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• How deeply Elon Musk has interfered with elections here and elsewhere, on the basis of the false notion that “whites are a rapidly dying minority”

• The Justice Department’s case against the Southern Poverty Law Center and what it portends for other organizations;

• The tactics used by propagandists to persuade voters to fight for privileges provided by dictators instead of the power provided by democracy

• How to resist hopelessness and despair in the face of these anti-democratic measures

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How to participate in the Book Club

Each week, we’ll post questions, and on alternate Wednesdays we’ll meet for a discussion with the Club or a visit from an author or other special guest (occasionally we’ll schedule special events on alternate days or times, but we will let you know). Look out for posts with further details.

In between meetings, we invite you to chat or comment on our posts with your insights and questions. The Book Club will meet next on Wednesday, May 6 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern.

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Book Club meetings are open to paid subscribers to The Ink, so if you haven’t become part of our community, join us today!

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President Trump’s Justice Department has brought a new prosecution of James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, in connection with a social media post by Comey featuring seashells arrayed to say “86 47.” According to federal prosecutors, this was a dangerous threat to the president’s life.

While some believe the prosecution goes too far, criminalizing the mere utterance of numbers, what if it actually doesn’t go far enough? Here are some other numbers President Trump might consider banning.

1 — It represents unity, for starters — a threat to division. It also allows other people to claim to be No. 1, when everyone knows there is only one No. 1. Furthermore, it is in violation of America First’s copyright.

2 — Two sides to every issue. No. There shouldn’t even be two parties. Two reeks of debate instead of loyalty.

3 — The supposed “three branches of government” is reason enough. Do we really need checks and balances?

4 — An ugly reminder of the number of criminal cases Trump has faced.

6 — A lovely January day, forever ruined by people who are sticklers about insurrection.

9 — The worst court circuit of all the circuits. Banned.

12 — The number of jurors in criminal cases. Enough said.

14 — How can you think about 14 without thinking of the Fourteenth Amendment and equality? Just ick.

19 —Women got the vote by this amendment. And now look.

20 — He lost, but really he won — but he lost. A year so bad, they said the number twice.

25 —The most dangerous of all the amendments.

27 — He is still stinging from the news that this is his approval rating on the economy. Banned.

28 — The number of days in a typical menstrual cycle.

46 — Biden. Biden. Emperor of the autopen, fake president, stealer of what Trump won.

50 — A highly annoying reminder of the number of states, several of which did not vote for him.

56 —Melania’s age, the age of an ex, not a wife. He needs to get back on the apps — just needs his password from Kash Patel.

60 — Who can see this number and not think of “60 Minutes,” with its follow-up questions? Ew.

65 — A terrible number, because it implies that people should retire after a while.

76 — Evokes the spirit of ’76 and the whole independence thing, which spread the deeply unfair idea that people deserve rights whether or not they donated to you.

99 —This one stings, as it’s the percentage of people who do not benefit from his policies.

The president could consider additional bans above the first hundred, with special attention being given to 270 (an annoying way to decide whether you won an election), 280 (a character limit upsetting to a man with so much wisdom to share), and 666 (provokes unfair comparisons).

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Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty

And don’t forget to join Leigh Haber at 12:30 p.m. for a live conversation for our subscribers with Ibram Kendi about his new book, Chain of Ideas, our April Book Club selection.

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To change big things, start small

By Katharine K. Wilkinson

A cliff’s edge is the perfect place to feel small. I count on that sensation each time I visit my mother in Tennessee. She lives on a sandstone bluff of the Cumberland Plateau, rock that was formed in the shallows of an ancient sea. Some 300 million years later, it is our perch to watch the evening sky turn to gold, then pink and streaking red. Both time and space feel unbounded there. One human life is tiny by comparison.

Having studied and written about climate change for more than two decades, I know that feeling small isn’t always a good thing. Too small to make a difference. Too small to matter. Especially now, in a movement under duress. Given the scale of planetary disruption and the losses we face, that reaction is rational. But if we want public progress—on climate or anything else—we must embrace the role that smallness plays. Small spaces that form, connect, and renew us are essential infrastructure for change.

When we imagine a social movement, we picture its most visible moments: civil rights activists marching from Selma to Montgomery, the 20 million Americans who participated in the first Earth Day, protestors camping for weeks in Zuccotti Park. These are the scenes that fill history books and command media attention. But they are the crescendo, not the origin.

What we witness in the streets begins in modest enclaves, where the people who lead change come together. Rosa Parks trained at the rural Highlander Folk School before sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Second wave feminists raised consciousness in living rooms before legislatures ever debated their demands. Abolitionists organized in Quaker meeting houses.

Movements depend on churches, retreat centers, classrooms, and community halls because our work isn’t just strategic. It is creative, emotional, relational, and often spiritual, and that kind of work requires such spaces to take root.

My own path as an environmental activist began at such a place. At sixteen, I spent a semester at an experiential outdoor school that connected us to land and one another. There, encounters with ecological loss in the Southern Appalachians shook me, but I had space and support to process the ache and to envision alternatives. Within that community, my concern grew into a clear calling and alarm became energy to act. The experience set my inner compass in a way that still holds.

For the majority of Americans who worry about the climate crisis, my experience is an outlier. Most people have no such container. Many never even discuss the topic with family or friends. Despite a willingness to engage, the very worry we feel can produce paralysis. Isolated from others who care, concern curdles into overwhelm. We get stuck on the question: What can I do?

For the small minority who step off the climate sidelines and into engagement, burnout is a real risk. I know from personal experience how it can squelch a sense of purpose. Without places to metabolize what we are witnessing and reimagine what’s possible, the draw to disengage swells. And without sustained, spirited participation, no collective mission can succeed.

We need spaces where people can gather to grapple with fear, share grief, test ideas, build trust, and stoke courage. Such rooms are not peripheral to social change. They are its heart.

Consider last year’s landmark climate ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The world’s biggest problem reached the world’s highest court thanks in no small part to a classroom. At the University of the South Pacific, a group of law students brainstormed ideas to help their island nations, increasingly inundated by rising seas. They landed on pursuing an ICJ advisory opinion, in hopes of binding all countries to act on climate. That classroom birthed a world-shifting vision.

Leaders at the highest levels of climate diplomacy have recognized the need for intimate spaces, too. Christiana Figueres, the former United Nations climate chief who helped secure the Paris Agreement, has partnered with Plum Village, the engaged Buddhist community founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. Together, they offer retreats for climate and nature leaders. I attended one last fall, where we dropped discussion of science and policy, in favor of silence, insight, and renewed mutual commitment.

The work of my own organization, the All We Can Save Project, follows a similar vein. Through a network of climate educators, our Climate Wayfinding program is helping university students across the U.S. and Canada move beyond information to orientation and gain clarity on their roles in planetary healing. A new book by the same name makes the experience available to climate seekers of all ages, as we find our way in an increasingly mapless world.

