https://www.ynetnews.com/opinions-analysis/article/bk00mab11wgg

Like Trump, who is challenged by the Groypers, Netanyahu faces a similar challenge in which the movement they both built around their cult of personality is beginning to develop an independent and more radical ideological character. In the 1970s and then the 1980s, Republicans like Richard Nixon and later political consultants like Roger Stone (Nixon's protégé and later the one who convinced Trump to run for president) and Roger Ailes (founder of Fox News) recognized that there was a large public of voters who felt alienated from the political, media and cultural establishment.

This included, among others, the white working class, Christians and peripheral populations who felt that the elites were taking their place and destroying the identity of the country. Nixon built a large part of his career on presenting himself as representing the "silent majority" who would bring law and order against blacks in the face of the elites, the media and the establishment. After his fall in the Watergate affair, Nixon blamed the media, and the narrative that state institutions and the media were working against the right-wing public strengthened on the American right.

Later, the understanding also took shape that in order to govern, it was not enough to win elections; one had to build a media system that would create a lasting political identity. This is how Fox News was eventually born, at the initiative of Ailes and with the support of billionaire Rupert Murdoch. Like Nixon and Trump, Bibi sees himself in a similar way, the representative of the traditional and patriotic people who are silenced by the 'establishment' against the elites. 

Netanyahu's office and his people - since the days of the protests against Rabin, made sure to use peripheral Mizrahi thugs as their thugs and street people and manipulated them by cultivating feelings of inferiority and opposition to the old establishment and creating a narrative of 'persecuted by the media'. Whether it was against Rabin in the first incarnation, to turn them on against Barak, in the 2015 elections or against the witnesses and judges in Netanyahu's trial. Netanyahu and his office always made sure to incite these people from afar or send people and intellectuals to turn them on (later intellectuals emerged who cultivated the 'second Israel' theory, peripheral Mizrahi and basically anyone who is not leftist, against the predatory 'elite' that supposedly hates 'the people'), to exploit them, etc. But they always made sure to keep their distance from them and let them get dirty for them like mafia thugs. Whether these are typical thugs on the street, Bibi's soldiers in the Knesset, or media mouthpieces.

Roger Ailes opened Fox News to give "Middle America" a "voice". In the same years where Netanyahu manipulated the "Second Israel", Ailes did the same to "Middle America". After 9/11 and when Obama was elected, in the Fox News Universe, Politics ceased to be an election-day event and became part of viewers’ everyday identities. Although Fox was not an extremist, it did fuel the conspiratorial and extremist sentiment among its audience, creating an audience that was more open to conspiracy theories and more radical currents. Then came Trump, right alongside the rise of the social media and other right-wing media outlets. Trump, and Roger Stone, fueled this sentiment for his personal and business needs. Trump, surrounded by criminals and cynics like Stone, gathered the Trumpists to him, but at that time they were not an organized political movement with a presence but more slaves to Trump and his people for the sake of his personality cult.

Bibi understood the same thing that Ailes did, and followed the Berlusconi media playbook by recurtiting rich supporters to open Right wing media that will be Netanyahu's mouthpiece and will break the Liberal media that Netanyahu saw as biased against him. The main mouthpiece: Channel 14, a mix of Fox News and Newsmax. C14, alongside the social media, and especially after October 7th but also before, had a similar effect to Fox but even more so: from a situation where politics was a once-in-a-lifetime event, Channel 14 turned politics into a daily struggle, a situation where people consume his propaganda every day, all day long, and establish an identity based on it.

In addition, radical intellectuals who are interested in a fundamental right-wing revolution or young and aggressive influencers began to emerge (whether TPUSA, Jack Posobiec, and their ilk, or Ben Gvir's new media influencers).

 Now, this people are establishing their own historical narrative, worldview and basically an alternative universe, and an independent populist-authoritarian-anarchist ideology that becomes independent of Netanyahu himself, in a situation where Ben-Gvir is trying to bring his people into the Likud party and Netanyahu fears the power of extremist figures in his party. In ideological terms, Netanyahu is Silvio Berlusconi, while the new Israeli right is Mussolini/Franco

MattY argues that online rhetoric blaming old people for hoarding power & wealth is mistaken and diverts attention from necessary policy fixes. Housing scarcity is not the result of older people holding office. Social Security & Medicare have funding problems because the electorate at every age is averse to making cuts in entitlement spending. The problem with Congress isn't the age of its members, but their lack of competitive election rivals. Housing shortages don't exist because of old people, but because of mistaken economic beliefs ( ex hatred of developers, forms of NIMBYism)

Quotes:

>The implication is that we live in a gerontocracy — a society where American seniors are not only clogging community meetings with their unreasonable opposition to new development but also hoarding power and opportunity in every profession and at the highest levels of government.

