“I worry far more what the judgement on me will be in a 1,000 years time than what the trolls are saying today.” So wrote Cicero, Rome’s most celebrated orator, in 59 BC. Although the comment was made privately to his close friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus, no one would have been surprised to read it. Cicero was notorious among his fellow citizens for the insufferable quality of his conceit. The notion that anyone would remember him a millennium after his death would have been greeted in Rome with widespread hilarity.

Yet in truth Cicero was being modest. Not one but 2,000 years have passed since his death, and still he is being quoted. His posthumous fame is tribute not just to his own achievements, but also to the enduring hold on the popular imagination of the city of which he was a citizen. “Urbs Aeterna,” the poet Ovid called Rome some 50 years after Cicero’s death: “the Eternal City.” The empire ruled by the Romans may long since have declined and fallen; its monuments crumbled into ruin; its language evolved to become Spanish, Italian, and French; but its memory remains a golden one. Indeed, according to a meme that has recently taken social media by storm, millions of men across America are apparently thinking about it every day.

Why? Not, I think, out of any particular devotion to Cicero or Ovid. The reason is likelier to be altogether more visceral. The Roman Empire was the apex predator of antiquity: powerful, terrifying, box-office.

If that makes it sound like a tyrannosaur, then perhaps that is no coincidence. The Romans, much like the dinosaurs, are not merely glamorous—they are also safely extinct. Two thousand years have passed since the heyday of the pax Romana. The age when the capital was at its most teeming and gilded, when the sands of the Colosseum were black with the blood of gladiators, when the rule of Caesar was backed by legions capable of visiting slaughter and ruin on all who opposed them, are long gone. Few people watching Gladiator, no matter how much they might be rooting for Russell Crowe, feel complicit in the enthusiasm of the crowd. The Romans are too distant to be truly unsettling; instead, they have become exotic.

The display of might—especially when backed up by color, clamor, and overpowering architecture—can be stirring, even thrilling. Successful empires have always understood this. It helps to explain why so many capitals in Europe and America are replete with monuments inspired by imperial Rome. Yet the shadow these buildings cast in the 21^st century is not merely a Roman one. We understand, as the designers of the Capitol and the Arc de Triomphe did not, to what extremes swagger and steel can lead. With fascism, a long tradition in Western politics reached a hideous climax and then expired.

But the fascination with power endures. Only the most toxic crank today would confess to finding the displays of Nazism alluring. Yet Julius Caesar—who was reported by one classical biographer to have slaughtered a million people and enslaved another million while conquering the region of Gaul—still has his statue in the centre of Rome, while, just down the road, touts dressed as centurions and gladiators encourage tourists to pose with them outside the Colosseum. The empire of the Caesars—unlike more recent empires—is removed in time enough from us to be protected by a certain statute of limitations.

Read More: Women in Ancient Rome Didn’t Have Equal Rights. They Still Changed History

Of course, this does not explain why modern-day men of America are busy thinking about the Romans rather than, say, the Egyptians, or the Assyrians, or the Vikings. The answer, perhaps, lies in the way that the Romans, more than any other ancient people, seem to offer America a distorted reflection of itself. So they have always done. Just as American conservatives today look back wistfully to the Founding Fathers as patrons of an age of rugged independence and virtue, so did the Founding Fathers look back with an equal wistfulness to the early years of Rome. There, for any infant republic victorious in a war against a great monarchy, was a morality tale to be found that could hardly help but serve as inspiration. The Romans, like the Americans, had originally been ruled by a king; then, resolved no longer to live in servitude, they had dared all in a heroic and ultimately successful campaign to expel him. In 1832, commissioned to mark the centennial of George Washington’s birth with a fittingly imposing statue, the sculptor Horatio Greenough represented him as a properly Roman hero, returning his sword to a grateful people. Simultaneously toga-clad and be-wigged, the first president of the United States was portrayed by Greenough as the heroic, if sartorially challenged, intersection point of twin republics: the Roman and the American.

In the 21^st century, the parallels drawn between ancient Rome and the modern United States tend to be gloomier. Wars in Iraq; the rise in the east of a rival superpower; political vendettas pursued in the law courts; anxieties that venerable constitutional traditions are menaced by populism; the emergence of radicals preaching that the last will be first, and the first will be last, to the excitement of many, and the consternation of others. All these are developments that will be familiar to anyone with even the most glancing familiarity with Roman history.

Gladiator—the most celebrated sword-and-sandals epic of the 21^st century (of which there is a sequel currently in the works)—offered a portrait of a world that seemed, in many ways, as much about the future as the past. Citizens fed on dazzling entertainments; armies striking at an elusive foreign foe; the high-tech delivery of weapons of fire. Here was a mirror being held up to the decades that were to come.

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that so many Americans today should be thinking about the Roman Empire. They are thinking about a civilization that is at once strange and familiar; terrifying and glamorous; safely extinct and the image of themselves.    

September 21, 2023 marks the 200th anniversary of the date that Joseph Smith claimed to have been visited by the Angel Moroni in Palmyra, New York. According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ canonical account, the 21-year-old Smith was in bed when the divine visitor appeared in his room. The prophet-to-be was then instructed to dig up a sacred record inscribed on ancient golden tablets that was located in a nearby hill.

The resulting text, the Book of Mormon, published in 1830, became a cornerstone for a new world religion. Today, the Latter-day Saint church claims over 17 million members across the globe. But while they have achieved a degree of cultural acceptance, especially among American Christians, there remains a suspicion—sometimes subtle, sometimes explicit—that Mormon beliefs are fundamentally irrational, if not heretical.

While there are plenty of doctrinal principles that have drawn scorn, like their since-rescinded belief in polygamy and an anti-Black racial restriction, the story of an ancient scripture record found on buried gold plates has long served as a lynchpin for external skepticism. How could otherwise rational people believe in what appears to be a fundamentally irrational myth? And does such a belief forfeit their place within mainstream culture?

Read More: Why the Mormon Church Finally Let Black Men Into the Priesthood

Yet debates over the boundaries of religious respectability, and whether the Mormons could be accepted therein, reveal as much about America as it does about its most famous homegrown religion.

Charles Dickens once wrote that Joseph Smith’s true audacity was in claiming to have “communion with angels” in an “age of railways.” By that, he meant that the 19th century was supposed to usher in a new enlightened era in which eccentric frauds could no longer dupe the gullible. How is a religion that believes in ancient gold plates, angelic ministrations, and prophetic revelation supposed to function in a rational society?

Smith was raised in a family that believed in a miraculous world. That included buried treasure that could only be acquired through supernatural means. Smith was therefore part of an earnest though unsuccessful circle of treasure diggers who used seer stones to unearth priceless wonders. (It was on one such magic quest that Smith met his wife, Emma Hale.) So when Smith eventually produced a book of scripture—an alleged account of ancient Christians who had inhabited the American continent—his fellow seekers and skeptical neighbors alike connected it to his folkloric practices.

Indeed, few critics felt it necessary to actually examine the Book of Mormon’s text. Its purported origins were scandalous enough. An early dissenter exposed the fact that Smith had used the same seer stone with which he sought treasure to translate the gold plates. In response, Smith refused to detail the exact method through which he produced the Book of Mormon, only insisting it was through “the gift and power of God.” It was an indirect confession that some stories appeared too fanciful.

Of course, some who took the time to read the new scripture were still not impressed. Mark Twain claimed that the real “miracle” of the Book of Mormon’s origins was Smith “keeping awake” while dictating “chloroform in print.”

Read More: The Living Book of Mormon

But for the scores of believers who followed Smith’s teachings, the book represented an open canon of truth and a sign that God still spoke to a modern world. Their most successful proselytizing tract throughout the 19th century, Parley P. Pratt’s Voice of Warning, argued that the Book of Mormon’s appearance was evidence of the end times. Moroni, who had delivered the gold plates to Joseph Smith, was soon identified as the angel prophesied in the New Testament who would preach the gospel “to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people” (Revelation 14:6). The image of the Angel Moroni and his horn therefore became the faith’s unofficial symbol, gold statues of which appeared on the top of their temples.

For the remainder of the 19th century, Mormons were proud of their “peculiar” image. Their founding stories set them apart from a fallen society and corrupt Christendom. Eventually other principles, most notably polygamy, became their doctrinal center. But when the church was forced to renounce their distinctive practices at the end of the 19th century, and encouraged to adopt more mainstream culture in the 20th, Latter-day Saints were forced to consider how their faith would fit in a society they had previously scorned.

After decades of slow, uneasy, but steady cultural assimilation, Mormons appeared on the brink of cultural acceptance by the 1970s. Yet an upswing in evangelical anti-Mormonism threatened such advances. Part of the resurgent animosity was rooted in resurrected fears of “cults” that accompanied backlash to the mass murder-suicide at Jim Jones’s People’s Temple in 1978. A wave of books, pamphlets, and movies dredged up old stereotypes of conniving Mormon leaders and duped LDS followers. Most successful was the film The God Makers, which showed a caricatured version of the gold plates story to millions of viewers across the nation.

Mormons were forced once again to adapt. They accomplished this by framing their faith’s story, including that of the Book of Mormon’s origins, as one of Christian sincerity. They announced a subtitle to the Book of Mormon meant to cement their Christian affiliation: “Another Testament of Jesus Christ.” Leaders even re-formatted the church’s logo so that the words “Jesus Christ” were far larger than the rest.

The most successful form of improved collaboration, of course, was in the political sphere. Starting with their fervent opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, followed by their central role in opposing same-sex marriage in the 1990s and 2000s, Latter-day Saint leaders formed firm alliances with Evangelical groups that otherwise found their truth claims blasphemous.

Mitt Romney’s presidential runs in the 21st century demonstrated both how little and how much things had changed. During his first campaign for the 2008 GOP nomination, he was blindsided by hostility from those on the left and the right. Progressive critics already prone to question religion pounced on the irrationality of stories like the gold plates. “Someone who truly believed in the founding whoppers of Mormonism,” wrote an editor at Slate, exhibited “a basic failure to think for himself or see the world as it is.”

Meanwhile, evangelical opponents, like the supporters of Mike Huckabee, quickly identified the theological chasm between Mormons and “acceptable” Christianity. The outspoken Reverend Bill Keller went so far as to say that a vote for Romney was “a vote for Satan,” as it would validate Mormonism’s blasphemous beliefs. Though declared an early frontrunner, Romney’s candidacy fizzled well before the GOP convention.

Yet much changed in the succeeding four years. Once exposed to national attention, the vehement anti-Mormon sentiment seemed neutered, or at least drowned out by a cultural fascination with the faith. Dubbed the “Mormon Moment,” 2012 featured a wave of media obsession with the faith in the form of Broadway musicals, television hits, and a successful LDS public relations campaign titled “I’m a Mormon” that highlighted the faithful’s cultural commonalities. Either out of growing tolerance or forced necessity, Republican voters this time embraced Romney’s message. Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress explained that while Mormonism was still obviously a “cult,” he clarified that it was a “theological” cult, not a “sociological” one—a distinction that reflected the Religious Right’s emphasis on political over doctrinal fidelity.

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The supernatural elements of the Latter-day Saint faith’s founding stories no longer appeared so exotic. Stephen Colbert’s satirical Comedy Central character skewered Christians who dared to claim Mormonism illogical. Mormon beliefs that “Joseph Smith received golden plates from an angel on a hill” were “weird,” he protested, only because “everyone knows that Moses got stone tablets from a burning bush on a mountain.” The message was clear: Mormon supernatural claims were no more outlandish than traditional Christianity’s.