A classroom or a retreat may appear small compared with planetary disruption. Most things do. But that is how nature functions—through trillions of minor links. Without the underlying web, an ecosystem weakens. The same is true for a movement. Efforts like these are the mycelial network of change caring for itself.

Big swings for the future of our shared home are certainly needed, as urgency grows and too many gains are lost. We should stage protests, run campaigns, and prepare to seize the next political opening. But we must invest equally in nurturing the people who make all of it possible. If the future lives anywhere, it must be within and between us.

As I stood on that sandstone bluff on a recent visit, watching day yield to night, I did not feel insignificant. I felt connected—one being knitted into life on Earth, one person among many who care deeply about what comes next. No individual carries change alone. Movements endure because communities tend them. If we want sustained engagement, on climate, democracy, or any of the challenges ahead, we will need more than big moves. We will need small rooms that can hold us.

Within them we realize: Small is not the opposite of power. It is often where power begins.

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Katharine Wilkinson’s new book is “Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home."

Photo: Michael Warren/Getty

Can the book-publishing industry survive shrinking attention spans, endless streaming options, the AI onslaught, and the prophesied disappearance of the American reader?

I braved cross-country air travel last weekend in the hope that the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books would offer some answers—or at least bring me face to face with multitudes of fellow book nerds who also greet news of, say, a new Ann Patchett or Colson Whitehead novel with the passion of a Swiftie. And along the way, I got to meet Stacey Abrams and read her a special message Oprah sent me to read to her.

Come with me.

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Follow The Black Trump, a.k.a. Trevor Morris, on TikTok here.

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Friends,

It’s that time again. I thought I’d share with our supporting subscribers some of the things I’ve been reading, learning from, listening to, watching, cooking, etc.

If your taste is anything like mine, you might enjoy some of what you find below, from my go-to work playlist to a salad that I sometimes make inside a foil boat. And some brilliant analysis of our times.

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Jessica Grose is an opinion writer for The New York Times and the author of “Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood.” We recently caught up with her for her analysis of a secretive right-wing project to dispatch women back to another century.

What alerted you to the existence of the Heritage Foundation’s “Saving America by Saving the Family” initiative, and why did it set off alarm bells and prompt you to write your initial piece about it?

I had been following the Heritage Foundation’s commentary on women and families for many years. I learned about this particular report after reading a conservative newsletter writer’s commentary on it. I wasn’t surprised at a lot of what was in it, because I had read a previous report from Heritage two years ago, where they suggested many people should get less education so that they might start having babies earlier. The recommendations in the new report alarm me mostly because of the organization’s coziness with the Trump Administration via Project 2025.

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And there’s also the speed and effectiveness with which the Trump Administration has activated those Project 2025 recommendations, namely, to dismantle the administrative state; defend our “sovereignty” at the borders and against “global threats;” as well as gutting DEI and using the Comstock Act to further limit abortion rights. But also embedded in Project 2025 was a mission to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.” This latest report doubles down on that effort, right?

In my column about the report, I say that “the bulk of the paper is about ways to whittle down government support for anybody who isn’t part of a traditional married family, ideally with a male breadwinner.” There is at least one contradiction espcially that stood out to me at the heart of Heritage’s argument: They want to provide as little government support to families as possible, but they also want women to stay home to raise their families. Given the cost of living in the United States — and Trump’s opposition to government funding for daycare — even if families preferred this arrangement, most would be unable to afford for a parent to stay home for any length of time. They also want to use policy to nudge people to get married and have children, but only if they are in heterosexual relationships. Heritage is a conservative think tank, so they’re always putting out policy papers like this, but I think people, including our vice president, are very worked up about the falling birth rate in the United States, so my guess is that is why they decided to focus on this topic right now.

The report sees the decline in U.S. fertility rates–which were at a record low of 1.59 births per woman in 2024–as an existential threat. They blame this on “childlessness by choice,” “careerism,” and the “normalized use” of birth control pills.

Yes, and the authors of the Heritage report believe that abortion becoming legal in the 1970s alongside feminism and the widespread availability of contraception have been a disaster for the American family. The entire conservative policy and legal movement has been working in concert to overturn Roe for 50 years.

I guess overturning Roe wasn’t good enough for them, though. What is their ultimate goal?

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• The series introduction

• The first chapter: Epstein’s network of bystanders, on courage in an age of networks

• The second chapter: Never eat with women, on how Epstein’s circle avoided what it feared most

• The third chapter: Rich Brain, on the mundanities that preoccupy the ultrawealthy

• The fourth chapter: The most overlooked Epstein email, on a philosopher, a pedophile, and Epstein’s mind harem

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The Epstein Class’s secret weapon

Already, it feels like the world has moved on.

There was a dark shining moment when all the world, it seemed, was focused on the crimes and schemes of Jeffrey Epstein and his coterie of associates and enablers. And then new stories vied for attention: a war broke out, human beings circled the moon, Kim Kardashian was spotted with Lewis Hamilton, memories faded, and the virus of collective rage went hunting for new hosts.

Was the Epstein story just another story? Was it just more grist for the mill? Was it a chance to vent the frustrations of an age in which some get away with anything they do and others never get anything they need? Will we take this phenomenon of a story as a spur to charting a new course — or “enjoy” the catharsis of fury and move on?

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As I reflect on what I’ve learned spending time in this muck and putting together this series, two broad themes stand out; I believe our responses to each of them will help determine which way we will go. One is the culture of impunity, of a lack of accountability, that the Epstein saga highlights but that is endemic far beyond it. The other is the opiate of tribalism that allows the impunity at the top to go on.

This has been an era of infinite second chances at the top, facilitated by an underlying solidarity, and of fewer and fewer first chances for everyone else, exacerbated by their inextinguishable hostilities. Mostly, the Epstein files are an education in how not to be. But if we want to change this dismal status quo, we have to do something that I generally don’t advise: learn from the Epstein class. That’s because on one point, at least, this network is actually worth emulating.

They always have each other’s backs.

When Epstein was accused of sex crimes involving minors in 2007, he built a legal team and fought the charges. The following year, as later laid bare by Julie Brown’s heroic reporting in the Miami Herald, he secured a sweetheart deal that required him to serve just over a year in prison. Except that it wasn’t really prison: Epstein finagled a work-release allowance that let him come and go and allegedly put in time at a nonprofit. A local news outlet that obtained logs of his movements while “imprisoned” reported that Epstein was “[p]icked up by his private driver in a limo and allowed to make stops at his own home,” that he was permitted by a judge “to leave his cell six days a week,” that he was assigned a kind of police detail that “took him to his house at least nine times while he was on work release, and left him in his home unsupervised for up to three hours.” At one point, a confused police officer asked a sergeant for “some clarity of my duties and responsibilities while at the residence.” The sergeant reportedly answered that the officer’s function was to “provide security” for Epstein. Against the public, not the other way around.