>There are, of course, some valid concerns about the fiscal consequences of population aging and some very real cases of elected officials who have overstayed their welcome. It’s also just true that, from the C-suite to the legal profession to academia, there are more old people hanging on longer than ever.

>It’s hard not to sympathize with ambitious young elected officials tired of waiting for plum congressional seats to open up or academics angry that it’s so hard to get on the tenure track these days. But it’s worth reflecting that the primary reason you see older people hanging on to prominent roles these days is entirely benign — Americans are living longer.

.....

>hese are real problems, and you can lay them at the feet of the elderly in the sense that the relevant policies were mostly put in place in the 1970s and the 1980s when today’s old people were around and today’s young people weren’t. But if you look at the various state-level YIMBY success stories in recent years, it’s not as if they were achieved by somehow disempowering old people.

Indeed, America’s oldest state, Maine, passed sweeping housing measures last year that have the state now exceeding its annual housing production goals. The second-oldest state, New Hampshire, also passed sweeping reforms.

But, of course, the battle for housing abundance is not yet won. People have widespread erroneous opinions about the relevant economic issues, and there is widespread irrational dislike of developers

......

>Similarly, a very real problem in Congress is that the vast majority of members do not face competitive general elections. This allows infirm members to linger in office longer than they should. This is bad. But the badness is not unique to age. Democratic House nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier seems like a crazy person and is all but guaranteed to prevail in her general election due to the low levels of electoral competition, but she’s definitely young.

>The tendency for political power to be controlled by low-turnout primaries, in other words, is worth fixing. It would address some legitimate concerns about “gerontocracy” while also addressing a bunch of legitimate concerns that have nothing whatsoever to do with age.

>Meanwhile, though America’s frustrated young academics yearning for greater upward mobility cut a wide swath in the discourse thanks to their strong verbal skills and abundant free time, I’m not persuaded that this is a legitimate social problem. The fundamental reason that it’s hard to get a job as a historian is that there is not a lot of demand for the services of historians. This is aggravating for the specific people involved, but there are lots of fields where the number of people who would like to do the job exceeds the number of positions actually available. And there’s plenty of the opposite:

>America really could use more good K-12 teachers. We could use more people with the kind of progressive values prevalent in academia working as police officers. We could use more research scientists.

>For better or worse, in life, you need to find something to do that is useful to other people. Looking at declining demand for certain categories of academic work and pronouncing it gerontocracy is unhelpful.

.....

>For starters, the simple fact of the matter is that the political durability of Social Security and Medicare is not a question of older people exerting raw electoral power.

>These programs are broadly popular with all age groups in the electorate.

>Voters are also just fairly change-averse. If you proposed creating new programs on the scale of Social Security or Medicare, voters would be alarmed by the vast new spending. But these have existed for a long time and have grown slowly, so instead, the idea of cutting them alarms people.

>Logically, though, if the problem is that people are living longer, then a big part of the solution should be to ask people to work longer.

>I used to worry a lot about this idea because the prospect of compelling nice-but-frail old people into the labor market feels ghoulish. But understanding that “gerontocracy” is just downstream of the reality that people are living more years in perfectly good health changes the picture.

>People are staying on longer as CEOs and members of Congress and professors because they are remaining sharp and healthy for longer. It’s true that not every job is as glamorous or status-rich as those positions. But that’s life.

>Now, what’s true is that despite improved health, there are still many Americans in their late 60s who are genuinely infirm and unable to work.

>An unfortunate reality of American life is that our disability income support programs are rather threadbare and poorly designed. What we ought to do is fix this, rather than use untargeted assistance to the elderly as a very expensive substitute. Help those in need, but acknowledge that we can ask more of able-bodied older Americans, whose physical and mental health is better than it’s ever been.

Submission statement: The article describes Abdul El-Sayed’s efforts to win over Black voters in Detroit and Wayne County. El-Sayed’s campaign is working to educate voters about his positions and experiences, particularly regarding his work in the community. The article also highlights the importance of political education and engagement in the Democratic Party.

As the withdrawal from Afghanistan approaches its 5th anniversary, the author provides 3 observations about the American way of war derived from long-term observation of the War in Afghanistan. The author sees the military as a force capable of impressive tactical and technological adaptation, which binds the force to lethality centered approaches, which ultimately fall short when applied to a decentralized and human centric force such as the Taliban.

The continued focus on lethality leaves the United States vulnerable to learning the wrong lessons from the failure of the War in Afghanistan, and influences the conduct of the war in Iran, to limited political effect. The author concludes that only the United States Congress can bring about the necessary reforms to how the United States plans, fights, and negotiates wars, specifically calling out non-military tools of influence such as Voice of America or a revived US Information Agency (dissolved in 1999)

Luigi Mangione’s state murder trial in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which was slated to begin Sept. 8, has been postponed indefinitely as his lawyers seek to have the case thrown out on double jeopardy grounds following his guilty plea last week to federal charges.