Indeed, the Latter-day Saint church has continued to be repackaged to appear less intrusive to mainstream Christians. Its most recent prophet, Russel M. Nelson, encouraged the media to no longer use the “Mormon” nickname, claiming it distracted from their Christian message. He also ceased their century-long production of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, where thousands of saints gathered each summer to witness a dramatic reproduction of Joseph Smith receiving the gold plates on the same New York hillside where he claimed to find them. And while the church has rapidly increased its construction of temples, most of the new sacred buildings no longer feature the Angel Moroni.

This is not to say the church is forfeiting core doctrines. Far from it. Latter-day Saint belief in the Book of Mormon’s historicity, Joseph Smith’s divine calling, and prophetic revelation are as firm as ever before. But after two centuries of heated battles with Christian contemporaries, Smith’s successors have learned how to frame these fundamentals in less threatening ways. The Book of Mormon is no longer posited as a correction to an apostate world, but a supplement to the Christian canon; his followers are not separated from Babylon, but fellow travelers in a world of pilgrims.

Two hundred years later, Joseph Smith’s Moroni story is as salient as ever, even if its tone and significance have evolved.

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Canada’s summer of 2023 was not just hot; it was ablaze. Fires decimated an area the size of New York state. Tens of thousands of Canadians were forced from their homes. A territorial capital was evacuated. Heavy, acrid smoke sent air quality plummeting in both the U.S. and Europe. Our national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, aptly dubbed it “Canada’s summer of fire and smoke.” 

Despite the fact that 90% of global GDP is covered by net zero targets, and there is real progress in scaling clean energy globally, the U.N.’s most recent progress assessment is unequivocal: The world is not on track. We need to phase out fossil fuels now and rapidly decarbonize all sectors of the economy or face catastrophic warming exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius. Make no mistake: in Canada and far too many other countries, this summer was only a taste of what will follow if we breach this limit.

Read more: U.N. Climate Warning Also Comes With Clear Steps To Cut Emissions

This is why the can’t-do attitude of too many business leaders and politicians has to stop. In some circles, it’s become acceptable to give up on the 1.5°C target as too hard. This is pitiful—especially when we have the solutions. The world can’t afford more foot-dragging and excuses. Instead, we need to win the race to net zero and stop talking ourselves out of even stepping onto the track.

As a former competitive swimmer, I learned that the path to victory involves setting an ambitious goal, putting in the work every day, measuring progress, and always sprinting for the finish. Yes, we need a 2050 net zero goal. But like an athlete training for the Olympics a decade out, we also need the accountability that comes from near-term targets. For the world, this means peaking global emissions by 2025, and halving them by 2030.

Yet, just when we need them to be champions, too many business leaders and politicians sound like also-rans. Rather than act like winners, they act like losers in the most critical contest humanity has ever faced. 

As the chair of the United Nations’ High-Level Expert Group on Net Zero, we have provided a clear path leaders need to follow.

Our report doesn’t mince words. Integrity matters. Companies, financial institutions, cities and regions must have ambitious, science-based transition plans that drive emissions down across their value chain. They must shift investments from fossil fuels to clean energy now. They can’t defer real emissions reductions by simply buying carbon credits. They must lobby for, not against, climate action. And they must report publicly and transparently on their progress.

As United Nations Secretary General António Guterres declared in advance of his Climate Ambition Summit on September 20th: “Surging temperatures demand a surge in action.” 

Let’s be clear: this isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s also smart business. The transition to a clean future is a trillion dollar opportunity. Leading businesses are acting because they see the potential — to manage risk, but also to innovate and attract investment, customers, and employees. These frontrunners are the true winners.

But others want to run backwards. Despite earning massive profits that could flow to clean energy, fossil fuel companies—from BP, to Shell, to Suncor—are walking back their dubious net zero pledges and doubling down on new oil and gas development. Shell CEO Wael Sawan goes as far as to call cuts to oil and gas production “dangerous.” This is what losing looks like.

We don’t need businesses that are fueling the climate catastrophe, lobbying against climate action, engaging in empty pledges or shamelessly greenwashing. Instead we must create an “ambition loop,” where positive actions by leaders inspire others to raise their game.

Read more: As Climate and Trade Become Intertwined, a Bipartisan Push for Carbon Tariffs Is Emerging

The finish line in our sprint to net zero is not just a distant, abstract goal. It’s a world with cleaner air and a sustainable and equitable economy that lifts up everyone. Winning this race isn’t just about dodging catastrophe; it’s about shaping a better, fairer future. This is a race we all need to run as if lives depend on it—because they do.

Just as Olympic champions don’t wake up two weeks before the Games expecting to make the podium, we can’t procrastinate until 2050 watching more people, communities and infrastructure fall to flood, fire or drought. We need leaders with the grit, ingenuity, and relentless drive of elite athletes. The starting gun was fired long ago; we’re in the race of a lifetime. No more delays, no more excuses. Time to greatly pick up the pace and win this for everyone.

Whether it’s managing an increasingly tense relationship with China or trying to sustain Western military support for Ukraine, the U.S. has its hands full. The Biden Administration, however, has nonetheless chosen to devote a significant amount of diplomatic capital trying to advance a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, two of its longstanding partners in the Middle East.

There’s no question the Biden Administration views such a deal as a seismic win in a part of the world often associated with conflict and diplomatic logjams. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the prospects of such an accord “a transformative event.” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan commented this month that while the negotiations weren’t close to being finalized, the sides have settled on a “broad understanding of many of the key elements.” President Biden will no doubt speak about the diplomacy with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.

The question, however, isn’t whether an Israel-Saudi normalization agreement would be a good thing for the U.S.—it’s how high a price Washington is willing to pay to get the deal across the finish line. It’s imperative for the White House to ensure that its desire for a major diplomatic accomplishment doesn’t blind itself to the risks of giving away too much.

Read More: The Limits of the U.S.-Saudi Relationship

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) recognizes that normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia is a key U.S. foreign policy priority in the Middle East. Even so, it’s deeply unpopular in Saudi Arabia and the broader Arab world absent concessions from Israel such as reaffirming Muslim rights at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute or, at the very least, greater Palestinian Authority control in the occupied West Bank. MBS has no intention of signing onto the dotted line for free given the likely blowback and the fact that his father, King Salman, is very much invested in supporting the Palestinians’ cause for an independent state.

For these reasons, MBS is using the prospect of a normalization accord in order to extract a series of U.S. concessions for Riyadh. At the top of the list is a U.S. security guarantee for the kingdom, which would reportedly compel the U.S. to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense in the event of an external attack like the one that occurred in September 2019, when a volley of cruise missiles hit two major Saudi oil facilities. (Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis claimed responsibility for the attack. However, U.S. and Saudi officials have pointed the finger at Iran, with Reuters reporting in November of that year that Iran’s leadership approved the operation, according to several Iranian officials the outlet spoke to. Tehran has strongly denied any involvement.)

If this is indeed on offer, the U.S. should have the common sense to walk out of the room right now before it’s too late. A U.S. security guarantee to Saudi Arabia should be avoided at all costs because the downsides are so numerous.

First, there would be nothing mutual about a so-called mutual defense clause with the Saudis. The kingdom has not shown itself to be a strong partner during past U.S. requests for assistance. When the Islamic State was at its peak in 2014 and 2015, controlling vast stretches of territory in Syria and Iraq, the Saudis were relative bystanders in the counter-IS coalition. Whereas the United Arab Emirates and Jordan contributed combat aircraft to the mission and conducted airstrikes against the group, the Saudi contribution largely centered on allowing the U.S. to use its territory to train anti-IS fighters.

Second, granting the kingdom a security guarantee would in effect turn U.S. soldiers, sailors, fighter pilots, and marines into security guards for the Saudi royal family running the kingdom. While this would no doubt serve the interests of the Saudis, who have proven to be incompetent warfighters in Yemen despite tens of billions of dollars in U.S. defense sales, it wouldn’t be in the best interest of the U.S., which should be downsizing its presence in the region in order to better resource its shift toward Asia. It should be noted that, ceasefire talks with the Houthis notwithstanding, the Saudi military is still very much engaged in an eight-year war in Yemen. Would a resumption of Houthi missile attacks into the kingdom compel U.S. forces to get involved in Yemen militarily? Right now, this is a hypothetical question. But it becomes a matter of urgency for U.S. policymakers if Washington and Riyadh have an active defense agreement or, more significantly, a defense alliance. 

Lastly, MBS has made major missteps in recent years, exposing him as an unreliable partner with poor judgment. By the U.S. intelligence community’s own assessment, he approved the killing of former Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which hurt the kingdom’s reputation in the West and for a time degraded its image on Capitol Hill. His government also allegedly kidnapped former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and forced him to resign on television because he was insufficiently hawkish on Hezbollah (although Hariri later withdrew his resignation after he returned to Lebanon). And, in cooperation with the United Arab Emirates, MBS helped orchestrate a land and sea blockade against Qatar in an attempt to coerce Doha into altering its foreign policy to Riyadh’s liking. That policy failed to elicit the policy reforms the Saudis demanded, even as it divided the Gulf Cooperation Council and pushed Qatar closer to Iran.

MBS has been a more pliable figure lately stressing conciliation rather than confrontation. The Saudis have since mended ties with Qatar and have normalized relations with Iran, not to mention its ongoing ceasefire talks with the Houthis. But nobody can say with confidence that this transformation is permanent, and there is a risk that a U.S. security guarantee could push MBS to revert to his previous ways. 

The bottom line is that the Biden Administration needs to be extremely cautious as it tries to play peacemaker between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Otherwise it could find itself fleeced in the process.

Against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, combating authoritarian aggression has taken center stage in Washington’s foreign policy agenda. But given the West’s inaction in the face of yet another Azerbaijani assault on Nagorno-Karabakh this week—which resulted in the death of at least 32 people and the forced displacement of several thousand more—it is clear that not all crises are made equal.

During U.S. President Joe Biden’s remarks on Tuesday before the United Nations General Assembly, he asked “if we abandon the core principles of the United States to appease an aggressor, can any member state of this body feel confident that they will be protected?” Yet just hours prior, Azerbaijan launched an unprovoked assault on Nagorno-Karabakh following nine months of blockading the region’s 120,000 indigenous Armenians. The blockade was already causing critical shortages of food, medicine, fuel, and other basic necessities—forcing Karabakh’s Armenians into a position of dependence and subservience. Under these conditions, many Armenians will see no option but to leave their homes. But if Azerbaijan’s record of detaining civilians at its military checkpoint tells us anything, it’s that the ability for Armenians to flee persecution isn’t guaranteed.

A ceasefire announced on Wednesday appears to have largely brought the latest assault to a halt. Yet the latest fighting is a crisis the U.S. had every opportunity to prevent but spent months ignoring—prioritizing the preservation of energy ties with authoritarian Azerbaijan over the imminent threat to Armenian lives. The U.S. did not simply turn a blind eye to Azerbaijan’s longstanding attempts to impose its will on the Armenian people through starvation and force—it repeatedly emboldened and legitimized Azerbaijan’s coercive diplomacy by refusing to hold Azerbaijan accountable for its blockade. In standing by as Armenia was forced to engage in peace talks with a gun to its head, the U.S. appeared content with waiting until the Armenians of Karabakh were desperate enough to submit to Azerbaijan’s terms.