So at the heart of this story is a galling impunity. But in this as in other ways, our principal character’s way of moving through the world was not unconnected to the ways of the larger circle that surrounded him.

One of Epstein’s lawyers in the matter, the late Kenneth Starr, had spent much of the 1990s hounding President Bill Clinton for sexual misconduct, wasting vast sums of public money on a political witch hunt and destroying lives in the process. Now, in 2007, Starr signed on to Epstein’s legal team, becoming an avid defender of a Clinton friend’s considerably worse sexual misconduct. This is how it works in this world: you never have to take a beat and say, I was wrong. You just move on to the next thing.

The doom loop of causing problems, ducking accountability, and even being promoted is a defining feature of this circle. Larry Summers pushed for financial deregulation under Clinton, and when, in 2008-9, thanks to advice of that kind, the markets melted down and the world economy collapsed, he was brought in as a top economic advisor to President Barack Obama. Bill Gates operated a monopoly that crushed competition (which is to say other people’s dreams), reaped a fortune anyway, and parlayed it all into an even more august position as unofficial global health czar.

As David Sirota has argued unflaggingly, the lack of accountability for anyone at the top has become a driving force of this American age. Helped cause Iraq? Cable gig for you! Helped ignore Katrina? Professorship! Pushed subprime mortgages? Cabinet position! Built a tech behemoth that hurts kids? Presidential advisory commission!

In the Epstein class and far beyond it, across the commanding heights of American life, the best way to get ahead is to really majorly fuck something up along the way.

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Why does our society function as a protection racket for elites who have made it big by making big mistakes, even as it becomes less merciful to everyone else? One answer that emerges from the Epstein files is that the super-elites who are all over it have a loyalty to each other that transcends opinions. They are connected on the basis of their interests, not their beliefs, and quite willing to sacrifice these “beliefs” on the altar of their interests. And this gives them a certain undergirding of compassion for each other, helpfulness to each other, that endures regardless of which way any given election goes, which ideological currents are ebbing and flowing, who is up or down.

One of my “favorite” emails is among the more indecipherable of the lot. The subject line is simply “list for bannon steve.” It says:

Who knows what this list was about. But it brings together people, many of whom were known to be in Epstein’s orbit, who don’t share a philosophy or race or religion or profession, but a membership: they are on a list of people who are on the list.

And what you see in the Epstein files is that people on the list generally treat each other as though deserving of brotherhood. Their elevation of network solidarity over principles and beliefs gives a resiliency and flexibility and even gentleness to the group. There is a moment in which Epstein appears to invite Kathy Ruemmler, a former White House counsel to President Obama, to join him on some panel (the exact details are not clear), along with Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, and former President Clinton. Epstein assures Ruemmler the event would be “off the record” and the collaboration “very funny.”

The email captures something important. Out there, in the world, these people have serious-seeming beefs with each other. But off the record, it’s all very chill — kind of funny, even. For people in the network don’t stress about their beliefs, no matter how publicly proclaimed. Beliefs, in fact, are often mere performance, and these elites, with their solidarity for each other, never forget that. Another of the exchanges that has stayed with me is between Epstein and Bannon about getting an Epstein friend into the Augusta National Golf Club. The friend is the super-lawyer Brad Karp, then running the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss. Karp had reportedly been a financial bundler for Democrats, and Paul, Weiss is known for its ties to the Democratic Party. But Epstein thinks nothing of asking Bannon for help getting Karp into Augusta.

Bannon’s first response is: “Can he convert to Southern Baptist???”

Karp is Jewish. Epstein attempts a joke: “Difficult to put the foreskin back on.”

Bannon then explains that Augusta historically was strict about “no catholics, Jews, blacks or women.” But Bannon seems determined to try — not because he and Karp agree on the issues but, one assumes, because they are ultimately on the same team.

Epstein asks who runs Augusta.

“These are real crackers,” Bannon writes. “7 Atlanta and Augusta families.” And then he adds, in case he has been too subtle: “Real crackers.”

So here we have the political figure who has done as much as anyone in America to revive white nationalism and populist fury referring to exclusionary white people in Georgia by the racist term “crackers.” It’s all a game — not the golf, but the republic itself. And then, in the early months of the second Trump term, Trump came after big law firms like Paul, Weiss, threatening to sever their government contracts if they didn’t come to heel, and, matching the spirit of flexibility Bannon had displayed, Karp bent — bent the knee and forever bent his law firm’s credibility. For many (including within the firm itself), it was an unconscionable capitulation. But the people who think that way are burdened by beliefs that depress their side of the seesaw. It’s why they may never find themselves at the very top, where beliefs are featherweight.

It’s not that members of the Epstein Class don’t possess beliefs. It’s that they seem to treat them, well, like that: as possessions. Their beliefs are tools to help them win; if they don’t continue to spark the joy of winning, throw them out. There can always be new beliefs; but the network is forever.

We down here, on the other hand — well, that’s a different story. We down here are at each other’s throats. This is the age of division, the age of polarization, the age of civic fracture…the age of impending civil war?

And what does this consist of, in practice? People who vote differently but share, more or less, similar interests becoming convinced that the neighbor two doors down is a mortal enemy. His vote is literally violence. Their protest is literally anarchy.

People without much power beyond their vote have become so convinced that other people without much power are their problem that it can be provocative to even suggest to some activists that they woo voters to their side in order to win elections. Why should they have to engage with such toxicity? On the right and left both, you will find fantasies of elimination — which is to say, the dream of living in a country cleansed of these different-thinking people.

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In other words, among regular people, beliefs have been elevated over interests. Who you voted for has come to matter more than how you live. Ideology has superseded materiality, and so there is none of the suspension of judgment we see in the Epstein class. There is none of the bracketing. There is none of the tabling of this issue we don’t agree on in order to advance on that thing. No, down here, everything is war, and there is no give, and there is no mercy, and there is a dearth of genuine solidarity.

Is this, in the end, what we might learn from the Epstein files? That these people do their kabuki fighting in public and have each other’s backs in private when shit gets real; and we live lives with many of the same challenges but imagine our neighbors to be as bloodthirsty and ignorant of the world as an uncontacted tribe of cannibals. Nothing can reach those dolts; they are who they are; nothing will ever change their mind. We have none of the sense of mercy for each other that the Epstein class displays for its own. That mercy, in their case, comes from class solidarity; it comes from the solidarity of patriarchy. And in their abiding mutual support, they encourage us, through the media organs they own, through the social media platforms whose algorithms they code, through the political levers they operate, to keep bickering.