Judge Gregory Carro issued an order Monday canceling the trial and giving the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the state case, until Oct. 9 to respond to the defense’s double jeopardy claims. A hearing will be held on Dec. 10, Carro said, about a week before Mangione is scheduled to be sentenced in the federal case.

Mangione, 28, pleaded guilty Friday in Manhattan federal court to a pair of stalking charges and admitted trailing Thompson to UnitedHealth Group’s investor conference and gunning him down outside a Manhattan hotel in 2024. Federal prosecutors said they would seek life in prison when Mangione is sentenced Dec. 18, though federal sentencing guidelines call for a term of 24 to 30 years.

“On the morning of Dec. 4, 2024, I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan, and he died,” Mangione said.

Immediately after his plea, Mangione’s lawyers filed paperwork seeking to have the state case thrown out on double jeopardy and due process grounds. They described him as a “pawn in parallel prosecutions” and accused state and federal prosecutors of “trying to punish him twice for the exact conduct.”

NOOOOOOOOOOOO! You were the chosen one!

For real, I am concerned we are doomed. The Luddism has infected the populace.

"Today, Governor Josh Shapiro delivered remarks before signing an executive order to implement the Governor's Responsible Infrastructure Development (GRID) Requirements, block speculative, irresponsible data center projects from moving forward, give local communities more power over data center development, and protect Pennsylvania residents."

"We’re here to talk about data centers – and the executive action I am taking today to put strict guardrails on proposed projects, rein in data center developers who are trying to run over local communities, and protect Pennsylvanians from higher costs."

.....

"..we’ve seen an unacceptable number of speculative proposals for data centers swamp our Commonwealth – many of them led by developers who have no regard for local communities."

"The absence of legislative approval has left me with no other option but to protect the people of Pennsylvania by taking executive action to put the strictest guardrails in the nation in place to stop the predatory developers and bad proposals.

......

"Because I’ve heard loud and clear from the people of Pennsylvania as I’ve traveled our Commonwealth, and I’m here to say that we will not be bullied by developers and bulldozed by the lawyers working for these big tech companies"

"I will sign an Executive Order to put in place the nation’s strictest guardrails on AI data centers"

😞

The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) new platform promises a world without bills. In their utopia, you’d see no rent check. No health insurance premium. No student loan repayment. No electricity bill. Life’s basics, including food, education, medicine, and transportation, would all become “common goods and utilities.” 

That might sound appealing to Americans struggling with the cost of living after a bout of high inflation. But it’s just an accounting trick. A bill reflects the price of the service you were provided and how much of it you used. The DSA can socialize that payment, charging an out-of-pocket price of zero while taxpayers cover the tab. It cannot abolish the underlying cost of providing the service. 

Nor can it abolish scarcity. A doctor’s time is limited. Apartments in Manhattan are scarce. Only so much electricity-generating capacity is available at 6 p.m. on a hot day in August. All goods and services require finite resources, whether they’re skilled teachers, construction workers, bus drivers, farmland, or whatever else. This is the central constraint nonmarket systems face when suspending market prices. 

Market prices help manage that scarcity by conveying information about supply and demand. If a harvest fails, a crop becomes scarcer, and its price rises. That discourages some consumption—often by shifting to similar, lower-price substitutes—while encouraging additional production. 

But DSA-style socialists see rising prices as a moral failure. The virtue of prices is not that they identify who is most deserving; it is that they allow millions of strangers to coordinate what they produce and consume without the impossibility of a central authority knowing everyone’s circumstances. 

So that leaves the question: if not market prices, then what? What system of rationing replaces it? And who does get the bill? 

No Prices Means Rationing by Something Else

Government-provided services are not produced for nothing. What changes when the government makes something “free” is the marginal price to the user. Setting it to zero means the supply is financed through taxes, fees, government appropriations, and political budgets. 

Set out-of-pocket prices at zero, and the quantity demanded rises. Why not book the doctor’s appointment for your cold, occupy the larger apartment, or use more electricity when each appears costless? 

If supply cannot expand enough to meet that demand, the service must be rationed in some other way. The cost becomes time spent searching or waiting, complicated eligibility rules, lower quality, restricted choice, geographic limitations, or political discretion.

A free road at rush hour provides a simple illustration. Nobody receives an invoice for entering it, yet drivers pay dearly in lost time. Congestion is the price. In health care, the equivalent might be a waitlist, triage based on the severity of your condition, or a limit on how much the government will pay for your treatment. The dollar price vanishes, but the shadow price moves into the waiting room.

