How scared should you be of bird flu?

Experts need to be clear that currently the levers of action are squarely in the hands of government leaders and agricultural interests, not in the hands of the general public. But public attention is crucial to ensuring that authorities find the will to act. Jennifer...

America’s climate boomtowns are waiting

Across the Great Lakes region, cities were in their prime six decades ago as America forged its industrial might. But places such as Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Duluth have been in a steady decline ever since. And Ypsilanti, with its nest of...

Canada’s big worry: A US civil war

When Justin Trudeau meets Joe Biden at the G7 summit in Italy this week, Trudeau will probably not ask whether the United States is at risk of erupting in civil war in the next few years. A think tank housed within Trudeau’s government is already pondering that...

An object lesson from covid on how to destroy public trust

Under questioning by a congressional subcommittee, top officials from the National Institutes of Health, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, acknowledged that some key parts of the public health guidance their agencies promoted during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic...

Are we doomed? Here’s how to think about it

In January, the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton gave a lecture to Are We Doomed?, a course at the University of Chicago. He spoke via Zoom about whether artificial intelligence poses an existential threat. He was cheerful and expansive and apparently certain that...

Shrink the economy, save the world?

As it happens, Susskind says precisely the same thing but in the reverse: that it’s degrowth’s advocates who suffer from a “lack of imagination.” The mirrored accusations are striking. Maybe it isn’t a matter so much of imagination scarcity as of where that...

The case for hope

More than three-quarters of Americans say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. This year, for the first time, America dropped out of the top 20 happiest countries in the World Happiness Report. Some couples are choosing not to have children because of...