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Our tribalism protects their impunity. Their solidarity sustains our being deprived of nice things that we could very easily have. Their ability to hold their beliefs lightly, and to take their own interests, on the other hand, very, very seriously indeed — this ability explains a lot about the society we live in. And it raises the question of what the world would look like if we beat them at their own game. If, instead of Bannon and Karp being the ones to battle on the surface and help each other below, it was us, that we held our noses at differences in our ranks, endured people who say things that sting, had tolerance for different locations on the on-ramp to change, but in some basic and fundamental way elevated our shared interests over our clashing beliefs.

On good days, you can see glimpses of it. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is doing more than bringing a leftist approach to governance. In ways that have not been properly appreciated, I think, he seems to aspire to a formation of the political left more interested in finding converts than heretics, more smiling than judging, more interested in mercy and expansion. It is an approach less interested in the dividing lines of identity and more interested in the binding agents of solidarity and shared hardship. His culture war is filling potholes.

It is one model in one place. We will see how many others of us can absorb these lessons. But this is what I am left with. In these Epstein files, we got an ugly and at times evil master class in elite solidarity. The ball of change is now in our court.

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Photo: Valery Hache/AFP/Getty

The other day, I, along with a group of other panelists, discussed this question and others in a conversation about the Epstein files, hosted by The Drift, a literary magazine that I highly recommend to you.

Some of what I said in reply:

Conspiratorial thinking rises and falls at different moments in history, depending on what’s going on in a society. When inequality rises — there’s a lot of research supporting this — conspiracy thinking goes up. When life doesn’t feel fair to a lot of people, conspiracy thinking goes up. The public may be wrong about the names, wrong about the players, wrong about the mechanisms. But are they right that the way their health care works is essentially a high-functioning conspiracy? If Washington works the way it does, is that a conspiracy? People are grappling in the dark for explanations about why cause doesn’t equal effect anymore, why effort doesn’t lead to reward anymore, why nothing seems linear, why all the things they’re supposed to do don’t work. And into that space, conspiracies enter.

For the rest of this very interesting, wide-ranging conversation, check out The Drift.

The Drift

Issue Seventeen is here!

We’re thrilled to share the seventeenth issue of The Drift with you today. In it, you will find…

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11 days ago · 10 likes · The Drift

AI ads.

First there were a few here and there; then they were everywhere; then, on certain trains, it was the only kind of ad there was.

Lately, riding the trains here in New York, I find myself looking up at the ads inside the car and back down at the people below, up at the ads, back down at the people. Because the ads are trying to make exciting, make enticing, make appealing, a world in which there is no use for these people. It strikes me every time I am in one of these cars that we are being marketed our uselessness. We are being sold the idea of not being needed. And this, perhaps, is the real project of the ads: not so much to sell the service in question, in the narrow sense of a subway commuter thinking to herself, “Let me inquire into that HR tool!”; but rather to habituate us to the idea of being replaced, of being rendered irrelevant.

Today Jodi Kantor’s wonderful new book, How to Start, comes out. And it deals with this feeling of needlessness head-on. Everywhere, Jodi argues, young people are receiving the message of not being needed. Is there a more insidious, depressing, soul-sucking message that can be received? Her book is an attempt to rebut this idea, by giving young people hope — and a plan.

Robot interviews, threats to entry-level work, dystopian management schemes and intimidating housing prices are all real. But they do not come even close to representing the entire truth.

A core element of Jodi’s advice is the idea of craft. Longstanding Ink readers will remember that craft has been an obsession of mine. I talked about the idea in my 2023 commencement address to my high school:

Pursue the ambition of a craft, not of a career. There’s a difference.

A craft is a basic activity you dedicate yourself to day after day, decade after decade, like batting practice. My craft is making sentences. Painting is a craft, editing film is a craft, designing buildings is a craft, drafting arguments is a craft, butchering hogs is a craft, writing code is a craft, organizing neighborhoods door to door is a craft.

Too many people chase career success more than craft and end up with neither. If you commit to doing something particular and focused really well, and obsessively try to get better at that thing, you will find your career and your success. Don’t obsess about how to rise. Obsess about getting really, really, scarily good at something.

One of the things Jodi and I have been discussing in recent days — in our Ink conversation, and over falafel after her terrific book-launch conversation with Esther Perel and my beloved Priya Parker — is how to help young people, and all people, get sharper and more specific on this idea of craft. And for those of you who want to go deeper on this idea, I wanted to share one part of our conversation about this that may be helpful to anyone pursuing reinventions.

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With Riz Ahmed’s brilliant Hamlet adaptation now in American theaters, we are re-sharing this post about Ahmed’s radical re-interpretation.

Recently in London, I attended an early screening of a new Hamlet movie adaptation, starring the brilliant actor and loyal Ink reader (and no less trenchant rapper, it’s unfair, I’m generally against this level of concentrated anything) Riz Ahmed.

There is a lot to say about this brave and profound reinvention of Hamlet, which Riz spent years dreaming and inventing and creating. It takes a story that everyone knows and fears from grade school and re-situates it in Riz’s London — a South Asian British world in which the kingdom is a real estate company and the soliloquies may be given while speeding down a highway in a BMW. I couldn’t get enough. Wow.

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But I want to highlight just one thing Riz said in the discussion afterward that blew my mind. In many ways, his project has been to “take Shakespeare back.” Take it back from an educational establishment that teaches it in ways that scare students rather than pull them in. Take it back from those who would view it as a single culture’s property rather than a story that speaks to multicultural Britain now — and to everyone on earth. But, above all, perhaps, Riz was determined to take Shakespeare back from those who would strip the radicalism from it, those who would defang it and do with it what was done to the thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., for example. And he illustrated this by wholly reframing the most well-known stretch of the play, the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. I will never see it the same way.

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Earlier this year in The New York Times, Jessica Grose unearthed a new Heritage Foundation initiative that continues to fly under the radar amid news of war, scandal, and increasingly outrageous posts on Truth Social. Grose’s article, “The Heritage Foundation Wants to Send American Women Back Half a Century,” considers the implications of a recently rel…

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“This was some major disruption,” I wrote shortly thereafter in the dispatch below, “a bunch of non-writers debating how to replace all the writers. I was taking careful notes, so that the replaced writers of the future would have some record of how the purge went down.”

Well, here it is.

The dispatch was not published at the time, because it didn’t fit my book then in progress. I recently revisited it and was struck by how, in retrospect, our present was being hatched there.

I’m re-publishing it now, a glimpse into the past where the future was being foretold. It’s a long read, so dive in — or save it for a moment when you have time. I hope you enjoy it.

Can A.I. replace “all the writers”?

By Anand Giridharadas

The Gates Building at Stanford, home to the A.I. lab.