But the U.S. can learn from its past mistakes and make clear to Azerbaijan that its acts of aggression will not be rewarded. With negotiations between Azerbaijan and Karabakh’s Armenians on the horizon, the fate and status of the region’s Armenian population remains uncertain. What is certain, however, is that Azerbaijan cannot be trusted with their security.

Prior to Azerbaijan’s assault on Nagorno-Karabakh, international legal experts including former International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo and former U.N. Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide Juan Méndez warned last month that Azerbaijan’s actions constituted a violation of the United Nations Genocide Convention. Those concerns remain no less pertinent today—and the risks of ethnic further tragedy remain extremely high should the international community fail to take action and hold Azerbaijan to account.

During a recent U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia Yuri Kim vowed that “the United States will not countenance any action or effort—short-term or long-term—to ethnically cleanse or commit other atrocities against the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh.” 

Read More: Column: Don’t Just Remember the Armenian Genocide. Prevent It From Happening Again

Despite this, the U.S. failed to match those words with any meaningful action, a move that could create a credibility crisis that would embolden other would-be aggressors. To rectify this, the U.S. should suspend military assistance to Baku via the enforcement of statutory restrictions outlined in Section 907 of the FREEDOM Support Act, which was enacted in the early 1990s in response to Azerbaijan’s first war on Nagorno-Karabakh and humanitarian blockade against Armenian civilians. Indeed, this is what the chairs of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, Bob Menendez and Jack Reed, urged in a recent letter to Secretary Blinken.

For decades, successive U.S. administrations have emboldened Azerbaijan through waiving Section 907 restrictions on national security grounds. The State Department claims it is reviewing assistance to Azerbaijan but refuses to publicly enforce restrictions out of fear this would undermine peace talks with Armenia and push Baku into Moscow’s arms. But if withholding the enforcement of these restrictions was meant to compel behavioral change in Baku, then clearly this strategy has failed.

The U.S. must also directly target Azerbaijani officials complicit in the perpetration of human rights abuses with sanctions, including under the Global Magnitsky Act. The Biden Administration can use Thursday’s upcoming emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council convened by France to pursue robust guarantees for Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians. This must include an international peacekeeping force on the ground and a humanitarian mission that ensures Armenians are not left at the mercy of Azerbaijan. 

How the U.S. responds in the aftermath of Azerbaijan’s latest unprovoked assault on Nagorno-Karabakh will be a test of its commitment to not only combating authoritarian expansionism—but also in the duty to prevent further atrocities. A failure to change course would not only threaten the survival of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians, but send a dangerous signal to despots the world over.

It’s September 2023, and markets have become battlefields, as economics and geopolitics become ever more closely intertwined. Many think that we are returning to the Cold War, but we’re not. Back then, the military had the materiel and commanded the view of war. Now, after thirty years of globalization, it’s very often business that commands the resources, fundamentally changing the balance of power. Whether the U.S. fulfills its national security ambitions doesn’t just depend on its armed forces, but its relationship with firms. The recent revelation that Elon Musk used his control of the Starlink satellite system to unilaterally decide the limits on a Ukrainian offensive is just one example of how business can, quite literally, call the shots.

How did this happen? At the height of globalization, the U.S. government and its allies handed over control of key communications networks to business, never thinking that these networks would become crucial strategic assets in shooting wars. The Internet—which came into being as a side-product of Pentagon spending—was turned over to a non-profit corporation dominated by private interests. Allies’ national telecommunications champions were privatized and U.S. giants, like Lucent, sold to foreign firms for spare parts. The submarine fibre cables that tied the world together were mostly laid by consortiums of for-profit companies. As new communications technologies such as cloud computing emerged, they were dominated by a few firms like Amazon and Microsoft.

This all meant that innovation happened faster than would have been conceivable during the Cold War. Government fell far behind the leading edge of many key technologies, leaving critical communications infrastructures under the control of the private sector.

That didn’t present national security concerns so long as the world was at peace. But now that geopolitics is back, the U.S. government faces a basic dilemma. How does it ensure national security in a world where the private sector holds many of the levers of power? Of course, it can turn to business for support. And where it can demand that support, the U.S. can sometimes do far more than it ever could during the Cold War (using telecommunications companies’ international reach, for example, to help it surveil the world). But sometimes, business may prefer to stay politically neutral, prioritizing profits for its shareholders, or, even worse, cosy up to geopolitical adversaries such as China or Russia.

The U.S. government’s first instinct in recent decades has been to create public-private partnerships to expand its power—and some private sector actors have certainly been willing to cooperate. The Starlink story is not the only story about business in the Ukraine conflict. In our new book we explain how the U.S. and the Ukrainian government have benefited from Microsoft’s willingness to abdicate neutrality. After years of trying to build a “digital Switzerland,” in which platform companies would be held inviolate from spying and conflict, Microsoft volunteered for the digital frontlines of the Ukraine war. From the beginning, it willingly surveilled the online battlefield, detecting and countering Russian cyber-weapons, and sharing key information with the U.S. and its European allies. It airlifted Ukrainian government ministries into the cloud, providing them with a degree of security that the government itself was incapable of doing.

Read More: Inside Elon Musk’s Struggle for the Future of AI

It wasn’t only Microsoft that helped out. As a new report by Ulrike Franke and Jenny Söderström explains, Amazon has been ferrying Ukrainian data to safety using customized suitcase-sized “Snowball” systems, providing safe storage for critical state information. Google has proudly announced that it is fighting disinformation, and blocking Russian state-funded news channels.

But not all business gives this kind of unequivocal support. As we recently found out, while Microsoft was countering cyber-attacks, the Ukrainian army found itself increasingly dependent on the whims of Elon Musk. Ukrainian commanders rely on Musk’s Starlink satellites to communicate on the battlefield and to guide automated drones to their target. Musk partly owes his near monopoly of low orbit satellite communications to government inaction in the U.S. and elsewhere. The result is an unprecedented level of privatized geopolitical power, concentrated in the hands of a single, politically erratic tycoon with a reported penchant for ketamine. Ukrainian soldiers reportedly found themselves cut off and blind when they ventured into territory that Starlink had ‘geofenced’. In another incident, Musk refused to provide access to Starlink when the Ukrainian military attempted a drone attack on Russia’s naval fleet, leaving the drones to wash up on shore, inoperable. The company had its own commercial worries. As Musk told his biographer, he did not build the system for war but so that “people can watch Netflix and chill.” Musk—who reportedly has had friendly conversations with Putin after the invasion—is at best a highly unreliable ally. But the U.S. has little option but to placate him and try to keep him onside, if Ukrainian commanders are to be able to talk to each other and their troops.

There are other problems when governments depend on the goodwill of tech founders. Some of the companies that are signing up for service in the Ukraine war have dubious records on citizen privacy. Palantir, which specializes in surveillance and data analysis, was co-founded by the billionaire Peter Thiel. Its CEO, Alex Karp, claims that it is responsible for “most” of Ukraine’s targeting. The embattled Clearview—whose privacy-intrusive facial recognition engine is powered by billions of images scraped without permission from the Web—says it is helping Ukraine identify Russian assailants. Both companies are likely embracing their wartime role to repair their battered domestic public images, and rehabilitate controversial technologies.

President Eisenhower famously warned of the dangers of a “military-industrial complex” in his closing address to the nation. While he feared that business might gain “unwarranted influence” thanks to the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry,” his greatest concern was that the military would overwhelm industry, subordinating innovation and entrepreneurialism to a government controlled by a technological elite. During the Cold War, the U.S. and other governments were far better organized and resourced than private industry, and had the legal power under the original 1950 Defense Production Act to command private resources for compelling national interests.

What we risk today is more or less the opposite, as government comes to rely more on business leaders than business leaders on government. Firms have pushed innovation further and faster than Eisenhower or his defense department leaders could have imagined. So now, senior officials are often obliged to kiss the rings of billionaires with questionable goals, and rely on the kindness of multinational corporations. When business cooperates, they can get access to capacities that the government doesn’t have. But things can go badly wrong when business won’t play ball. As the confrontation between the U.S. and China heats up, adding new pressures on top of the Ukraine-Russia war, the government is going to have to consider how best to manage this new set of relations.

Returning to Cold War controls would be a terrible idea. But allowing volatile individuals like Musk to dictate the course of war and peace is even worse. We need to reimagine how the U.S. government manages this new military industrial complex, avoiding past mistakes of selling critical infrastructure to the highest bidder. When business leaders hold monopolies on key resources, they should face a higher level of regulatory obligations vis-à-vis national security interests. But in contrast to current arrangements, under which government quietly negotiates clandestine access with telecommunications companies, these obligations ought be discussed and policed openly. That means antitrust and proper regulation of global information platforms that could otherwise hold government to ransom.

The technological dominance of U.S. companies has provided the U.S. with extraordinary power. But putting them in charge of national security is a very risky bet indeed.

We are in the midst of a new psychedelic renaissance. Drugs like MDMA and psilocybin are being ushered into mainstream medicine, promoted as miracle cures for a host of psychiatric woes. But as psychedelics come to be seen as treatments for various types of psychological suffering, we are overlooking one of their most precious offerings: the potential for play.

“Neuroplasticity” is the word many mental health professionals are now using to describe the positive effect of psychedelics; a process in which the brain sort of loosens up, becoming flexible and open to learning (Children’s brains, for instance, are highly plastic.) Plasticity is why researchers believe psychedelics show promise in helping individuals who are suffering from psychological complaints related to obsessiveness, ruminations, and habits—what professionals diagnose as “depression,” “anxiety,” and “addiction.” And it’s one reason psychedelics help people in general, moving them from a sense of repetitiveness in their lives to a more expansive, awakened encounter with the world.

Neuroplasticity primarily focuses on cognition, emphasizing the role of thinking. But that’s where the idea of a more flexible brain misses the most interesting and most human element in psychedelics: Experience, not just thinking, has always been the central way psychonauts talk about the effects of these medicines, especially in regard to mystical experiences: When we “open the doors of perception,” we’re not just thinking differently, we’re experiencing differently; encountering the world in a new or altered way through our thoughts, yes, but just as importantly, through our feelings, perceptions, intuition and gut instincts.

Read More: Psychedelics May Be Part of U.S. Medicine Sooner Than You Think

In our increasingly data-driven society, where the measurable and visible aspects of life often receive higher validation and credibility, the significance of subjective experience—the sentient (experiencing) “you” that interacts with the world—is diminishing. That’s a problem, since you really can’t describe a soul or a self without starting with the idea that they are, at base, sites of experience. Things get soulless fast when we define people as merely thinkers.

In this sense, it is no coincidence that prominent researchers are studying the transformative effects of psychedelics consider mystical experiences as the core therapeutic component of these substances. Neuroplasticity fails to encapsulate this crucial aspect in any shape or form. On the other hand, play, its more profound, engaging, and spiritual cousin, does.

Play has been given too “fun” a rap in our culture. For children and adults alike, play can obviously involve fun and amusement. But play is so much more than that, and is very serious business.

To understand what I mean by play, imagine a lump of clay in your hand. It exists independently of you. Yet here you are, able to mold it. That’s the first thing to understand about play: It’s the act of taking something into your hands or mind and experiencing it as pliable.