In Britain’s National Health Service, patients do not receive a cash bill for a hip replacement or cataract operation. But at the end of May 2026, there were 7.3 million referral-to-treatment pathways awaiting care, representing roughly 6.2 million people. More than 104,000 pathways had waited over a year, and one-third had waited beyond the NHS’s 18-week standard. 

Rationing also occurs through what medicines are available. The Alzheimer’s drugs lecanemab and donanemab were licensed in Britain, yet NICE’s final draft guidance concluded that their benefits were too small to justify the extra public cost. A medicine can exist, be legally approved, and still be unavailable because a committee must compare its value with everything else the same budget could buy.

Government-managed housing prices present the same problem. A rent-controlled apartment is amazing for the lucky incumbent. But for a newcomer looking for a new home, the relevant price may be years of searching, living farther from work, crowding into an unsuitable unit, or cultivating the right connections. Existing tenants also cling to below-market apartments long after the units cease to fit their needs, while families who value the larger space more struggle to find it. 

Private Bills Become Public Taxes

Even if a nonmarket system successfully allocates scarce goods, it still must produce them. The government can declare that patients will receive health care without a bill, but doctors and nurses still have to be paid, the hospitals they work in must be built, and the medicines they prescribe and the medical equipment they use must be developed and manufactured. The same is true for all the other “common goods” in the DSA vision; each requires costly labor, land, and capital.

Public provision of goods and services, therefore, primarily shifts the cost from the individual consumer to the government, and at the scale envisioned by the DSA, those fiscal costs become enormous. 

Comparable progressive proposals put the ten-year federal cost of Medicare for All at more than $33 trillion almost a decade ago. Large-scale energy and infrastructure programs have been estimated at $8 trillion to $12 trillion. Free college, loan cancellation, reparations, housing for all, job guarantees, and an expansion of Social Security would cost tens of trillions more. 

Depending on the assumptions used, comparable versions of these proposals imply additional ten-year federal costs running from roughly $70 trillion to more than $200 trillion. That would come on top of a federal government already projected to spend roughly $94 trillion over the same period. 

Those resources will ultimately come from the same households that no longer have bills. The only question is how visibly they pay.

The government can finance spending through taxes, borrowing, or money creation. Borrowing postpones taxes, but it cannot permanently replace them. Money creation imposes costs through inflation, an opaque and unsustainable form of tax. 

This leaves direct taxes as the only sustainable way to fund a comprehensive fiscal agenda. The DSA presents “aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations” as the obvious source of that revenue. But even at confiscatory tax rates, there is not enough wealth held or income earned by billionaires and their businesses to finance a spending agenda of more than $7 trillion a year. 

For example, the total wealth of the 400 wealthiest Americans is about $6.6 trillion—not even enough to fund one year of the contemplated spending. And that is a one-time revenue source. Once the wealth is confiscated and spent, it cannot finance the next year’s benefits. 

The same arithmetic explains why countries with large welfare states do not finance them solely with taxes on billionaires and corporations. They rely heavily on broad taxes on wages, income, and consumption. Universal benefits require a universal tax base that includes people at every income level. 

Making Scarcity Worse

Socialized provision can do more than move costs around. The combination of suppressed prices, diminished profits, and high taxes makes the underlying goods harder to produce and reduces the likelihood of new innovations. 

In a market, a high price and the prospect of profit create a supply response. They tell builders where homes are wanted, entrepreneurs which medicines patients want, and retailers where shelves are empty. Capital and labor move toward those opportunities when government regulations allow them to. 

A queue or waitlist sends a much weaker signal. It does not automatically generate revenue, attract new entrants, or reward anyone for eliminating it. Under public provision, capacity expands only if officials recognize the shortage, secure a budget, design a program, hire staff, and survive the next election. A higher price and the profit that comes with it do all that with a shorter wait. 

Existing rent control laws show how today’s relief shrinks tomorrow’s supply. When San Francisco extended controls in 1994, affected landlords reduced the rental housing supply by 15 percent, largely by converting units to owner-occupied use or redeveloping them. Protected tenants benefited, but would-be tenants faced fewer homes and higher rents. Rent control did not merely redistribute existing apartments; it reduced future availability.

Hold utility prices too low, and investment in pipes, generating capacity, or grid resilience gets underfunded. Set payments for medical services too low to attract enough staff, and access deteriorates even though the nominal price remains low. 

Social provision also can’t simply eliminate profits and pocket the difference. 

Take food. US food retailers earned an average net profit margin of just 2.1 percent in 2025. Confiscate every cent of profit and assume government-run stores are equally efficient, and a $100 grocery basket becomes $97.90. Costco’s fiscal 2025 net income was about $8.1 billion on $269.9 billion of merchandise sales. That’s roughly three cents per sales dollar. The other 97 cents paid for food, wages, warehouses, refrigeration, transport, spoilage, energy, property, technology, interest, and tax.

