In Democracy at Work, labor law professor Ruth Dukes and sociologist Wolfgang Streeck describe how the dehumanizing and demanding conditions of an Amazon “fulfillment center” maximize the isolation of workers and impede the formation of any kind of community in the warehouse. Handheld devices, in addition to monitoring every minute of activity (including breaks) against target speeds, “direct workers to take routes through the warehouse designed to minimize opportunities to interact with co-workers.” The newest warehouses require workers to stand still in small, phone-booth-like boxes as conveyor belts deliver packages to be sorted; each workstation is set up so that the worker cannot talk to, or even make eye contact with, any co-worker…

The economic performance of the United States and other major developed economies in the twenty-first century has been appalling, whether in comparison to the period of nearly eighty years since World War II or with the rest of the world over the past two decades. Having suffered the most severe postwar financial crisis in 2008, we now face a high risk of another one…

The engine of innovation exists in peace and quiet. The North Carolina Biotech Center is nestled behind layers of birch trees, on a spacious modernist campus where rustling leaves and birds pierce through the silence. The noisy city-goer wouldn’t realize this is one of the leading hubs of American innovation, with semiconductor fab plants and biotech…

The Brazilian presidential election of 2022 was one of the closest—and dirtiest—elections in the country’s history. After a long and grueling campaign, former president and union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva prevailed over right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro by the slimmest of margins. Lula will now join Getúlio Vargas as the second president to secure…

With the rise of China, talk of a second Cold War has intensified. This is typically explained in economic terms: a morality tale in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) flirted with the virtuous free trade order and its political corollaries only to fall to the temptation of state capitalism. Like a laboratory study in which the subject failed to defer gratification…

In recent years, experiments in basic income have proliferated across the United States. According to a September 2022 report in the New York Times, at least forty-eight trials have been launched since 2020, and several more have been announced this year. A constellation of organi­zations is behind these efforts, with municipalities raising funds for individual pilots…

In Of Boys and Men, Reeves turns his attention to another increasingly disadvantaged group: males. Reeves chronicles the myriad but neglected ways in which boys are falling behind in school and men are increasingly adrift from both work and family. This insightful study ought to serve as a touchstone in future debates about men’s flourishing…

As ideologies go, libertarianism is a borderline personality. One moment it is prophesying doom; the next it is hailing social and economic progress. One moment it is pining for destruction; the next it is rationalizing the status quo. One moment it is racist and reactionary; the next it is cloyingly politically correct. One moment it is rejecting com­mon ground…

“Lind,” the voice on the phone told me one day in the mid-1990s, “I’ve been talking trash all day with Al D’Amato. Can you meet me tonight for dinner?” That is how dinners or lunches with Daniel Patrick Moynihan typically came about. My phone would ring and a secretary would tell me, “Please hold for Senator Moynihan.” Then the familiar voice…

Since it became law in 1996, Section 230—which shields tech companies from liability for the third-party content that they host—has seemed untouchable. All of that changed in 2018, however, when fosta (the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) was enacted into law. Fosta carved federal sex trafficking laws out of Section 230…

Following successive releases of advanced AIs since ChatGPT, a group of leading technologists has called for an immediate, six-month moratorium on training large AI models. Their open letter, signed by Elon Musk and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, raises alarms that AI labs are locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control…

Growing, nigh-incontrovertible evidence suggests a nexus between heavy social media use and mental health issues in children and young adults, prompting numerous lawsuits against major tech compa­nies, including TikTok, Meta, and Snap. Seattle Public Schools’ recent lawsuit, for example, accuses these social media giants of contributing to a youth mental health crisis. Many researchers have found that the negative effects of social media on minors and young adults far outweigh any benefits…

In a time in which generations struggle to understand each other, everyone, young and old, is nevertheless in agreement that something has happened to the young. Young people are now consistently more distressed than our elders, a fact whose daily confirmation through experience is the only thing keeping us from recognizing its utter his­torical perversity. Youth has been stripped of its natural tendencies to energy, autonomy, and subversion. In our turning away from life, the generation christened with the albatross of the alphabet’s final letter…