While out in the Bay Area, I spent a few days at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The lab occupied two floors of the Gates Computer Science Building. It was a dull gray hive of offices and conference rooms. If, for some strange reason, someone blindfolded you and deposited you in its midst, and you somehow failed to notice all the robots and equations, you might guess you were in a regional sales department of a midsized manufacturer of lower-school sports trophies.

Nothing in the atmosphere suggested power. Nothing told you that this is the place that had spawned Google. And yet it was said by very intelligent people that the future they were concocting here could change the face of human civilization. Some thought that their work would bring heaven down to earth; others feared this was the closest we had come to hell.

The heaven scenario saw a human existence made effortless, seamless, healthy to the possible point of immortality, efficient, leisurely, cornucopiac, creative. A.I. already guessed what you were seeking when you looked things up, and in the future it would know all your needs in every area of life. A.I. already decided when to tell new parents that a newborn might not be breathing, and in the future disease-curing nanobots and big-data-crunching supercomputers could end aging and even dying as we know them. A.I. already traded half of all stocks on the American exchanges, and in the future it might free all of us from the burden of work, and allow us to paint and write sonnets and dance. By giving human beings such mastery over their health and environment, A.I. could, it had been argued, make us the first species to avoid extinction itself.

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And yet Elon Musk — builder of electric cars and rocket ships, booster of all things technological — had called A.I. the world’s “biggest existential threat” and declared that “with artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon.” This was the hell scenario. It was less precise, less sure, because it focused on what human beings might not foresee as they built the tools of their replacement. Reid Hoffman, of LinkedIn, compared A.I. to the development of an unknown species that could have major effects on the planet. There was also the humanist worry that an artificially intelligent future would essentially be a future without work for most people — except, of course, for the builders of A.I. and its algorithms. Pope Francis had warned that robotics and related advances could, left alone, “lead to the destruction of the human person — to be replaced by a soulless machine — or to the transformation of our planet into an empty garden for the enjoyment of a chosen few.” The most dire visions had A.I., on its own or in the hands of bad people, speeding up our extinction date.

It was a lot of pressure to work on such things. Such was the fate of the researchers of the Stanford A.I. Lab who were drifting into the second-floor lounge this evening. This, sometimes, is how civilization gets remade: by often highly socially awkward people who do not see themselves as remaking it — by a squad of robot-like humans chosen to make robots more human-like.

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What stayed with me most from several days spent at the lab was this meeting, lasting a little more than an hour. For in that meeting, I was able to see, as I hadn’t so clearly before, how Silicon Valley’s rhetoric of prediction works: how a strange cocktail of futurism and cynicism could be used to justify a world that will be devastating for vast numbers of people and great for its predictors. And how cultivating and believing in the idea of your own powerlessness had become an essential tool for seizing power.

***

Tonight was the biweekly meeting of the lab’s eClub, which described itself as “the first official coalition between the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) and a cluster of corporate partners to foster discussions between artificial intelligence researchers and venture capitalists interested in real world AI applications.” The techies got to meet the money men of Silicon Valley, who worked a few blocks and a world away on Sand Hill Road. The money men, who were also ThoughtLeaders, got a glimpse into cutting-edge technologies that just might become their next unicorn.

The topic of today’s meeting was journalism and writing. They were trying to figure out whether and how to “replace all the writers,” as one of them put it.

The perks of coalition-building with venture capitalists: a table to the side was covered with pizza from Pronto, a bottle of Pinot Noir, and some beers. The pizza vanished at the rate of several slices a minute. The Pinot Noir would remain unopened, but some beers were being sipped.

About twenty students began to take their seats. Lots of jeans, lots of wrist activity trackers, lots of waifish legs crossed at the knee, lots of genius, lots of zealous and impatient male energy unleavened by social awareness or social grace. There was one woman in the room. Over the next ninety minutes, she would not speak.

In one corner of the room sat a pair of venture capitalists. There was a man I will call Marty, a partner at a preeminent venture capital firm nearby, who possessed, especially in this room full of immigrants and immigrants’ children, the special force of the Old White Man who has seen it all, is faintly bored by everything, thinks his first ideas are his best ideas, and has a lot of money. Beside him was a man I will call Ashish, a partner at another top venture capital firm in the Bay, who offered a more realistic ideal for the people in this room. He was Indian, handsome enough not to be rich, but rich all the same, dressed in perfectly fitting dark clothes that were at once sporty and formal, broadcasting a vibe of “I was the youngest partner in the history of my firm.” Which he had been. When you searched his name in Google, the first additional query suggested (by A.I.) was “Ashish ______ net worth.” You could just picture Stanford students looking him up late at night, intimidated and amazed: He studied here, too! He flies microlight airplanes! He is on leave from the Stanford Medical School! Together, Marty and Ashish represented several billions of dollars longing to be invested in kids like these techies.

I took a seat beside a student named Manoush. He was unkempt, earnest, slightly hostile. I asked what drew him to A.I. He spoke of wanting to free people from the drudgery of work. Let the machines, the algorithms, do the repetitive things. Free people to think big strategic thoughts.

“The biggest factor that leads to increased quality of life is efficiency of workforce,” he said.

Without intending to, I must have looked skeptical. Manoush told me to look up the citation myself.

There was some tension over Manoush’s vision in A.I. circles. A handful of A.I.’s founding fathers, some of whom were present at the 1956 Dartmouth meeting that was the field’s constitutional convention, lamented that their original project — using computers to seek to understand and mimic human beings — had given way to the more prosaic and lucrative goal of raising productivity. An irascible old-timer like Pat Langley could mourn the days when the “intelligence” in “artificial intelligence” was defined as “the ability to carry out complex, multi-step reasoning, understand the meaning of natural language, design innovative artifacts, generate plans that achieve goals, and even reason about their own reasoning.” But the privatizing drive of the age of markets had reached A.I., too. Things now had to justify themselves in the marketplace. The “commercial successes of ‘niche’ A.I.” and an “obsession with quantitative metrics” had reoriented the field, Langley wrote. A.I. labs had “abandoned the field’s original goal. Rather than creating intelligent systems with the same breadth and flexibility as humans, most recent research has produced impressive but narrow idiot savants.”

Manoush believed deeply in the idiot savants. Those bots could free up much human energy. But, I asked Manoush, what about all the people who would be beached, temporarily or even permanently?

“We have people who are going to get shafted,” Manoush said. “But in the long term, we are going to have a higher quality of life for the whole.”

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This was an important article of faith around the Bay these days. These men and women knew their inventions could be frightening. Their promise was that this was the storm before the calm, the shafting before the emancipation.

