News of Apocalypse from The Atlantic
In the version of this blog from May 2007 to Feb. 2009, most of my posts (roughly four per day!) consisted of links to external articles, including lots of political ones, with relevant excerpts. For this time only, I wanted to kind of revisit this feeling. Today, I feel like quoting copiously at times. Either way, such posts only take a couple of minutes to create.
All articles are from The Atlantic, which I don’t read anymore since its contents became subscriber-only. But I’ll give you barrier-free links, so you can read these articles in full.
Anchors do exist: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7 (they exist in most recent posts, even if not mentioned).
Anne Applebaum: The New Rasputins
Barrier-free: https://archive.ph/c4gGw
No excerpts from this one, although it’s an excellent read. About 2300 words. It starts with Călin Georgescu. Romanian readers can have a few paragraphs translated and adapted on G4Media.
How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days
He used the constitution to shatter the constitution.
Barrier-free: https://archive.ph/8hsJl
A fascinating long read. About 4800 words. The law mentioned at the end of the article is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.
Barrier-free: https://archive.ph/wxY8p
Since it’s a 7800-word article, I’ll quote some parts of it. No suspension points to mark the omissions!
In 2023, 74 percent of all restaurant traffic came from “off premises” customers—that is, from takeout and delivery—up from 61 percent before COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association.
The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years.
According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years.
Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent.
The End of the Social Century: From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half.
Starting in the second half of the century, Americans used their cars to move farther and farther away from one another, enabling the growth of the suburbs and, with it, a retreat into private backyard patios, private pools, a more private life. Once Americans got out of the car, they planted themselves in front of the television. From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained six hours a week in leisure time. They could have devoted that time—300 hours a year!—to community service, or pickup basketball, or reading, or knitting, or all four. Instead, they funneled almost all of this extra time into watching more TV.
Smartphones: The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.
Homebound: In 2022—notably, after the pandemic had abated—adults spent an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003.
One might ask: Why wouldn’t Americans with means want to spend more time at home? In the past few decades, the typical American home has become bigger, more comfortable, and more entertaining. From 1973 to 2023, the size of the average new single-family house increased by 50 percent, and the share of new single-family houses that have air-conditioning doubled, to 98 percent. Streaming services, video-game consoles, and flatscreen TVs make the living room more diverting than any 20th-century theater or arcade. Yet conveniences can indeed be a curse. By Sharkey’s calculations, activities at home were associated with a “strong reduction” in self-reported happiness.
A homebound life doesn’t have to be a solitary life. In the 1970s, the typical household entertained more than once a month. But from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, the frequency of hosting friends for parties, games, dinners, and so on declined by 45 percent, according to data that Robert Putnam gathered. In the 20 years after Bowling Alone was published, the average amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events declined another 32 percent.
The exponential growth of AI companions: “The horrifying part, of course, is that learning how to interact with real human beings who can disagree with you and disappoint you” is essential to living in the world, Epley said. I think he’s right. But Epley was born in the 1970s. I was born in the 1980s. People born in the 2010s, or the 2020s, might not agree with us about the irreplaceability of “real human” friends. These generations may discover that what they want most from their relationships is not a set of people, who might challenge them, but rather a set of feelings—sympathy, humor, validation—that can be more reliably drawn out from silicon than from carbon-based life forms.
The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows
Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state.
Barrier-free: https://archive.ph/TsqEQ
About 5000 words. Excerpts (again, no suspension points):
If you were curious why Tucker Carlson, who was raised Episcopalian, recently spoke of being mauled in his sleep by a demon, it may be because he is absorbing the language and beliefs of this movement. If you were questioning why Elon Musk would bother speaking at an NAR church called Life Center in Harrisburg, it is because Musk surely knows that a movement that wants less government and more God works well with his libertarian vision. If you wanted to know why there were news stories about House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Southern Baptist, displaying a white flag with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven outside his office, or the same flag being flown outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a Catholic, the reason is that the Revolutionary War–era banner has become the battle flag for a movement with ideological allies across the Christian right.
By last year, 42 percent of American Christians agreed with the statement “God wants Christians to stand atop the ‘7 Mountains of Society.’” Roughly 61 percent agreed with the statement that “there are modern-day apostles and prophets.” Roughly half agreed that “there are demonic ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ who control physical territory,” and that the Church should “organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons.”
The ideas have seeped into Trumpworld, influencing the agenda known as Project 2025, as well as proposals set forth by the America First Policy Institute. A new book called Unhumans, co-authored by the far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and endorsed by J. D. Vance, describes political opponents as “unhumans” who want to “undo civilization itself” and who currently “run operations in media, government, education, economy, family, religion, and arts and entertainment”—the seven mountains. The book argues that these “unhumans” must be “crushed.”
PHOTO: Faith leaders, including major figures in the New Apostolic Reformation movement, pray with Donald Trump at the White House in 2019.
How Well-Intentioned Policies Fueled L.A.’s Fires
Barrier-free: https://archive.ph/lx53l
Only about 750 words, but it’s enlightening.
Commentators wasted no time trying to find a villain. Was it Mayor Karen Bass, who had left the city for Ghana before the fires began? Doubtful. What about budget cuts to the Los Angeles Fire Department? In fact, its budget recently grew by $50 million. Was it a 2022 donation of firefighter boots and helmets to Ukraine? Water is in short supply, not uniforms.
The real story of the wildfires isn’t about malice or incompetence. It’s about well-intentioned policies with unintended consequences.
Take insurance—a trillion-dollar industry built to identify risks, particularly from disasters such as wildfires. Insurance companies communicate this risk to homeowners through higher premiums, providing them with useful information and incentives. People may think twice about moving to a fire-prone area if they see the danger reflected in a fee.