Play is most awesome and even magical in its ability to make us see possibility and malleability in things that, unlike wet clay, appear completely inert. Think about a child playing with their toys. These toys are manufactured by others, and thus exist in an external world to the child, and they can be as solid as a wood block. Yet the child playing with them experiences their toys as if they are as compliant, as ready for possibility, as wet mud in their hands. When we adults play with ideas, we’re doing something very similar, looking at all angles of some theory or concept that may seem like settled law. That’s what places this mindset at the center of psychological change, which depends on our ability to take a more flexible and innovative approach to old narratives about ourselves, and to see possibility in revisions to those stories that often motivate us to alter our lives and change our relationship to our suffering.

In many ways, proponents of psychedelic-induced plasticity seek precisely this quality—a departure from habitual thoughts and behaviors through a more flexible worldview. However, they fall short by limiting their focus to thinking.

Back to the clay: you shape it, forming something entirely unique. Whatever you make from it, this clay will become a creation: something from you that exists independently of you.

That’s the next thing to understand about play: Through it, the invisible landscapes of our inner lives merge with the visible world we all perceive in our own unique ways. When we play, we always play with someone or something: it’s always a relationship, an encounter between the “me” of our original, creative impulses and a “not-me” of a world that goes on without us, as the great psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott called it in his seminal 1971 book Playing and Reality. Play thus acts as an antidote to the isolation and disconnection inherent in psychological suffering—it is inherently collaborative and connective.

Read More: What MDMA Taught Me About Human Connection

Think, for a moment, about listening to your favorite song. While you may have had nothing to do with the creation of this cherished gift from the land that is not-you, what you gain from listening to it is tremendously dependent on your own unique being: You chose the song, the song means something to you, it reflects your particular taste in music and it might be your favorite because it resonates so powerfully with your own memories and experiences. In fact, it’s nothing to you without your “me.”  It’s also nothing if it were never written or played by the “not-me” of musicians. The whole event is a collaboration between the ineffable space of your unique soul and a world made by others; and the end result is a one-of-a-kind encounter.    

Winnicott called the in-betweenness generated in play transitional meaning a sort of experiential space and a particular state of mind you enter when you play, created between (a subjective) you and the (objective) world. Not unlike a psychedelic trip in this way, with its sense of interconnectedness, a loss of a solid ego state, and a deep feeling of being related to everything. “The sensation that the partition between ‘here’ and ‘there’ has become very thin is constantly with me,” wrote Bill W., the founder of AA, about his psychedelic journey, capturing well the “here” of “me,” and the “there” of “not me,” and a thinning of the barrier between the two.

When you’re in this transitional space, you experience what Winnicott called “going-on-being”: a sense of life coursing through you, your soul stirring, and a self emerging alive here on earth. “It is in playing and only in playing,” wrote Winnicott. “that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.” So here’s another important aspect of play: it conjures you to life.

Play also evokes our perception of life within other living beings. As you mold the clay, you perceive it as imbued with vitality. If that sounds a little far out, recall the child playing with her toys: an intrinsic element of her play is her summoning of life to those toys, seeing them as animated.

This, too, is a central element of the psychedelic experience—the recognition that the world around us is alive, vivid, animated, its vitality extending beyond our individual existence. Remarkable, when you think about it—how play performs two really important tasks that are both central elements of religion (especially early religions) and central themes in psychedelic experiences: stirring souls to a feeling of greater aliveness and animating the world around us.

None of us always vibrantly experiences the relationship between the outer world and our inner life. We sometimes feel lonely, isolated, dislocated and empty inside. These feelings (and lack of feelings) come up when we’ve not been able to enter into a playful mindset.  Play is always about being in relationship, since play is always an act of playing with something else, whether that be other people and beings, toys, ideas, imagination, words, tools, instruments.

Through play, we also encounter the vitality within the space between ourselves and the external world. While the idea that this middle space has a life of its own seems a little mystical, I’ll bet you know the experience of an “us” that has its own spirit and character. Think of a great night out with friends. Do you think back on one friend making that night great, or do you think about the group, and a sort of unique spirit to that group?  If you chose the latter, that is what I’m writing about: a sense of an unseen party to your party, the unique space you formed by relating.

Because we live in ecologies, life is something that flows between us. Play gives us access to this living middle element since it’s an inherently collaborative and relational activity.  As do psychedelic experiences, by the way.

Psychedelics are not magic bullets, but they do hold great magic. In the religious realm, they are the substances people have been taking for centuries as a way to reach the divine, and the encounters people experience today with deities can’t be swept under the rug as mere drug-induced states. Psychedelics also offer access to deep secular magic: a conjuring of life in one’s being and in others, an alertness to the strange and beautiful novelty of the world around us, an experiencing of one’s connection to this world, and the ability to take what seems solid within us and mold it like clay.

In other words, to do the thing we are already equipped to do, since it is the most human thing to do: play. 

The vast majority of Americans agree on the principle of equal justice under the law. Yet, every day, in courthouses across the United States, the type of justice you get depends on how much money you have. On Sept. 18, 2023, Illinois took a historic step in the right direction as the Pretrial Fairness Act went into effect and the state became the first in the country to eliminate cash bail.

The Pretrial Fairness Act, a hard-won effort of impacted leaders, grassroots groups, and state-based advocacy organizations, including the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice and the Coalition to End Money Bond, marks a historic milestone in strengthening due process and is an example for other states to follow.

On any given day in the U.S., about half a million people are held in jail not because they have been convicted of a crime, but merely to await court dates. These are legally innocent people, yet to face trial. The reason for their incarceration is as plain as it is unconstitutional: The cost of their freedom is unaffordable. The cash bail system, in putting a price tag on freedom, creates a two-tiered system of justice wherein those with enough resources are able to be released, while those without enough money in their pocket have no choice but to languish behind bars while their cases are pending. It is one of the biggest drivers of racial disparities in the criminal justice system and rapid growth in the jail population over the past three decades.

Read More: Americans Aren’t Supposed to Be Jailed Before Trial Just Because They Can’t Make Bail. But It Happens All the Time

Under the Pretrial Fairness Act, cash is eliminated as a condition of pretrial release. While everyone accused of a crime is presumed eligible for release, judges maintain discretion to detain those accused of certain crimes, such as “forcible felonies” including first-degree murder and robbery, if deemed necessary. The Act brings comprehensive change to the pretrial system, for instance, by also regulating the use of pretrial algorithms in pretrial detention decisions and putting in place basic safeguards to limit the use of electronic monitoring.

In passing the Pretrial Fairness Act, Illinois is making a valiant effort to restore the presumption of innocence to the roughly 175,00 people that are incarcerated pretrial every year in the state. They are also joining a national movement to improve the criminal justice system by getting money out of it. From New Jersey to Santa Clara County, with many stops in between, jurisdictions are collectively reconsidering the role that cash bail plays in how judges decide who to free and who to detain at the pretrial stage—and are inching closer to a more fair and equal system.

Despite strong evidence that bail reform does not undermine public safety, false narratives and misinformation surround the debate on cash bail. Many people wrongly assume that bail is meant to be a punishment, rather than an incentive to return to court. In addition, critics argue that bail reform threatens public safety and contributes to violent crime; and this becomes a simplistic talking point, readily adopted by some politicians and media outlets. The pushback against the Pretrial Fairness Act began even before it went into effect, with prosecutors in the state launching a defensive campaign. We expect more of the same response to come with the implementation of the legislation.

Study after study shows, though, that cash bail reform does not lead to high crime rates, nor undermine public safety. In fact, the story in jurisdictions that have implemented bail reform reveals the contrary. While we can’t attribute causation, in New Jersey, which significantly reduced its reliance on cash bail in 2017, crime rates have plunged. The percentage of people that were arrested for new crimes while released pretrial remained essentially the same as before the reform was introduced. And, in the state, court appearance rates improved to 97%.

At The Bail Project, we’ve provided free bail assistance for nearly 30,000 low-income people. But we don’t stop there: through our model of Community Release with Support, we provide supportive services such as text notifications and court transportation. Our clients return to over 90% of their court dates. This evidence puts a nail in the coffin for the argument that having money on the line is what determines whether someone will return to court. In Chicago, as the Pretrial Fairness Act goes into effect, we’re working in partnership with the Lawndale Christian Legal Center to scale this model.

Evidence continues to mount, pointing to the benefits of cash bail reform in strengthening due process, improving racial equity, and pushing us to focus on creating better social policies to address the root causes of crime, particularly those that intersect with matters of mental health, substance use, and homelessness. Other jurisdictions are taking note and pushing for similar change. Legislators in Michigan, for instance, are considering scaling back their use of cash bail. For now, though, all eyes are on Illinois.

It was my first session with my new therapist, and I was intimidated. She looked like a modern-day Grace Kelly, but with long auburn tresses instead of a structured blonde bob. Her name was Catherine (a pseudonym to protect her privacy), and her office was a high-ceilinged, prewar office in a classic Upper West Side brownstone, with an Eames lounge chair in one corner and a plush chenille armchair in another.

“So what brings you here today?” she asked kindly, legal notepad poised on her crossed legs.

 I told her that I had just gotten married, and we wanted to have a baby. And I was terrified.

“Why is that?”

I rattled off a list of fears. “What if I’m so sick from morning sickness I have to end the pregnancy? What if I go through my entire pregnancy and the baby is stillborn? What if have a child who turns into a psycho like that Virginia Tech shooter kid?”

“But what makes your mind go to all the worst-case scenarios? Out of all the possibilities?”

“There’s just—so much that can go wrong, isn’t there?” I said, jiggling my leg.

She paused. “But most of the time it doesn’t result in a nightmare. Most of the time it results in a child whom you love.”

Her response sounded so sane that I started weeping.

My anxiety around motherhood began early; as far as I could remember, I had been terrified of childbirth. And, like many women, pressured by society’s thin beauty ideal, I was also fearful of pregnancy itself, of the loss of control it entailed over my body. Though I had friends who craved the experience of expecting, I was the total opposite, harboring body dysmorphic fears about the bulging, distended pregnant belly, the dark phenomenon of the linea nigra, and the cruelly overstretched skin—all to be followed by the trauma of labor. (According to an April 2022 study published in Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, tokophobia—the fear of pregnancy—has been on the rise since the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among women of color.)

Read More: Allyson Felix on How Motherhood Made Her an Activist

But for me, the fear of motherhood was also inextricably tied to race. Having grown up a child of Chinese immigrant parents on the East Coast, I had always been surrounded by whiteness. I rarely saw myself reflected among my peers or at my LDS church or in the media. As Korean-American actor Greta Lee once said, that absence of representation on screen or in anything you are consuming sends a subliminal message over time that somehow you are defective. And that feeling of defectiveness was amplified everywhere in my own life, thanks to the hegemonic reach of white supremacy: from my mother who would lament how small and narrow our eyes were and how flat our faces; from a white ex-boyfriend who would poke fun at how small my breasts were by asking what my future babies would eat; by another who would patronize me by saying that C-sections were invented for delicate, willowy women like me, who were always suffering from some minor ailment or another.

So it made sense that the perfect storm of shame, defectiveness, and poor body image would converge around a rite of passage as momentous as becoming a mother—the ultimate test of womanhood. I had spent my life assimilating, performing a kind of whiteface; having a child would certainly unmask my racial shame. What kind of child would my infantilized body even make—would she have all ten fingers, some other birth defect? Would the jagged peninsula-like birthmark running down my right cheek also mark her? Would I even be able to conceive?