Of course, there were those, even within the lab, who questioned this vision. Juan Carlos Niebles, a Colombian researcher, laughed off the pop-culture imagery of robots killing off and eating their human masters. But he worried about other threats that to him seemed realistic. He wondered: Would the A.I. agents nurtured by his lab create mass unemployment? Would people need to be paid a minimum income when complex machines are doing so many of the old jobs? How would we occupy people’s time and energy and imagination? Niebles didn’t worry about apocalypses. He worried, with more self-awareness than many winners of the age, that he was participating in the creation of a new world that would be rewarding and fulfilling only for people like him.

But he hastened to add that he had no time to think about such matters. “Day to day, we think of: what are the barriers to achieving new things?” he said. The technical problems were so overwhelming that they crowded out reflection. The A.I. researcher’s self-conception was of an unblocker of the blockages standing between us and progress, he said. It was not their habit to muse about consequences.

***

At present an Italian postdoc named Roberto called the meeting to order and introduced some questions to frame the conversation. How could A.I. help to personalize the news for each person’s interests? How could it mine oceans of data and discover stories hidden in the numbers and patterns? Could it copy the style of particular writers and produce fresh content in their voices?

It should be noted that there were no journalists participating in this conversation. (I was a silent observer.) It is far less awkward to reimagine people’s lives in their absence.

Some gatherings begin with problems in need of solution. Others begin with solutions seeking a problem. This was a meeting of the latter type. Journalism, of course, had plenty of problems. But no one in the room seemed to know much about those problems; and if they did, those problems weren’t their motivating spur. They were here because they were inventing technologies whose spread they believed was inevitable, and they wanted to see what those technologies could do for — or perhaps to — journalism.

An important self-belief in the room seemed to be this: they were extrapolators of the Curves, the seers of forces. It was not their role to say what world they wanted. Their job was to get what they wanted by saying it would happen anyway.

Manoush got things rolling with an idea about who should produce the news in the future. The Curve was driving more and more of the world’s Internet traffic and advertising dollars to the big Internet portals. In the quarter in which Manoush spoke, 85 percent of new money spent on online ads was captured by just two companies, Facebook and Google, according to the for-now-still-existing New York Times. (Both companies happened to be major recruiters at the lab.)

“It seems pretty obvious to me that news should be moving toward distribution by people who can do advertising better than, like, New York Times and Washington Post, because they just don’t have enough data on you.”

It was a modish idea in tech circles: that tech should “eat” the media, just like it should “eat” everything else. In the future that Manoush envisioned, the most powerful entities on earth would also serve as the checks on their own power. But he didn’t propose this idea out of any belief in the world it would imply. It just seemed obvious to him that news should move toward wherever the Curve of advertising revenue is going.

A meek but protesting “Well…” shot out a few seats down from Manoush. It was Elek, who looked like a blend of Bjorn Borg and Jesus. “I’ll contest that to some extent,” he said faintly.

By the way, just so you’re not alarmed, this was nothing untoward, because disagreements in the lab tended to be devoid of the E.Q. niceties of the business world: “I think that’s a really interesting point, and the only place I’d push back…”; “Just to build on that and take it in a slightly different direction…”; “I think that’s mostly true, but…” Here when you disagreed with a comment in progress, you leaned forward, and your neck stiffened, sometimes to the point of your chin mildly vibrating, and perhaps called up a fake smile that did not mask the contempt you felt, and then you launched.

Some people went with the straightforward “No no no no no no no no no.”

Others favored the more gentle but still direct “Yeah, I mean, but…”

Or, on one occasion, just: “The reason I don’t like this idea…”

“Well…” said Elek. “I’ll contest that to some extent.”

Manoush turned toward Elek, both necks now stiff, both fake smiles in force: “O.K…”

“There’s one of two cases,” Elek said. “Either there’s a lot of money in news, and The New York Times is being greedy and then, yes, Facebook should take a greater share of that. Or there’s not a lot of money in news, and The New York Times is scrambling. And if Facebook takes a bigger share of that, what’ll happen is not the world becomes a better place but all the writers get fired. And then there’s no news for anyone.”

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Elek, you will notice, reasoned differently from Manoush. Manoush saw a Curve and prophecized-advocated the future that it implied. Elek saw the Curve but didn’t think we were doomed to follow it. He thought we had choices. It would turn out that he wasn’t alone in this view in the room, though he was in a tiny minority. And that minority consisted entirely of Europeans. They, having some history under their belts, perhaps heard alarm bells when people spoke of a writer-free society.

Yet, Elek and his fellow E.U. delegates aside, the ThoughtLeaders and their disciples tended to gravitate to Manoush’s view. If we lived in the best time of times, in an endlessly self-improving world, who needed the kind of critical press for which Elek seemed nostalgic?

“I look forward to the time when the press covers all the hard work and toil and not the doom and gloom or shame of companies that hit bumps,” a V.C. partner named Josh Elman tweeted. When the darling startup Theranos was the subject of a Wall Street Journal investigation that questioned its basic veracity of its blood-testing business, young founders were incensed: “Sadden by witch hunt against @theranos. Yes, more transparency needed but innovation will have mis-steps. But why burn effort on a cross?” When Mark Zuckerberg pledged to give away ninety-nine percent of his Facebook shares, but to do so through a for-profit company with little oversight or accountability, many raised questions in the press. Sam Altman — Paul Graham’s cofounder at Y Combinator — tweeted: “It’s fine to wait to congratulate until they share more specifics on the recipients, but outright hostility in the mean time makes no sense.” Graham replied: “I think the reason you’re surprised is that not being a loser yourself you underestimate the power of envy.” Many ThoughtLeaders would hardly have minded Google and Facebook “eating” the news, as they liked to call it.

***

Yet tonight Elek had an unlikely ally. Marty, sitting in the corner, was becoming irritated by all the Facebook talk. He had driven over to hear some techie tell him the future of news lay in companies guys like him had already built.

“If we get back to the context of these meetings,” Marty said, pleasantly but with great authority, “we’re trying to think of ways that you can create interesting new businesses.” He offered some kindling: “If Uber wants to replace all the drivers by robots, do we want to replace all the writers by A.I.? I’ll pause there. It strikes me that those are the kinds of things we should be talking about here.”

Now we were talking. This was some major disruption: a bunch of non-writers debating how to replace all the writers. I was taking careful notes, so that the replaced writers of the future would have some record of how the purge went down.

The other V.C., Ashish, gave Marty a bit of an assist, suggesting they discuss “an algorithmic approach towards content creation.” He praised the news site Buzzfeed, whose tautological purpose was to get the most eyeballs for the things most likely to attract the most eyeballs. The site was putting A.I. to work already, although for now it still involved humans in the process.