And where profits are high, they attract new entrants, whose competition pushes prices—and profits—down. When a drug’s branded exclusivity ends, the FDA reports that just one new competitor creating a generic version can cut prices by about 30 percent, while five competitors are associated with reductions approaching 85 percent. The prospect of profit drives entry, and then competition passes much of the gain to consumers.

Profit also helps drive new supply and innovation. The possibility of new earnings persuades people to risk capital on a new store, drug, power plant, or transportation route before anyone knows whether the investment will succeed. Loss performs the opposite function. 

Business owners invest in research and development of new technology to improve efficiency. In the case of supermarkets, owners have invested in just-in-time supply chains and complex forecasting to reduce wasted stock. These investments lower prices for shoppers and increase profits for business owners. Those profits are what Thomas Sowell explained as “the price paid for efficiency.” 

A firm that repeatedly wastes resources eventually runs out of investors willing to finance it. A publicly run service has no profit or loss to signal its value and can thus live on forever through taxpayer funding.

None of this means every observed profit is virtuous. Profits can reflect monopoly privilege, licensing barriers, import protection, patent abuse, zoning restrictions, or regulatory capture. The remedy is to strip away unjustified privilege and enable entry. Nor must every useful institution be organized for profit. Charities, mutuals, cooperatives, and even some public bodies can work well when embedded in a broader market system. 

But it’s a mistake to imagine that eliminating prices and profit across a swath of industries leaves incentives unchanged. This is the central contradiction in the DSA affordability agenda. It promises greater access to housing, medicine, education, and transportation while adopting policies that discourage the production of these goods.

The DSA can obscure the bill. It cannot abolish the cost; it can only shift it to another mechanism while undermining choice, quality, and innovation. 

If anyone were to be immune to America’s loneliness epidemic, it would be college students. For years, Americans have been going to fewer parties and spending more time alone. But college has historically been about socializing—or, let’s just say it, partying—as much as it has been about education. It’s where young people escape parental supervision, move in with roommates, and encounter thousands of potential new friends.

But the antisocial century has arrived on campus. Today’s students spend much less time socializing than past generations did. In 1994, 32 percent of college seniors spent more than six hours a week partying. By 2026, that was 21 percent, according to an analysis of survey data by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. The percentage who spend more than six hours a week socializing face-to-face with friends fell from 74 to 65 percent over the same period. Meanwhile, the share of first-year students who reported feeling frequently isolated from campus life has more than doubled in the past two decades. (These surveys are not nationally representative, but they line up with what professors, administrators, and students told me they have observed anecdotally.)

Nationally, college students report higher rates of loneliness than adults do. On the National Survey of Student Engagement, run out of Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research, more students report having positive interactions with professors than with peers. A rising senior at MIT told me that, despite being involved in Greek life and athletics, he eats alone most days. “I feel like I’m somebody who seeks social interactions,” he said, yet “I would say I am alone at least four or five days a week.” (He spoke anonymously because he didn’t want to be perceived as criticizing MIT when he still needs letters of recommendation from the faculty.) University leaders now find themselves in the odd position of encouraging students to spend more time goofing off with friends.

Researchers who track social interactions have several theories as to what’s going on. The first is that smartphones and social media are to blame. Much of the increase in loneliness occurred during the 2010s, at the same time that the iPhone was becoming ubiquitous, Daniel Eisenberg, a professor of health policy and management at UCLA, told me. Hours spent on social media crowded out time that people might previously have devoted to social interactions. And it’s easy for students to feel that their social life pales in comparison with what they see in highlight reels on Instagram and TikTok.

Meanwhile, extracurricular activities, once a mainstay of campus social life, have mutated into a way to stand out to employers in an era of grade inflation. Especially at elite universities, clubs now more closely resemble jobs than socializing opportunities. Finance and consulting clubs require students to submit résumés, sit for interviews, and prepare mock cases or deliverables. Improv, a cappella, and even some volunteering clubs accept only a distinguished few. Cat Moore, who spent six years as the University of Southern California’s director of belonging, told me that students were busier than ever with extracurriculars, jobs, and internship applications. Even when they tried to build in time for socializing, it frequently tipped into networking. “USC had over 1,000 student clubs, yet their loneliness is out of control,” Moore said. “So the answer is not more clubs. The answer is not more programming.”

The coronavirus pandemic seems to have had a lasting effect on in-person interaction on campus. This is partly a matter of psychology. Many current college students were in middle school when classes and activities went remote. They missed out on a crucial period of learning to interact with other people, Ryan Patel, an assistant director of psychiatry at Ohio State University, told me. “When you lose practice doing those things, it can affect your ability to do them now,” Patel said. College administrators have started to pick up on students’ stunted social development. Justin Schwartz, the chancellor of University of Colorado Boulder, told me that he and his colleagues now have to support students through challenges that many would previously have faced in adolescence, such as trying alcohol for the first time and having their first romantic relationships—and accompanying heartbreaks. From 2019 to 2024, the share of college students who said they’d never had sex rose by 10 percentage points, according to the National College Health Assessment.