Perhaps it’s hard to imagine how I could have felt this way. In the last few years, Asian Americans have gained so much ground—Ali Wong courageously put a household face and body to Asian pregnancy and gave it the stamp of her comedic genius; Constance Wu and Henry Golding came off believably as an appealing leading couple on the silver screen in “Crazy Rich Asians,” rather than desexualized and mortifying; and, the fabulously outré “Everything Everywhere All at Once” swept the Academy Awards this past March, winning seven Oscars. But in the early 2010s, when I was on the precipice of a new chapter in my life, there was nothing in the media that reflected me or my experience, and the few Asian American friends I had had yet to become moms themselves.

My weekly sessions with Catherine were grueling emotionally, but also freeing. We established early on that she would not disclose any personal information—whether she was a mom, how old she was, where she was from—so that we could focus on how I responded to her as a foil.  Faced with Catherine’s compassionate gaze, her Spartan dialogue, and her total lack of self-disclosure, I was in unknown territory: I had only ever put my best foot forward in the company of white affluence, trying to compensate intellectually or academically or conversationally for what I couldn’t be physically. But now I was a sobbing, crumpled, terrified mess, stranded in that therapy room with no competition to win, no conversation to commandeer, and in short, no life to compare mine to—only a psychoanalytic mirror repeating back to me in questions my own words.  I had no choice, then, but to sift through the lifelong feelings of shame and inadequacy and see them finally as what they were—not beliefs that arose from a fundamental defect but fictions I’d adopted through insidious cultural conditioning.

Over the course of several months, my fears began to loosen their chokehold on me. I began to catch my worst-case scenario thoughts as they happened, then let them float off—merely thoughts, not truths. I enumerated the many ways in which my body was a fully healthy, capable body, and gradually I weaned myself off my anxiety medication. But perhaps most importantly, when two of my Asian-American friends had babies, I watched them nurse. Seeing their bodies in this important maternal capacity—not fetishized bodies as objects of a sexual perversion, as straight Western porn has rendered the preference for Asian women—was revelatory. It closed at last the wide chasm I perceived between the archetypal white nursing mother’s body and my own.

Soon, my husband and I were trying. And within a month, amazingly, we were pregnant. I bought myself a ring with a tiny gold heart to celebrate. At eight weeks, I saw a tiny pulsing heartbeat on the monitor, then a hazy white figure, curled like a bean sprout. A girl, I was thrilled to learn. By the time I took a Lamaze class in my third trimester, I had been confronting my fears for so long in therapy that I was able to sit unflinching through the obligatory birthing video, while my fellow moms-to-be winced or looked away.

Our daughter arrived a month early, right on the cusp of full-term, but she was fine. I delivered her without complication (and without a C-section). And when I put her to my breast, she effortlessly latched and nursed.

Incredibly, a few hours after she was born, we discovered that she had a heart-shaped mole on her elbow that matched the shape and size exactly of the heart-shaped ring I’d bought. I had marked her it turned out, but with love—both for her and, at last, for myself, coming into my own skin. I don’t expect to single-handedly change the culture around her, but what I can impress upon her now and always is that, not only can fear be confronted and dismantled, but it can also point us toward what we want and deserve.

The night before my first book came out, I lay awake envisioning all the ways it could ruin my life. What if I get sued because I made a mistake? What if I get harassed online? What if I get such bad reviews I never work in journalism again?

I’d spent the past 18 months obsessing over the project, thinking about it on a loop. I often struggled to sleep, ruminating over all the ways it might fall short. I started seeing a therapist for the first time in my life. My career was at its high point, and I had accomplished a dream so big I’d never actually thought it would come true, but my mental health had never been worse.

The fact that I was also living through and writing about the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic certainly didn’t help, but it was the stress of the book that really had me spiraling. By the time it was published in mid-2021, I was mentally and physically exhausted. I longed to do less, to forget about work and productivity and self-promotion and just…be.

As it turns out, I had—and have—plenty of company. Around the time my book came out, so many people were quitting their jobs the media began calling it the “Great Resignation.” Then people started “quiet quitting,” proudly doing the bare minimum at work without actually resigning. Now, lots of people want a “lazy-girl job” that’s low-stress and high-pay. That’s hardly an unprecedented desire, but it now seems to be pervasive. Federal data show that preference for part-time work is rising and, at least according to one 2022 study, the pandemic ushered in a “sharp decline” in the number of hours U.S. adults want to work. The idea of a four-day work week is gaining mainstream credibility, too. Increasingly, it seems, people are rejecting the stress and burnout traditionally baked into U.S. work culture in favor of a slower, more peaceful life.

These trends hit me on a core level. During all those sleepless nights leading up to my book’s publication, I began to reevaluate my relationship with ambition and what I want from my work and life. And the truth I came to is this: mediocrity is a far better fate than misery.

American ambition

Embracing mediocrity goes against everything Americans are taught to believe. Hard work has been valued throughout U.S. history, dating back to the Puritans who built New England on the belief that labor was inextricably linked with salvation. The idea that anyone can succeed with enough hard work forms the backbone of the “American Dream,” a phrase popularized in the 1930s. The concept of the American Dream has evolved over time—until the mid-1900s, the phrase was associated not with material wealth but with furthering the common good—but it has always placed a premium on progress, on striving to be better as both individuals and a people. In more recent decades, the American Dream has become closely aligned with the kind of economic prosperity required to own a big home, a nice car, and the latest iPhone, with cash to spare for a glamorous vacation every summer.

To pursue that prosperity in a deeply capitalist society, anyone not born into immense wealth has to work for it. So it’s perhaps no surprise that U.S. culture lionizes hard work and looks down on leisure, that we’re raised to earn and do and achieve as much as we can, to shoot for the moon and settle for landing among the stars. We are taught, from an early age, that we can be anything we want to be, that with enough elbow grease we can accomplish big things. The subtext being that we should accomplish big things, no matter what it takes to get there.

For a long time, I bought into that mindset. I was the straight-A high school student, the summa cum laude college graduate, the magazine intern happy to give up my personal time to write articles for free if it meant advancing my nascent career. It was only once I achieved the big thing and watched it tank my mental health that I realized what this mindset had cost not just me, but also others who subscribe to it.

As of 2023, more than three-quarters of U.S. adults report feeling stressed at work, almost 60% experience elements of burnout, and almost 20% feel they work in a “toxic” environment, according to the American Psychological Association. We often normalize these problems, turning them into topics for happy-hour venting sessions, but they are not trivial. Countless studies show that chronic stress is bad for the body and mind, and burnout is linked to everything from depression to premature death, research shows. Last year, the U.S. Surgeon General declared improving workplace mental health and well-being “a critical priority for public health.”

Some companies have responded to these warnings with anti-burnout programs and extra vacation time. But the solution, as I see it, requires a broader rejection of the ceaseless pursuit of greatness that often leaves our health and happiness in its wake.

How striving affects well-being

In 1922, a group of more than 1,500 high-ability U.S. children were enrolled in a study through which researchers would track them for years on end. Ninety years later, a pair of researchers used some of the resulting data to assess how ambition had affected the participants over the course of seven decades.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who self-identified (and were described by loved ones) as ambitious achieved more lucrative and prestigious careers. But when it came to life satisfaction and longevity, the researchers didn’t find a strong connection to ambition. In spite of their professional accomplishments and cushy salaries, go-getters were not significantly happier or healthier than less-ambitious people, although they weren’t significantly unhappier either.

Similar conclusions come up often in scientific studies. Researchers have found that countries with shorter average working hours tend to have happier populations; achieving a huge career goal may not bring lasting satisfaction; and traits that frequently accompany ambition, like perfectionism and desire for power, can predispose people to burnout, anxiety, and depression.

Meanwhile, things that reliably boost happiness and well-being—community, time in nature, movement, mindfulness, personal growth, and learning—are often seen as unserious pursuits for which only underachievers have time. Research suggests that, in work-obsessed modern society, busy people are regarded as higher-status than people with lots of leisure time, a reversal from previous eras when only the rich had time to relax. When busyness and productivity are brandished as badges of honor, it is daring to prioritize activities that result only in rest or relaxation or joy.

But these things, so often skipped or squeezed into our 48 hours away from the office each week, are what make life feel manageable and rewarding. “Feeling good within yourself is about way more than ambition and striving forward,” says Emma Bradshaw, who researches the relationship between aspiration and well-being at Australian Catholic University. “Sometimes sitting in place is perfectly healthy.”

Bradshaw’s work is guided by a school of thought called self-determination theory (SDT), which holds people have three key psychological needs: a feeling of choice and control over their actions, connection with others, and a sense of competence and achievement. But the type of achievement matters.

SDT research, including Bradshaw’s, suggests that people who are motivated by internal, or “intrinsic,” goals are more likely to feel fulfilled than people who are striving toward external, or “extrinsic,” markers of success. “Things like building quality relationships with other people, growing and learning new things about the world and about ourselves, contributing positively to the community…tend to be better for you, as opposed to things like wanting lots of money and wanting to be really beautiful and wanting to be popular,” Bradshaw says.

That’s not to say everyone who is successful, wealthy, or popular is unhappy, or even that ambition is inherently bad. Lots of successful people, Bradshaw says, tap into intrinsic motivation in their work, pursuing new projects because they genuinely enjoy the process or have a higher motivation for doing so. The problem is that we often chase promotions and raises and awards by default, even if those things are unlikely to bring lasting fulfillment or satisfaction without a deeper purpose.

Trying to obtain these external trappings of success can feel like forever chasing moving goalposts. “It’s infinite, how much money you could try to earn,” says Sheri Johnson, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has researched the relationship between ambition and mental health. “You may be stuck in that striving state without satisfaction.”

Who gets to be mediocre?

But giving it all up isn’t so simple, as scholar Avram Alpert learned when he wrote his recent book, The Good-Enough Life, which explores how the pursuit of greatness harms individuals, communities, and society at large. Initially, Alpert says, he wanted to focus on how learning to be pleased with “good” instead of “great” might affect individuals’ happiness and well-being. But it felt impossible to say with a straight face that people should “chill out and be good enough” in the face of huge societal barriers like wealth inequality, racism, and sexism.

“If you say, ‘I’m going to be good enough. I’m not going to be overly ambitious and I’m not going to pursue every last award and every last degree and I’m not going to try to rise to the top of the pyramid,’ and then you find you’re doing that but society isn’t respecting that,” Alpert wondered, where does that leave you?

Checking out of the greatness grind often requires a safety net that millions of Americans living paycheck to paycheck or in poverty simply don’t have. It is one thing to tell someone who is already financially comfortable that money can’t buy happiness. But what about someone struggling to pay the rent or put food on the table? How could anyone tell them to be content with less?

“We shouldn’t have layers of society where people have to work that hard and live in those dire conditions,” Alpert says. But since we do, choosing mediocrity is perhaps the greatest privilege of all—and one that historically has available only to white people, says Michael Harriot, author of Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America.

“A Black person has to work twice as hard as a white person to get half as far,” Harriot says. That means choosing to be average often isn’t an option for people of color, just as it isn’t for others who have to swim against the current of discrimination every day, including those who are not able-bodied, cisgender, or heterosexual.

But, at the same time, “we can’t expend all of our energy and work ourselves to death trying to accomplish things that are unachievable because of systemic issues,” Harriot says. He bristles against the narrative that “rugged individualism and hard work is how [people of color] get ahead in America, when we know that’s not true.” Individuals can’t fight against centuries of systemic oppression on their own.