“A lot of the listicles are often completely curated, or suggested, using this tool they have in-house that pulls together various links being shared across Twitter, Facebook, and so on,” Ashish said. The tool scans the Web for viral outbreaks. Perhaps it detects an upswing in posts about cupcakes. It analyzes them for patterns. “Basic classification techniques like string-matching can tell you that there’s some similarity between these several links that all have to do with how good the cupcakes look.” Then an editor can assign it, a writer can stick a headline on it and choose fourteen of the best examples, and now what was already beginning to trend on its own is unleashed to trend on Buzzfeed.

“It turns out people really like that content,” Ashish said. “So maybe it means we’re staring at a future where you do have A.I. helping to create content; it just looks more like Buzzfeed than a New York op-ed.” Laughter filled the room. “And that’s what maybe we all actually secretly want to read.”

Ashish had just shown off an important ThoughtLeader move: the faux-populism of claiming to give the people what they want, which just so happens to be rewarding for people like you.

A European neck stiffened across the room. It was Roberto’s.

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“But how far can that go?” he said. “Because at the end of the day, someone needs to go out there and take a picture of that news. And someone needs to sit down and write the original thing that, with A.I., you’re gonna morph. But the original content was paid by someone.”

Here, again, one of the European guys was entering the debate and offering some wide-eyed idealism. It was idealistic in this room because it elevated a vision that would require choosing, that was different from what the Curve might bring.

Ashish quickly put Roberto in his place by reminding of the power of the Curve: “I would argue that as long as the Internet’s free, there’s going to be enough user-generated content that will allow folks to compile the most interesting things out there.” This was a common Valley refrain: in the future, the news would just be a greatest-hits collection of photos and videos and pieces of text posted by ordinary people.

But if writers wanted to save themselves, Ashish said, there were ways. They could, for instance, join Patreon, a platform that allowed artists to crowdsource patronage — to find your own small-dollar Medicis. In other words, in the future the entrepreneurs were building, the way to survive was to become an entrepreneur. The rise of entrepreneurship was, after all, another Curve on which the Valley was gambling.

Now another Euro guy, with two-tone brown and blond hair and more of that Euro-humanism, stiffened his neck and wanted in. He didn’t buy this patronage idea, which assumed that people would pay for higher-quality writing. “I mean, if no one cares about good op-eds and they only care about speaking about feelings, then no one’s gonna pay for it,” he said. Once again, a Euro was drawing a distinction between what the Curve would tend toward and what would be good.

Ashish would have none of it. “What is the value of journalism?” he asked, laughing as he said it.

Two-Tone Euro was still gloomy: “Once you tell people you gotta pay five dollars, or you could get a very shitty version that has a similar title and it’s made by Buzzfeed, they might not pay five dollars anymore.”

Ashish didn’t want to be a downer. Besides patronage, there was another bright spot he knew of in journalism. A site called The Information had recently taken Silicon Valley by storm, and its subscriptions weren’t cheap. Here’s why The Information was good, according to Ashish. Because it helped people make money, instead of spouting some vague Euro ideals about democracy and citizenship.

“What’s great is their subscriber base are the people they often write about,” he said. “It’s a lot of folks on Sand Hill Road. A lot of people who are in executive positions at tech companies. And they’re willing to pay for that content, because they’re a necessity almost. Business information. You’re not reading, sort of, news. It’s critical now to your business to know.”

***

As the conversation progressed, the future of journalism was revealing itself: unpaid user-generated content about cupcakes, auto-selected by bots for curation into listicles; journalist-entrepreneurs raising their own patronage; premium content on the society-magazine model of covering the great and good for consumption by the great and good — journalism of and for them.

But now here came Roberto with his Euro-sentimentalism, delicately stated though it was.

“Journalism — I’m trying to think — is more like the intersection between objective delivering the news and something that’s artistic in the way you write, inspires the person that’s reading, moving the person to a feeling, probably. It’s not so much to have a concrete goal of producing an outcome that would be monetizable.”

Again, the Euro-defiance of the Curve. Listen to the words Roberto was condemning: concrete, goal, producing, outcome, monetizable. These were the words that made the Curve curve. What words did he offer instead? Artistic, inspires, moving, feeling. These were the kind of words you depended on when you sought, mostly in vain, to overrule the Curve.

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Before long, one of the Americans was helping to bring things back to the Curve. He had an idea for how to disrupt journalism. “Can we continue to distill the content collector, the reporter themselves?” he asked, a little inscrutably. “Instead of The New York Times employing a few hundred reporters, could this turn into a model where you’ve got individual freelancers or individual bloggers just out there taking pictures and writing about things, and A.I. aggregates this information for some kind of distribution?”

But this only served to rev up Two-Tone’s Euro-sentimentalism once more. He didn’t want to live in a listicular world. And he believed there were many others like him — people who wanted to be elevated by the writing they read and the art they experienced, who, yes, might give in to clickbait in the moment, but who desired to rise above the immediacy and instinct. He wondered aloud: Could A.I. help to build “a new website that keeps you away from cat videos, away from Buzzfeed articles”?

This was perhaps a bridge too far — an A.I. tool built to counteract the Curve? So extreme was this Euro-humanism that it now caused a Euro-schism. Roberto, though by the standards of the room a quite committed humanist, couldn’t take it.

“Yeah, but sorry,” he said. “Facebook is not a conscience. The fact that you are hooked to Facebook — there’s a reason. And, yeah, it would be great to do something that keeps you away from partying or all these other things. But for some reason you end up going. It’s very hard to change the behavior of someone.”

It is hard to change the behavior of someone: an important idea for the winners working in A.I. For those winners to win to the fullest, just with regard to media, algorithms would have to do more and writers, less; layoffs would have to happen; the quality of public discourse would have to drop; the press as an institution would have to rot; writers would have to become eternal fundraisers, dependent on the whims and opinions of their backers; the technology firms that recruited heavily in the Stanford lab would have to control ever more of the society’s information. The architects of A.I. knew that this could become an unpleasant future for many — as a subset of Euro-humanists in the room seemed to think it would.

If you were intelligent, as these techies certainly were, you understood that things could grow tense as you built the future of your dreams — a future in which people with your specific skill set would gain an enormous amount of power, even as other people’s lives and many cherished institutions suffered. And so it was far more prudent, if you could pull it off, to present what was happening as inevitable — and, more important, to cast oneself as powerless over these changes.

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Here, in this laboratory, one saw the banality of disruption. Here you disrupted things because what you knew how to do was disrupt things. You optimized for variables because those happened to be variables that you knew how to optimize for. You could imagine away whole swaths of society, without asking the human questions, because the overwhelming technical questions crowded them out. You amassed what others would experience as great power, while insisting on your impotence. You mused about your tools being used to disrupt things, instead of asking what problems needed you. And you did all this by convincing yourself that your own role was minimal, that you were merely riding atop the Curve.