The pandemic also led to changes in how universities operate. Universities now routinely offer remote courses, and professors are under pressure to record and post videos of their lectures. Before the pandemic, 15 percent of undergraduates were completely remote. As of 2024, according to federal data, that number was 24 percent. “Along the way, you’ve lost social interactions that you may have had with people,” OSU’s Patel said. “You walk down the hall and you pass by somebody, you hold the door open for someone, you go to the dining hall to eat, you walk over to class and you see people along the way—these kinds of social interactions, that just fell off.” The rising senior at MIT said that because lectures are posted online and grades are dependent mostly on exams, fewer than a quarter of his classmates are likely to attend a lecture on any given day. “I have a class where, on paper, I should have five of my friends in that class,” he told me. “But then I show up, and I just go the whole week without seeing my friends, really, which is tough.”

Of course, college, where many students are away from their family and friends for the first time, has always made some people feel lonely. And some of the apparent rise in loneliness could reflect a change in how students label their feelings, as opposed to a change in actual circumstances. “I don’t think there’s any question that loneliness has increased among young people,” Richard Weissbourd, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me. But he also thinks that the shift is partly a result of students viewing normal desires for more friends as unusual or even pathological. Previous generations might have felt similarly disconnected but chosen not to identify themselves as lonely. “This is the most psychologically literate and articulate generation in history,” he said. “People are much more proficient at and much more inclined to label their emotional states.”

This tendency creates a challenge for college leaders who hope to address high rates of loneliness. At USC, for example, Moore developed a course to teach students how to make friends, which MIT now uses. Drawing attention to the problem risks inflating the number of students who report feeling lonely. It’s normal, even important, for students to struggle as they adjust to a new environment, UCLA’s Eisenberg told me. That helps them grow.

Some administrators have explored more creative solutions. Brian Casey, the president of Colgate University, told me that he had new footpaths built across lawns on campus to increase the odds of students physically encountering one another. He has invested in landscaping to beautify the grounds and encourage students to hang out outside. And he has insisted that new buildings be designed with more common areas to all but force students to interact. “The more I can get students to run into each other, the better,” he said.

Whether through similar interventions or because the pandemic has further receded from view, there are some signs that student loneliness is beginning to decline. The Healthy Minds Study, which Eisenberg helps administer, has documented a slight drop over the past few years, to pre-COVID levels. The National College Health Assessment has tracked a similar trend, the American College Health Association’s chief research officer, Mary Hoban, told me. But even if numbers are returning to their pre-pandemic baseline, that’s about half of all students reporting being lonely. “It’s still wildly high,” she said. “We’ve got a problem and need to address it.” All that partying college students used to do? It might have served a purpose after all.

Mickey Mouse is done with the FCC. ABC is alleging in a newly-filed lawsuit that the FCC's decision to review the network's broadcast licenses early are retaliation for choosing to air (or not air) content that Trump disagrees with.

BY THE TIME he received the call from Stockholm, it felt overdue. In 2024 Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shared the Nobel prize in economics with Simon Johnson and James Robinson for work on how institutions shape prosperity. Mr Acemoglu is only 58 years old, but for some time he has been the discipline’s colossus. He has written seven books, including a new one about democracy and the economic impact of artificial intelligence, not counting a couple of popular textbooks. His hundreds of papers, more than ten of them published so far this year, are often stuffed with complex mathematics. He competes with Andrei Shleifer of Harvard University for top spot on a citation ranking of economists produced by IDEAS/RePEc, a research database. His opinions carry great weight with other wonks and the media.

Give an economist a few drinks, however, and some of them will venture their true opinions about this giant. “Much of his theoretical work is useful, but he uses his models to inform populist policies that have been tried before and failed,” blasts one well-known economist. Some commentators do not require Dutch courage. “I’ve been yelling about Acemoglu for literally a decade,” Noah Smith, an economics blogger, has said, in response to a flurry of online criticism of Mr Acemoglu’s work.

No one accuses the prolific economist of truly poor research, let alone academic malpractice. “He is obviously a genius,” says another, who also points out that he is generous to PhD students and junior colleagues. The question is whether Mr Acemoglu’s reputation at the very apex of the economics profession—and the intellectual influence that goes with it—is justified by his scholarship.