It was that realization that led Amil Niazi to write a viral 2022 essay about renouncing ambition, which she is now adapting into a book. Niazi felt for a long time that being exceptional was her only choice. “I’m an immigrant. I grew up very poor. I’m a woman of color,” Niazi says. “I was never able to be mediocre. I would not be able to be where I am today if I had just sat back and said, ‘It’s okay for me to be average.’”

But even decades of striving didn’t prevent Niazi from being passed over for professional opportunities and promotions, which she says often went to people—predominantly white men—who could relate to her bosses in ways she couldn’t. After years of burning out trying to play their game, Niazi decided to quit and start her own, leaving her job in media to freelance and create her own definition of success.

Accepting “good enough” in a world that wants great

Even as an objectively privileged white woman, I’m nervous to attach my name to an essay with anything positive to say about mediocrity. As much as I craved it in the depths of my pre-publication stress, I do not actually want—nor can I afford—to torpedo my career. Numerous times as I wrote this essay, I wondered, Do I really want to be known as the mediocrity girl? And if I feel uneasy, how could I expect anyone without my advantages to embrace this concept?

That fear says a lot about the culture we live in. It should not be controversial to say that life exists beyond work and achievement, that the ways we’ve been taught to strive are hurting us—all of us, but particularly those who are marginalized by systems of power. And yet it’s a scary thing to put in writing.

So how can I, and everyone, live a good-enough life when the world isn’t there yet? Alpert thinks it’s about applying the philosophy of good-enoughness to whichever “pockets” of your life you can, whether that’s sometimes taking on a behind-the-scenes role rather than seeking credit; adopting a hobby just for fun; or trying to remember that, as he puts it, “the things we find most meaningful and wonderful and purposeful,” like being with loved ones, are not lazy or frivolous, but vital.

Dr. Gordon Parker, a psychiatrist and founder of the Black Dog Institute, an Australian research organization focused on mental health, believes that aiming for a 20% more laidback lifestyle can enhance well-being, particularly for the kind of type-A people who are prone to perfectionism. In other words: you don’t have to reject the system in its entirety. Sometimes it’s about trying to do just a little bit less, and becoming okay with that.

That’s been the case for Kathleen Newman-Bremang, who has written about embracing mediocrity as a Black woman. Newman-Bremang was raised to believe she had to be excellent, always, to succeed in a system that wanted her to fail. But that constant pursuit left her exhausted and disillusioned. Eventually, Newman-Bremang realized the far more “radical act” was to embrace mediocrity, even with all the negative baggage that word carries.

“Maybe my worth is not weighed by my weariness. Maybe my worth is not what kind of worker I am,” she says. “If I am just mediocre professionally, that’s okay. That can still mean that I am a good person, a good friend, a good wife, a good dog owner.”

That mindset shift is a work in progress, Newman-Bremang says. She still has to remind herself to rest and take breaks. But she no longer believes that excellence is the only option.

I, like Newman-Bremang, have tried to embody that philosophy through a hundred tiny revolutions against capitalist culture. I do my work as well as I can, but I take my lunch breaks, I use my vacation time, I resist the urge to check email on weekends. These are privileges of secure white-collar work, to be sure, and I am grateful for them. But also: they should not be as revolutionary as they feel to me, and I remind myself of that when my inner voice tells me to do more, achieve more, produce more.

Bradshaw, the SDT researcher, also gave me a piece of advice that struck a chord. When you are presented with a decision, she told me, think about why you would agree to it. Is it because you genuinely want or need to do the thing, or because you think it will make you look good?

This, too, is perhaps not so revolutionary, but it felt that way to me. So much of what I’ve done in my life has been to appear impressive, to get my foot in the door so that someday I could step all the way through. But I’ve been through the door, now, and the room inside wasn’t all I imagined it to be.

“Tripledemic“ jumped into our vocabulary and lives last year, referring to the winter surges of three respiratory viruses—RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), flu (influenza), and COVID-19. The tripledemic of 2022 infected millions, overwhelmed hospital systems, and killed more than 100,000 people in the U.S. over the 4-month peak span of these viruses.

As much as we hoped that respiratory illness would fade with the COVID-19 public health emergency ending, we must recognize that these viruses will continue to impact us for years. As the school year begins, we already see short-term school closures due to respiratory illness. We are seeing new variants of COVID-19 that may also contribute to increased cases of disease. 

However, the severe impact of the anticipated wave of respiratory illness this winter can be very different from last year. We can reduce the levels of severe viral disease seen over recent years, thanks to the remarkable development of new vaccines and therapeutics against these viruses. We can achieve this goal of preventing hospitalization and death by ensuring that individuals at the most significant risk for severe disease are vaccinated against each of these viruses before the late fall and winter months and receive prompt antiviral treatment when ill.      

RSV, flu, and COVID-19 are respiratory pathogens spread by the breath, spoken word, and cough. As with most pathogens, some individuals are more vulnerable than others to these infections. RSV and influenza take their most significant toll on those less than one year and older than 65 years and in people with serious underlying medical conditions. COVID-19 also exerts its most severe impact on older people and those with underlying medical problems. Although less frequent than in adults, COVID-19 can also result in severe disease in children, more than 50% of whom have no underlying medical conditions, which is why COVID-19 vaccines are recommended for children six months and older by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

During the respiratory season of 2022-2023, it was estimated that 100,000-200,000 people were hospitalized with RSV, 300,000-650,00 with flu, and 700,000 with COVID-19. During that surge, 6,000-10,000 people died from RSV, 19,000-58,000 from flu, and 75,000 from COVID-19. These numbers of deaths due to RSV were greater than the levels seen over the several years before the pandemic. It was remarkable that RSV and flu-related illnesses fell over the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, partly due to the mitigation measures against COVID-19, which also slowed the spread of these other respiratory viruses. Yet, with the relaxing of masking and other anti-COVID-19 mitigation measures, RSV and flu cases rebounded to exceed pre-pandemic levels. It is difficult to predict the patterns of RSV, flu, and COVID-19 over the coming months. But we can expect a rise in the activity of these viruses as population immunity from last year’s infections and vaccinations wanes and new viral forms appear.

This past year heralded important developments in the prevention of RSV. RSV infection among children under five years, which resulted in 58,000-80,000 hospitalizations and 100-300 deaths last year, can be prevented in several ways. If a pregnant individual is vaccinated against RSV, the transfer of immune protection from the parent to the fetus will protect the infant after birth, and such vaccines have recently been approved. If parents are not immunized against RSV during pregnancy, infants can receive a long-acting monoclonal antibody by injections to protect against severe disease for up to 6 months. This FDA-approved medication, Beyfortis, is now available through the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program and through pediatric care providers. The drug is approved for neonates and infants born during or entering their first RSV season and in children up to 24 months of age who remain vulnerable to severe RSV disease through their second RSV season. RSV vaccines for those 60 years and older have also been approved, dramatically reducing cases in older people.

The influenza vaccine is modified yearly in anticipation of the expected flu strain and is recommended for those six months and older. The flu vaccine, with doses specific for children and adults, becomes available in the fall and comes in forms administered by injection or a nasal spray. This year’s vaccine is designed to target several different flu strains. In addition to vaccines, several anti-flu medications, including Tamiflu, effectively reduce flu severity if started within a few days of illness onset.

Although cases, hospitalizations, and deaths due to COVID-19 are much lower now than over the previous three years, this virus remains a serious public health threat, with more than 100,000 deaths over the current year. COVID-19 will also be a top-five cause of death for adults and a top-ten cause of death for children. As with RSV and flu, severe disease due to COVID-19 is preventable through vaccination.

For individuals who develop COVID-19 infections, disease severity can also be markedly reduced by oral antiviral agents, including Paxlovid and Mulnupiravir. More than 80% of adults in the US have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 70% have completed the primary series. Because the protection from these vaccines phase after about six months, booster shots are recommended, but only 17% of the US population has a current booster shot. Like the flu vaccine, booster vaccinations are adapted to the anticipated circulating virus type, the Omicron variant. On September 12, 2023, the CDC recently recommended that everyone six months and older get updated COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech that better match the current circulating virus strains. These new vaccines will be available within a week of the announcement.

More than 700 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in the U.S., and data clearly show that COVID-19 vaccines are very effective in reducing severe disease risk and have an excellent safety record, as shown in very recently presented data. Notably, the risk of myocarditis following last fall’s updated COVID-19 vaccine was minimal, with two confirmed myocarditis out of about 650,000 doses, which is lower than after the primary series.

There is recent discussion has been about when to get flu or COVID-19 booster shots. Because the effectiveness of the flu and COVID-19 vaccines can wear off after six, it makes the most sense to get these vaccines in late October or November before the anticipated peak of illness during wintertime. Until there is a combination respiratory pathogen vaccine, these vaccines need to be administered separately. Flu and COVID-19 vaccines can be given simultaneously. Still, since the RSV vaccine is new, it has been recommended to wait two weeks after the RSV vaccine before other immunizations until more data are available.

Common sense public health measures also play a role in combatting the tripledemic, as we can spread viruses to others when we are infected. First, we must avoid others, especially those with vulnerabilities, when ill. We also now have home testing available to diagnose each virus separately or in combination. This can lead to prescribing antiviral medication and treating symptoms when coupled with telemedicine or in-person office visits. Mask use may also be considered in high-risk settings, especially for those who are medically vulnerable.

As part of this discussion of tripledemic action, we also need to recognize that issues related to COVID-19 have become politically polarized to the point where facts about the disease, its impact, its treatment, and its prevention are ignored. But we also need to recognize that COVID-19 now takes its place among the other common respiratory pathogens, and we have strong medical tools to address tripledemic viruses.

With all the amazing preventative tools and treatments we now have, we can look forward to saying, “tripledemic severe disease, no more.”

I’m a congregational rabbi and right now, I’m supposed to be thinking about Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. I’m supposed to be in a state of spiritual relaxation, eagerly anticipating hearing the sounds of our melodies and looking forward to seeing the warm faces of my congregants. But instead, like so many Jewish leaders, I’m thinking about security. Instead of thinking about liturgy, I have to think about lockdown doors. Instead of thinking about prayer, I have to think about private security guards. During this time of unprecedented antisemitism in America, Jews more and more often feel the need to obsess about physical safety–just for the act of being Jewish–and it’s heartbreaking.

These thoughts about how to secure the Jewish people can be pervasive and unyielding. They are a financial and emotional weight that hover over us. And the concerns are justified. At least 49 synagogues have been evacuated in the last 2 months due to bomb threats. In 2022, Anti-Defamation League(ADL) tabulated 3,697 antisemitic incidents throughout the United States—a 36% increase from the 2,717 incidents tabulated in 2021. This is the highest number on record since the ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979. This makes it nearly impossible to compartmentalize feelings of anxiety and stress or push them aside even for a brief while.

Read More: All the Ways We Deny Antisemitism

But, we can’t allow ourselves to be consumed by distress either. As we approach the Jewish new year, instead of simply ceding our sacred time to worry and fear, this is the exact season to do the one thing that true antisemites deplore: to be boldly, joyously, outwardly Jewish. This year at the High Holidays, instead of being trepidatious, I’ll have a little extra pep in my step. I won’t let antisemitism dampen this sacred period, and neither should the Jewish people.