***

The handful of Euro-humanists — now excluding Roberto, perhaps — wanted the room to own up to the real choices that they and the world faced. They wanted their colleagues to own up to the “moral character” of their work, to borrow a phrase from Phillip Rogaway, a cryptographer. Rogaway once wrote an essay criticizing his own colleagues for denying the social implications of their work. “Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what,” he said. “This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension.”

What he wrote of cryptography perhaps applied to A.I., too. A.I. types could cast their field as “fun, deep, and politically neutral.” Their shallow optimism about the Curve undercut the need for bigger-picture questioning: “a normative need vanishes if, in the garden of forking paths, all paths lead to good (or, for that matter, to bad).” Technologists, Rogaway wrote, prefer to deny that their inventions can either benefit or harm the weak, depending on choices we make together. Technologists were, you could say, a bit like ostriches.

Roberto, having traveled to the Americanish side in the ongoing Euro-schism, was in full ostrich mode. “Facebook is not a conscience,” he had said. “It’s very hard to change the behavior of someone.” Then he brought up broccoli. It would be great if people wanted to buy pieces of broccoli at fast-food restaurants. But they don’t. So we have McDonald’s. The world is what it is. They were powerless to change it.

This gave Two-Tone Euro the opening he needed. People do want broccoli nowadays! And if such change was coming to food, why not to other things?

“Before McDonald’s, there used to be organic farmers,” Two-Tone said. “Then everyone wanted to step away from the old to McDonald’s, and now they’re going back. So in a similar fashion, people were like ‘O.K., let’s go for New York Times,’ now they’re going Buzzfeed, but they’re gonna come back.”

Manoush, that champion of efficiency, had been following the back-and-forth and now tried to turn the conversation in a new direction.

“There’s a problem here that we’re not tackling, which is: how do you identify an atom of content, right?” he said. “So right now we’re dealing with articles’ being one atom of content. So I wonder if you can break that up further and further, and maybe you can figure out how much of that content to give to each person.”

(One might note, as an aside, that even this style of diction aided the Curve view. Manoush, like many in the Valley, began a great many of his sentences with a declamatory “so” and ended a significant fraction with a faux-interrogative “right?” To speak this way was to leave no space for doubt, for choices that might resist forces, for the thwarting of inevitability. This way of speaking reinforced a view of the world’s problems as purely technical — the view that there was, in every situation, a right answer. “So…right?” was the opposite of “From where I sit,” or “but maybe that’s just me.” It rejected the idea that people have different interests and needs and ideals. It rejected the very premise of politics. It dismissed the notion that there are competing values in tension in any situation, and that those values must be weighed and negotiated. It saw a world in which there was always a right answer, and technologists like Manoush had special access to those answers, and the rest of us should speak now or forever be quiet. So when I spoke, it made sense to cajole your agreement, right?)

***

So Manoush had been talking about how to identify an atom of content, right?

A neck stiffened just to Manoush’s right. Mahesh, an Indian techie n a white T-shirt, seemed perplexed by this idea of breaking up news into bits and algorithmically distributing the packages. “I don’t know,” he said, seeming a little lost. “It’s like, what is the goal here? What are you trying to optimize on?”

Now this was a great question — perhaps even the question with which the session should have begun. What problem were they actually trying to solve?

But here was the problem with starting with problems. To start with the solution was easy: you looked at the tools you had invented and the Curves that were in progress and you imagined where the future would lead: If Uber wants to replace all the drivers by robots, do we want to replace all the writers by A.I.? To start with a problem was trickier, because not everyone agreed on what was problematic. Starting with a problem, your focus had to be on the society’s needs, not on your tools. Solving that kind of problem tended to involve democracy — collective action, contending values, the making of choices.

What was most striking about the meeting was what hadn’t been discussed.

No one had spoken of democracy and of the place of a press within it.

No one had dwelled on what happens to art in an era of free everything.

No one had reflected on the extraordinary market power of Amazon and the effect of that power on books and ideas.

No one had asked whether the society could protect itself against the Facebook News Feed’s tinkerers slipping their own biases into the algorithm.

No one asked these things, for to ask these things was to admit one’s own power and reveal to others their power, and to suggest that you and those others could decide what kind of future it would be, the forces and the Curves be damned.

Here these bearers of great power over the future seemed in denial of that power. The world would be what it would be.

Before the meeting ended, Two-Tone Euro got up, picked up what appeared to be a homemade hoverboard from the corner — a skateboard-sized platform with a cantaloupe-sized ball in its middle — and rolled away. Others mingled over the remaining pizza and drinks. Just outside, a man retrieving his bicycle from the rack was savoring what he had just imbibed upstairs. That room, he said, wonder filling his eyes, had collided some of the smartest minds in all of Stanford.

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Some names and identifying details have been changed. All dialogue is quoted verbatim.

Photos: Eric Sander/Getty; Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty; Kimberly White/Getty

In her new book, which builds on a graduation speech she gave at Columbia, she pivots to giving young people advice about surviving the world whose making she has reported on. Young people are struggling in a labor market that doesn’t answer their queries, sends AI bots to interview them, and seems like it has no need for even highly skilled graduates. Into this world, Kantor makes an offering of advice, which she spoke to us about.

And, as a bonus, she gave us a tour of an empty New York Times newsroom.

Today I awakened many hours before dawn, and about as many hours since I had gone to bed, and I flew across this beautiful land. And since I figure many of you might share my occasional need for a reminder of what is here, and who is here, I thought I would share some of the photographs I took from the sky, presented here in order.

What I always forget on the ground, and always remember in the air, is that this is an especially big country. I don’t simply mean that it takes six hours to fly across, although that is very big by world standards. I mean that it contains not only a diverse people but such a profoundly diverse landscape, range of livelihoods, relationships to authority and systems, histories with the weather, ties to animals, senses of community, fears, desired levels of proximity, distances from water.

It’s the most obvious thing in the world, and yet it always takes getting back up there. The country is in a bad way. But it’s a big country trying to choose things together, and it encompasses a pantheon of ways of seeing. It helps me to remember that.

Maybe you, too.

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The book, “Here Where We Live Is Our Country,” is part family history, part detective story, part manifesto, part intervention. It is a history of the Bund movement, to which Crabapple’s great-grandfather belonged, a socialist, Jewish, anti-Zionist group that has been all but erased in recent years.

We spoke today about Crabapple’s attempt to recover this forgotten history, why she believes the history of anti-Zionist Jews can give modern Jews a greater choice of stories, how her book is giving younger Jews today a lineage they feel to be missing, how the traumas of the twentieth century make honest grappling over Zionism difficult, the connections among Jewish and Black and Hindu histories and stories about safety and homeland, and why she learned Yiddish to write this book.

It’s a remarkable conversation, and I encourage you to check it out.

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