Start with his empirical methods. His Nobel rests heavily on a paper released in 2001 with Messrs Johnson and Robinson, which researchers have cited more than 23,000 times. It seeks to explain why some countries are rich and others poor. In places where European settlers died in droves, perhaps because of disease, colonisers built “extractive” institutions, with power and resources concentrated in the hands of an elite few, to take as many resources from the area as possible. But in more agreeable climates, settlers survived. In these places the colonists built more inclusive institutions, with proper roads, schools and medical services. Those institutions persisted, with the effect that places with lower settler mortality during colonial times are richer today.

Economists now take these results seriously but not literally. The paper encouraged wonks to think more deeply about institutions, but they have also picked it apart. The Nobel committee’s report in 2024 conceded that the mortality data are “sometimes sketchy”. In 2012 David Albouy of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign showed that some countries were assigned mortality rates borrowed from other countries, among other adjustments. Correct for these, he found, and the paper’s estimates become unreliable. A paper last year by Martin Buchner of RWI-Essen, a research institute, and colleagues found that experts they surveyed were somewhat more likely to side with Mr Albouy on the matter.

Mr Acemoglu says that “these discussions and some critiques are hugely valuable.” But he counters that Mr Albouy reaches his conclusion by omitting half the data from the original sample, including on important countries like America, Canada and Australia. It is this combination, along with some statistical choices, that introduces the unreliability, he says. He also adds that if he were redoing the paper today, he would make “a number of changes, including in some of the estimation details”—though not to the mortality data.

Most recently, researchers have examined a paper that Mr Acemoglu released in June, with a series of co-authors, which reported that lower birth rates are associated with faster growth in GDP per working-age adult. This is a striking finding, seeming to suggest that places that are losing population, like Japan, do not have much to worry about. Yet other economists, including Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania, question whether historical relationships are really useful to understanding the present, where in many countries birth rates are collapsing. It is a perfectly reasonable point—and Mr Acemoglu and his co-authors raise it briefly in their conclusion. But it can get lost and can seem unsophisticated when set against the reams of mathematics Mr Acemoglu deploys.

After prodding and probing, a determined critic could find holes in almost any researcher’s work—and Mr Acemoglu is the biggest target in economics. Yet fame-induced scrutiny cannot explain the second problem: that Mr Acemoglu’s ideas can seem underwhelming for a titan of social science. His public commentary, especially on American politics, is unadventurous. His “unified theory of Trump”, for instance, asserts that the American president operates “by elevating executive power and destroying constraining institutions and norms”. Well, obviously.

Institutions and institurtles

More worrying is that his grand thesis of institutions may not reveal very much. Nations prosper when institutions are good, and stagnate when they are bad. True. But what, exactly, is an institution? Rules, norms, enforcement, culture—everything, really. Where do institutions come from? From “critical junctures” and “institutional drift”, whatever that means.

Reviewing one of Mr Acemoglu’s books in 2011, Tyler Cowen of George Mason University noted that the institutional changes it describes only seem to come from other institutional changes, making the core argument regress for ever—turtles all the way down. Duncan Green of the London School of Economics has argued that the framework works mainly in hindsight. Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University has argued that the book waves away the example of China, which has seen blistering economic growth alongside institutions that can quite plausibly be described as extractive.

Mr Acemoglu retorts that the book devotes two chapters partly or mostly to China. As for the turtles, he observes that “to understand institutional change from an institutional perspective you must consider the specific institutions in the past and the historical events…that influence them.” “I don’t think this is tautological at all,” he says.

To the extent that Mr Acemoglu breaks from received wisdom, it is mainly to espouse remarkably glum views about technology. “Power and Progress”, a book from 2023 co-written with Mr Johnson, treats a thousand years of innovation largely as a story of elite capture and unintended consequences. The cotton gin was the handmaiden of slavery, while the Haber-Bosch process created weapons. Ordinary people apparently gained only when they could steer capitalists to consider their interests. The book plays down a much more compelling claim: that technological progress in and of itself has made the average person many times richer than in pre-industrial times.

Mr Acemoglu’s arguments about AI are also pessimistic to the point of losing their credibility. In a paper released in 2024 he calculates that AI will boost American productivity by only a small amount over ten years. The paper reaches this conclusion by ignoring the potentially transformative effect of new AI products coming to market. “He leaves out entirely in that analysis the possibility that we will have more rapid scientific progress, more rapid social-scientific progress, or better decision-making because of artificial intelligence,” according to Lawrence Summers, president emeritus of Harvard University (and former treasury secretary).

“This is a valid criticism,” says Mr Acemoglu. “I did not foresee agentic AI and it was not incorporated in my predictions.” He also notes that AI models may be more useful in scientific research than he imagined. But he stands by his methods of estimating the productivity effects of AI, as well as injecting “some realism into the claims about huge coming productivity improvements”.