Afterall, one good way to fight antisemitism is to do something Jewish—publicly. Consider this outward pride in your identity as an act of subversion against the growing temptation to hide our Jewish selves. Go out into this world and wear your Jewish star necklace, show off your chai tattoo, or wear your kippah on the street. Tell people you are Jewish or that you are raising a Jewish family. Use words like “mishegas,” “yalla,” “tzedakah,” “l’chaim,” or “tzotchke,” even when you are around non-Jews. Stand with others outside and listen to the sound of the shofar as we perform our ritual of repentance. The threat of antisemitism has the power to push our Judaism beneath the surface; this year, we should rebel and raise the flag of Judaism even higher. This is how we will find our power—and our peace.

For me, I find this sense of peace by worshipping shoulder to shoulder with my community. Instead of stress, I notice all the good around me. I notice that when a congregant loses their place in the prayerbook, someone else helps them find it. I notice one mother offering to hold another mother’s baby, just to give her a minute break. I notice that when an elderly person can’t easily climb the stairs, several others quickly jump up to help. And when I notice all of these good things, at least for a moment, my mind is transported away from all of the worries and towards contentment and calm.

I remember several years ago I saw a bomb-sniffing dog comb through the sanctuary in my synagogue for the very first time. It broke my heart, because there is a prohibition against dogs entering a sanctuary—and because I knew it was necessary and I was glad it was there. Violent antisemitism is real, and we need to protect ourselves. And so many Jewish communities have done just that—we’ve consulted with security professionals, we’ve coordinated with our local police departments, we’ve undergone multiple security trainings, and we’ve implemented physical interventions to keep our community secure. But we can’t let security overwhelm the free and full expression of our religious rites.

This season, let’s give ourselves a rest from worry and embrace being Jewish in the spirit of celebration and joy as much as we can. We will come together and sing our songs, recite our prayers, perform our rituals. Maybe even if you aren’t a regular synagogue goer this is the year to participate.  Jews in America shouldn’t be running scared. Rather, we should work to find our own sense of security and at least a few moments of peace that we need so badly right now.

In March 2021, students and staff from UC Berkeley’s Investigations Lab gathered in a Zoom room—physically separate due a spike in COVID-19, but together online—each square on their screens a glimpse into the others’ private pandemic worlds. But unlike most Zoom calls, they weren’t talking to or even looking at each other. Each was busy scanning the internet, scrolling through amateur videos and photos that had been posted to websites like Facebook and Twitter. The images showed real-time horrors unfolding in Myanmar: a young man riding with two friends on a motorbike on a quiet street, suddenly ripped by a bullet. A body flung into the back of a truck. Wailing family members beseeching someone, anyone, to account for their loss.

These students are part of a growing community of digital researchers who gather potential evidence of genocide, war crimes, and human rights violations from the internet, sometimes thousands of miles from the sites of atrocity. Since 2016, the Investigations Lab we founded at the Human Rights Center, a multidisciplinary research institution on the UC Berkeley campus, has trained hundreds of students how to search social media for information about possible human rights violations. We founded the Lab to create a pipeline of professionals with the latest research skills, but also to support the work of journalists, human rights researchers, and lawyers who may not have the training or time to find reliable data online to strengthen their investigations.

The work isn’t easy. Long hours reviewing videos and photos of some of the worst things human beings can do to each other can be emotionally taxing. That’s why early in the Lab’s existence, we began searching out science-based approaches to preventing secondary trauma—the emotional distress that can come from experiencing others’ pain second-hand, including in online spaces—and to train our students in best practices. We’ve since interviewed dozens of experts and reviewed research that spotlights ways to handle harmful content that can be as valuable to our personal livesas our professional ones. These experts shared numerous tactics, from increasing awareness of what especially affects you to “tips and tricks” for lessening the emotional impact of videos and photographs—strategies that can ultimately benefit all social media users, particularly students.

Read More: Is Social Media Making Me Miserable?

Today, most of us are tethered to our cell phones. While we aren’t necessarily scouring social media for evidence of war crimes like these student researchers, we may regularly stumble across graphic images on Twitter (now X), TikTok, or Facebook. Social media posts may expose us to children who’ve been killed in Ukraine, to people blinded in protests, or to other horrors—even while making breakfast for our kids, working out in a gym, or scrolling Instagram for entertainment.

This new world order begs the following questions: How can anyone—whether they work in human rights or not—witness the cruelties of the world without becoming numb to them? And how can we minimize the potential for harm and maximize the social and psychological benefits from our time spent online?

While the strategies are numerous, three are especially powerful: Being intentional about your watching, sharing your experience with others, and minimizing needless exposure.

Psychologists Metin Başoğlu and Ebru Salcioglu have explained that anxiety often comes from feeling like you have a lack of control over upsetting experiences, and depression stems from having a lack of hope that things will be better in the future. Whether we absorb the pain found online in ways that strengthen us versus sending us into a demotivated spiral depends not only on what we watch, but even more importantly on how we watch and why.

According to UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, which explores the “science of a meaningful life,” engaging in actions with purpose can be powerful. These social science researchers define purpose as an intent to achieve a goal that is “both personally meaningful and makes a positive mark on the world.” Can we approach our news intake more intentionally in order to better protect ourselves online? What might that look like in practice?

The idea of “bearing witness” can help bring meaning to our viewing. Medical anthropologist and global health pioneer Paul Farmer considered bearing witness as a form of observing with compassion and solidarity. It is viewing “done on behalf of others, for their sake (even if those others are dead and forgotten).” This experience can be incredibly meaningful for the observer.

Such an approach can be contrasted with “doom-scrolling,” or robotically scanning one graphic image after another. Mindless intake can be especially damaging because of the potential scale of the exposure, the relative lack of analysis and context, and our own lack of agency. Criminal investigators, on the other hand, explained to us that their analytical process—scanning a photo for clues, having a reason to scrutinize something horrific—often helped to limit their psychological distress.

In addition to being clear about our purpose, it’s important to limit exposure. War crimes and human rights investigators sometimes compare the graphic nature of information found on the internet to “toxic waste.” Would you mindlessly expose yourself or your family to radiation without taking precautions? Or do so at large scales or for long time periods, understanding how harm can accumulate over time? Though the pain of others should never be considered “waste,” this protective framing helps underscore the dangers of overexposure.

Some of us may be especially vulnerable to secondary trauma. One indicator is whether you have experienced trauma yourself. And when you identify with the person who is being harmed in a social media post by way of language, ethnicity, gender, country of origin or another aspect of your identity, or identify with the trauma they’ve experienced, the risk of your own psychological harm may be especially acute. Knowing this can help you to recognize when additional protective measures might be especially helpful—such as lowering the sound on a video or minimizing the screen size to limit the emotional impact, all tactics used by professionals. Or you can read a newspaper article about an event instead of watching the raw footage, if you want to know the facts but minimize the salience.

Dr. Keramet Reiter and others say another powerful way to maximize meaning and minimize harm is to discuss what you’ve seen, using it as a mechanism to connect with others. The sense of community such discussions can generate can also be protective.

Recent research from psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge suggests that teenagers are experiencing unprecedented levels of loneliness and that there’s a link to the rising use of smartphones and social media. One study they conducted with colleagues analyzed results from a survey of 15-and 16-year-olds. The survey revealed an increase in loneliness in 36 out of 37 countries over a six year period (2012–2018). While this trend isn’t conclusively caused by social media, it correlates with its rise. Another study, led by UK researcher Rebecca Nowland, similarly found a rise in loneliness with increased digital engagement; however, that study also offers that social media may reduce loneliness when actively used to establish “new social connections.” One suggestion from this body of research into social media use and loneliness is to think about how to use social media to create connection—not replace it—the latter of which can exacerbate a sense of isolation.

Read More: Generational Researcher Jean Twenge on How Smartphones Destroyed Gen Z—and What Parents Can Do About It

The speed and scale of our exposure to graphic imagery has been exacerbated by current technologies, but the need to derive meaning from images that document events outside of our experience is timeless. Susan Sontag noted in her book Regarding the Pain of Others that each of us reacts to images in unique ways that are tied to our identities as well as our ideologies. While one person may view a photo from a war zone and feel a need to advocate for peace, another may identify with the individuals who were harmed and demand greater militancy. Images don’t “speak” for themselves—it’s up to each of us to imbue them with meaning, as well as to pull meaning from our witnessing.

Back in Berkeley, California, our students weren’t always physically together as they looked at upsetting videos of violence, but they could talk with each other and understand each other’s experience, deepening their sense of community. Through this collective activity they could take collective action. Over the longer term, their work could be used to advocate for intervention, or potentially as evidence to help secure legal justice for those suffering in Myanmar. But in the shorter term, each of those students was finding their own meaning, both through the process of discovery and through time spent with each other.

On 16th July 1945 the world changed forever. The Manhattan Project’s ‘Trinity’ test, directed by Robert Oppenheimer, endowed humanity for the first time with the ability to wipe itself out: an atomic bomb had been successfully detonated 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico.

On 6th August 1945 the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and three days later, Nagasaki— unleashing unprecedented destructive power. The end of World War II brought a fragile peace, overshadowed by this new, existential threat.

While nuclear technology promised an era of abundant energy, it also launched us into a future where nuclear war could lead to the end of our civilization. The ‘blast radius’ of our technology had increased to a global scale. It was becoming increasingly clear that governing nuclear technology to avoid a global catastrophe required international cooperation. Time was of the essence to set up robust institutions to deal with this.

In 1952, 11 countries set up CERN and tasked it with “collaboration in scientific [nuclear] research of a purely fundamental nature”—making clear that CERN’s research would be used for the public good. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was also set up in 1957 to monitor global stockpiles of uranium and limit proliferation. Among others, these institutions helped us to survive over the last 70 years.

We believe that humanity is facing once more an increase in the ‘blast radius’ of technology: the development of advanced artificial intelligence. A powerful technology that could annihilate humanity if left unrestrained, but, if harnessed safely, could change the world for the better.

The specter of artificial general intelligence

Experts have been sounding the alarm on artificial general intelligence (AGI) development. Distinguished AI scientists and leaders of the major AI companies, including Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, signed a statement from the Center for AI Safety that reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” A few months earlier, another letter calling for a pause in giant AI experiments was signed over 27,000 times, including by Turing Prize winners Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.

Read More: The Top 100 Leaders in AI

This is because a small group of AI companies (OpenAI, Google Deepmind, Anthropic) are aiming to create AGI: not just chatbots like ChatGPT, but AIs that are “autonomous and outperform humans at most economic activities”. Ian Hogarth, investor and now Chair of the UK’s Foundation Model Taskforce, calls these ‘godlike AIs’ and implored governments to slow down the race to build them. Even the developers of the technology themselves expect great danger from it. Altman, CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, said that the “Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”

World leaders are calling for the establishment of an international institution to deal with the threat of AGI: a ‘CERN’ or ‘IAEA for AI’. In June, President Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Sunak discussed such an organization. The U.N. Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres thinks we need one, too. Given this growing consensus for international cooperation to respond to the risks from AI, we need to lay out concretely how such an institution might be built.

Would a ‘CERN for AI’ look like MAGIC?

MAGIC (the Multilateral AGI Consortium) would be the world’s only advanced and secure AI facility focused on safety-first research and development of advanced AI. Like CERN, MAGIC will allow humanity to take AGI development out of the hands of private firms and lay it into the hands of an international organization mandated towards safe AI development.