But in 1988, California voters passed Proposition 103, arbitrarily reducing rates by 20 percent and subjecting future rate increases to public oversight. Nobody likes high premiums, of course. But the politicization of risk has been a catastrophe. Artificially low premiums encouraged more Californians to live in the state’s most dangerous areas. And they reduced the incentive for homeowners to protect their houses, such as by installing fire-resistant roofs and siding materials.
Artificially low premiums have also spurred new housing production in fire-prone regions on the edges of cities like Los Angeles. From 1990 to 2020, California built nearly 1.5 million homes in the wildlife-urban interface, putting millions of residents in the path of wildfires. Policy didn’t just pull Californians into dangerous areas. It also pushed them out of safer ones. Over the past 70 years, zoning has made housing expensive and difficult to build in cities, which are generally more resilient to climate change than any other part of the state.
The classic urban neighborhood in America—carefully maintained park, interconnected street grid, masonry-clad shops and apartments—is perhaps the most wildfire-resistant pattern of growth. By contrast, the modern American suburb—think stick-frame homes along cul-de-sacs that bump up against unmaintained natural lands—may be the least. Several of L.A.’s hardest-hit neighborhoods resemble this model.
The Palisades Were Waiting to Burn
Barrier-free: https://archive.ph/O24k1
Also only about 750 words. The previous article explains why there were vulnerable houses in vulnerable areas; this one explains the weather context.
The hills were ready to burn. It’s January, well past the time of year when fire season in Southern California is supposed to end. But in this part of the semi-arid chaparral called Los Angeles, fire season can now be any time.
Drought had begun to bear down by the time the fires started. A wetter season is supposed to begin around October, but no meaningful amount of rain has fallen since May. Then came a record-breaking hot summer. The land was now drier than in almost any year since recordkeeping began. Grasses and sagebrush that had previously greened in spring rains dried to a crisp and stayed that way, a perfect buffet of fuel for a blaze to feast on.
“You’d have to go to the late 1800s to see this dry of a start to the rainy season,” Glen MacDonald, a geography professor at UCLA, told me.
Then the colder months brought the Santa Ana winds: stuff of legend, the strong downslope gusts that suck humidity out of the air, if there was any to begin with. This time, the winds were stronger than average, too. A parched landscape; crisp-dried vegetation; strong, hot winds: “The gun was loaded,” MacDonald said. And it was pointed at Pacific Palisades.
Barrier-free: https://archive.ph/3VVH3
About 2500 words. It’s going to be fun.
“The countdown clock on the next catastrophic crash has already started,” Dennis Kelleher, the president of the nonprofit Better Markets, told me.
In the past few weeks, I have heard that sentiment or similar from economists, traders, Hill staffers, and government officials. The incoming Trump administration has promised to pass crypto-friendly regulations, and is likely to loosen strictures on Wall Street institutions as well.
This will bring an unheralded era of American prosperity, it argues, maintaining the country’s position as the head of the global capital markets and the heart of the global investment ecosystem. “My vision is for an America that dominates the future,” Donald Trump told a bitcoin conference in July. “I’m laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.”
Financial experts expect something different. First, a boom. A big boom, maybe, with the price of bitcoin, ether, and other cryptocurrencies climbing; financial firms raking in profits; and American investors awash in newfound wealth. Second, a bust. A big bust, maybe, with firms collapsing, the government being called in to steady the markets, and plenty of Americans suffering from foreclosures and bankruptcies.
Having written about bitcoin for more than a decade—and having covered the last financial crisis and its long hangover—I have some sense of what might cause that boom and bust. Crypto assets tend to be exceedingly volatile, much more so than real estate, commodities, stocks, and bonds. Egged on by Washington, more Americans will invest in crypto. Prices will go up as cash floods in. Individuals and institutions will get wiped out when prices drop, as they inevitably will.The experts I spoke with did not counter that narrative. But if that’s all that happens, they told me, the United States and the world should count themselves lucky. The danger is not just that crypto-friendly regulation will expose millions of Americans to scams and volatility. The danger is that it will lead to an increase in leverage across the whole of the financial system. It will foster opacity, making it harder for investors to determine the riskiness of and assign prices to financial products. And it will do so at the same time as the Trump administration cuts regulations and regulators.
Crypto will become more widespread. And the conventional financial markets will come to look more like the crypto markets—wilder, less transparent, and more unpredictable, with trillion-dollar consequences extending years into the future.
“I have this worry that the next three or four years will look pretty good,” Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell and a former International Monetary Fund official, told me. “It’s what comes after, when we have to pick up the pieces from all the speculative frenzies that are going to be generated because of this administration’s actions.”
You can read the site alright if you set your browser to not use javascript on www.theatlantic.com
This simple trick works on other sites too, just try and see.
When I give barrier-free links, they are for the public, not for me.
I specifically use NJS because on some websites it’s enough to let me read full articles. (On some sites, you have to let the article load in the background until it tells you that you have to subscribe, and only then you can disable the JS; on other sites, you can keep JS disabled all the time.)
And I also use magnolia1234’s bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean (as described here); but most people don’t.
Sure. As for me, I found non-mainstream browsers to be an excellent tool for this kind of things, since you can define granular preferences for every site directly into the browser itself. (A remarkable one is Vivaldi, built by the Tetzchner guy behind the Opera browser of old, but there are others too.) It’s amusing to see how everyone takes for granted that JS is enabled by default on the client. Or pictures. Or video play. These little gems bring back serenity to web browsing.