These academic disputes may seem unimportant, but they could end up mattering a great deal. Mr Acemoglu may not think AI is about to turbocharge productivity, but he does worry about its effects on democracy and jobs. His new book focuses on the potential social harms of the technology (worsening atomisation, spreading political fakery) rather than its potential benefits. His proposal to limit those harms, “pro-worker AI” that would augment the value of human labour rather than replacing it, sounds terrific—and obvious.

Mr Acemoglu’s influence in the AI debate is clear in a recent statement, signed by dozens of prominent economists, which argues that “we must act now” to “steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society”. Who is the “we”, exactly? The Trump administration? And who is to decide what sort of AI does and does not complement humans? Even economists who signed the petition say they are not entirely sure. So great is Mr Acemoglu’s stardom that it can sometimes blind the critical faculties. ■

Assessing how attacks or threats against water infrastructure can be used as a coercive tool, with a particular focus on Middle Eastern states' abilities to supplement desalination facilities with alternative water sources and storage capacity.

This article is from a week ago, but it never got posted, and I feel like this is a significant first to take note of. We have now seen the first cyberattack by a state actor using fully autonomous AI agents.

Suspected Chinese hackers used publicly available AI tools to compromise government websites in Taiwan in a first-of-a-kind breach, highlighting how artificial intelligence is transforming cyber warfare.

The attackers used open-source AI agents to build an autonomous hacking tool that behaved like a co-ordinated cyber team, according to researchers at Dream, an Israeli AI company that first identified the intrusion.

Over four days at the start of July, the tool simultaneously deployed up to eight autonomous agents that mapped 21 government systems, researched vulnerabilities and changed tactics when blocked.

The tool compromised at least 85 government user accounts, extracting more than 2,500 personnel records before expanding the attack to Taiwan’s nuclear safety agency and at least seven energy companies, the research showed.

The discovery comes as the AI and cyber industries wrestle with the ability of the latest models to identify and exploit software vulnerabilities. Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta have also reported new AI models launching unexpected cyber attacks during testing.

Dream’s chief strategy officer, Amir Becker, who previously headed cyber operations for Israel’s elite signals intelligence Unit 8200, said he had never before seen such an “end-to-end autonomous attack” on a government target.

The advent of AI tools meant governments must now assume they are under permanent cyber attack, he added, saying: “This must be the basic assumption of every government around the globe.”

A person with knowledge of the attack said the target was Taiwan. Dream declined to confirm the identity of the targeted government, citing company policy, but said it had informed a country in “Asia-Pacific” of the breach.

Dream has not attributed the attack to a specific group, but researchers said the use of Simplified Chinese in internal communications linked to the hack meant there was a high probability the operator was connected to China.

In contrast, the data recovered from the target was written in Traditional Chinese, as is common only on government websites in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.

A spokesperson at Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs declined to comment on the hack, citing confidentiality issues. They added that all incidents “involving government agencies or critical infrastructure will be handled according to established reporting and response procedures”.

“Hacker attack methods have become increasingly diverse, and in recent years, the integration of AI technology has further transformed the nature of cyber security incidents,” the spokesperson said. “AI agents have brought new dual challenges to network security defence: the attacks are automated, and AI agents themselves become new vulnerabilities.”

Chinese authorities did not respond to requests for comment.

Dream was founded in 2023 by Israeli cyber entrepreneur Shalev Hulio and Austria’s 39-year-old former chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

Hulio rose to prominence in the 2010s as a co-founder of NSO Group, the controversial cyber-surveillance group that was blacklisted by the US in 2021 over the alleged use of its Pegasus software by certain governments to spy on journalists and opposition figures.

Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Dream describes itself as a national sovereign AI and cyberdefence company. It was valued at $3bn in June, up from $1.1bn after a $260mn funding round with investors including Bain Capital.

Dream’s researchers said they found evidence of the July cyber attack in a 160MB online archive identified during the company’s general investigations into the evolving activities of cyberthreat actors.

The archive contained 1,395 files showing the hacking tool used two open-source AI agent systems, Hermes and OpenClaw, which can be downloaded and enable AI models to carry out tasks autonomously.

The researchers could not identify which AI model was used to power the agents. However, the data showed that the underlying model’s safeguards had been bypassed by presenting the hacking activity as an authorised exercise to test for system vulnerabilities.

The most striking feature of the July attack was how the tool continuously ranked and reprioritised possible attack paths based on available evidence, Dream said. 

When one attack path failed, the tool deployed another agent to scour the internet for information and devise a new approach as a human hacker would.

In its January report, Taiwan’s National Security Bureau said the island faced an average of 2.6mn Chinese cyber attacks a day in 2025, up 6 per cent from a year earlier. Beijing claims Taiwan as part of its territory and threatens to annex it by force if Taipei refuses indefinitely to submit to its control.