MAGIC would have exclusivity when it comes to the high-risk research and development of advanced AI. It would be illegal for other entities to independently pursue AGI development. This would not affect the vast majority of AI research and development, and only focus on frontier, AGI-relevant research, similar to how we already deal with dangerous R&D with other technologies. Research on engineering lethal pathogens is outright banned or confined to very high biosafety level labs. At the same time, the vast majority of drug research is instead supervised by regulatory agencies like the FDA.

MAGIC will only be concerned with preventing the high-risk development of frontier AI systems – godlike AIs. Research breakthroughs done at MAGIC will only be shared with the outside world once proven demonstrably safe.

To make sure high risk AI research remains secure and under strict oversight at MAGIC, a global moratorium on creation of AIs using more than a set amount of computing power be put in place (here’s a great overview of why computing power matters). This is similar to how we already deal with uranium internationally, the main resource used for nuclear weapons and energy.

Without competitive pressures, MAGIC can ensure the adequate safety and security needed for this transformative technology, and distribute the benefits to all signatories. CERN exists as a precedent for how we can succeed with MAGIC.

The U.S. and the U.K. are in a perfect position to facilitate this multilateral effort, and springboard its inception after the upcoming Global Summit on Artificial Intelligence in November this year.

Averting existential risk from AGI is daunting, and leaving this challenge to private companies is a very dangerous gamble. We don’t let individuals or corporations develop nuclear weapons for private use, and we shouldn’t allow this to happen with dangerous, powerful AI. We managed to not destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, and we can secure our future again – but not if we remain idle. We must place advanced AI development into the hands of a new global, trusted institution and create a safer future for everyone.

Post-WWII institutions helped us avoid nuclear war by controlling nuclear development. As humanity faces a new global threat—uncontrolled artificial general intelligence (AGI)—we once again need to take action to secure our future.

I was teaching an executive group and a manager raised a dilemma that initiated a soul-searching debate. The manager explained she ran a large fully remote team in Europe. The firm operated a local pay scheme for fully remote workers. London based remote workers were paid on a London scale, Glasgow based remote workers on a Glasgow scale and so on. The problem was one of the team reported that another team member was being paid for living in an expensive Northern city but had moved to a cheaper Southern resort. The manager asked should she discipline the employee? Probably yes. But this employee was a star performer continuing to deliver outstanding results. So maybe she should look the other way? But this would upset the reporting team member and breach company protocol?

My view is that highly localized pay schemes are problematic from the outset. This manager was put in an impossible situation. There was no good solution.

Before discussing the bigger case, it is worth first noting that for jobs that are partly or fully in person you clearly want to pay local rates. If you hire a shift-manager in New York you have to pay New York wages. If hire a shift-manager in Memphis you pay Memphis wages. But for fully remote employees who can live and work anywhere in the world things are more flexible. Indeed, I think firms may want to pay a national or even global rate for four reasons.

First, it avoids managers having to police HR pay policies. The manager in my group was stressed because she was having to discipline an outstanding employee for not being truthful on their residential location. But managers should not be policing where their employees live. As we know from decades of research managing large teams is extremely challenging. Adding the task of snooping into their employees’ lives is making their roles almost impossible.

Second, it lets employees move location without having to worry about changing pay. Indeed, one of the great allures of fully remote work is the flexibility you gain. This post-pandemic surge of “Digital Nomads” who pair work with extensive travel has been a resounding success. Moreover, employees often need to move for family, health, or personal reasons. Maybe your spouse gets a promotion and needs to move city. Any remote worker would feel angry if their employer used this as an excuse to cut their pay for shifting to a lower cost location.

Third, global pay makes life a lot simpler for HR departments. One of the lessons of the pandemic is managing hybrid and remote employees is hard. In the old fully-in-person world managers could manage employee’s inputs by simply desk watching them. This was poetically called “managing by walking around.” Managers could see if a team member was at their desk typing away on Word or Excel, suggesting they were (probably) working. Or you see if their team member was endlessly flirting with their colleague or making excessively long trips to the bathroom carrying their cell phone. But with home-based employees this kind of input monitoring is impossible. Managers instead need to focus on output monitoring. They need to evaluate employees’ performance on objectives outcomes like sales targets, customer numbers or product deliveries. But rigorous performance evaluation is hard and requires hard work by both managers and HR. So, this is exactly when you don’t want them regularly updating localized pay schedules. Don’t tie up your key personal in their time of challenge with pay bureaucracy.

Finally, the most profitable way to run a firm is to source the cheapest person to perform a task. For fully remote work that likely means posting this globally and accepting the best qualified candidate for the wage. If somebody in Texas is happy to code-up the same app or create the same marketing campaign at half the rate as somebody in San Francisco they should get the job. Profitable firms source out the best talent per dollar, and for remote jobs that means moving to global hiring.

There are challenges of course. One is legal and regulatory, and these barriers may take time to work around. Another is the pre-pandemic legacy. Many firms sent employees home in a hurry in 2020, deciding to keep them on the same pay rate. This meant remote employees ended up being tethered to the pay-scales of their former offices as they migrated around. But as time goes by these legacy issues are slowly fading.

The pandemic highlights how globally connected we are, both for good and bad. For firms and employees operating in a remote world this increasingly means dropping localized pay-schemes and moving towards global pay. We should be paying employees for what they achieve, not where they claim to live.

The news is full of record high temperatures. Phoenix broke 110 degrees for 31 straight days. July 3 was the hottest day on Earth since record keeping began, until July 4, then July 6, and then July as a whole. It is anomalously hot—at least if you look at air temperatures 2 meters (about 6 and 1/2 feet) above the surface, which is how it’s usually reported by government agencies. But if you look a little more broadly, the heat is not an anomaly—and that’s an even bigger problem.

As earth system scientists, we’ve learned it’s sometimes more helpful to look at Earth as, well, a system. In this case, the system of the air and the oceans. Understanding how they interact is the key to understanding what is, and what isn’t, unusual about this very hot year.

First, the basics. As we burn fossil fuels to power our cars, our factories, and our lives, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air climbs. It’s up about 30% since we were born in the early 1970s. Carbon dioxide traps energy that would otherwise escape into space, so with each incremental increase in carbon dioxide, the Earth System warms incrementally, by about 2F since the industrial revolution.

But that’s just the air. It turns out that the bigger story is in the oceans, which have absorbed 90% of all that extra energy. And that’s a lot. If you add up all the energy human society has used since the 1950s—all the oil, gas, and coal burned; all the planes, trains, and automobiles, all the nuclear power plants, all the wind, solar, hydro-electricity, and all the biomass burned—that unimaginably vast amount of energy is still 10 times less than the amount our greenhouse gas emissions have captured and forced into the ocean during that same time.

Read More: One Man’s Quest to Heal the Oceans—And Maybe Save the World

All that energy has warmed the upper ocean waters by about 1.5F, causing ocean heat waves, coral death, and sea level rise (water expands when it warms). But despite these dramatic effects, we should all be very grateful for the energy oceans have absorbed. If all that energy went into heating the air, rather than into heating the oceans, the surface of the Earth would be hot enough to boil water. 

But that ocean energy can come back to haunt us, and we’re getting a taste of that now. Every five years or so, during an El Niño, warm surface waters get trapped in the equatorial Pacific along the coast of South America and spread westward, releasing heat into the air and scorching marine ecosystems in their wake. The Atlantic Ocean has a similar phenomenon, but with a different cadence. This year those warming rhythms are in sync, so we’re getting a double warming whammy.

El Niño helped produce record temperatures in 1998, again in 2016. In 2016, ocean heat waves killed off about 20% of the corals on the Great Barrier Reef, which stretches along the coast of Australia for 1,400 miles (the same as San Diego to Vancouver Canada). One decimated coral around Palau, one of the most remote islands in the world. Our colleague tells of weeping into her scuba mask in the face of the underwater death scene. On land, the 2016 El Niño-driven drought and fire killed billions of trees across the worst-affected parts of the Amazon rainforest. Ocean heat can drive our climate system to extremes around the world.

But here’s the scary part. The “hottest year on record” in 1998 wasn’t as hot as our cool years are now. 2023 is making 2016 look cool. And by 2040 this year’s record highs will feel like an anomalously cool year. That’s because the amount of energy trapped in the oceans and the air combined, is only going up, and up, and up. Whether the air or ocean has a bit more of that energy almost doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, though it matters for air temperatures in a given year.

There are other rhythms in the ocean that we need to pay attention to if we want to understand our warming world. Ocean currents act like giant conveyor belts that shuttle heat around Earth’s surface. Part of one such current, the Gulf Stream, moves warm surface water from the equatorial Atlantic north to northern Europe. This keeps the British Isles and northern Europe relatively mild, since those warm waters give off heat to the northern air. That’s why London, England is much warmer than Newfoundland, Canada even though London is further north. As the surface waters lose heat to the air, some cool, sink and return south at great depths in a “meridional overturning.”

This overturning circulation is also threatened by climate change. Fresh water pouring off melting Greenland glaciers makes it difficult for the water to sink, and recent work suggests we may be close to a tipping point where the giant Atlantic Ocean overturning slows down substantially. If that happens it will, paradoxically, slow or even temporarily stop warming in the North Atlantic, since that region will lose its source of ocean heat. More heat will be trapped at low latitudes, so warming will speed up there. Once again, our fate is intimately tied to the fate of our warming oceans.

So, is this year anomalously hot? The answer is a little bit more complicated than a simple “yes” or “no.” Yes, the air and surface ocean are both much hotter because of the rhythms of ocean circulation. But in another way, the whole Earth system has been warming steadily in proportion to the greenhouse gasses we put into the air. It will only stop getting warmer when we stop burning fossil fuels. Until then, we are rapidly warming ourselves into a climate catastrophe.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was built upon bricks of patriarchal misogyny. One of the first acts of the revolution’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, when he took power in 1979, was to reverse women’s rights in marriage, child custody and divorce. This included lowering the legal age of marriage for women from 18 to 9, and girls this young can still be married in Iran today.

Iranian women have not only been forced to veil but have been forbidden from dancing or singing solo in public, riding a bicycle, attending matches in sports arenas, becoming judges or president. They must sit at the back of the bus and can travel abroad only with their husband’s permission. Their court testimony and inheritance are deemed worth half that of men. They are among the very few women in the world whose grandmothers had more rights.

Nothing scares the Islamic Republic’s rulers more than independently minded women, and they know that, one year after the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in police custody, the revolutionary fire still blazes in the hearts and minds of Iranians. More than just a condemnation of the draconian dress code that Amini had been charged with violating, “Woman, Life, Freedom” is a powerfully synergetic slogan that acknowledges the importance of women’s rights in the quest for a normal life and fundamental freedoms for all citizens.

Read More: Mahsa Amini’s Death Still Haunts the Iranian Regime

The theocracy’s brutal forces may have cleared the streets, but the people’s defiance is far from over. Female journalists Nazila Maroufian and Sepideh Gholian, continue to defy the regime despite multiple imprisonments. Mahmonir Molaei-Rad, the mother of 9-year-old aspiring inventor Kian Pirfalak who was killed by security forces, lives under house arrest for continuing to seek justice for her son. Dozens of Iranian female athletes have competed without compulsory hijab, prominent actresses have publicly removed their veils in protest, and hundreds of thousands of women continue to flout the hijab in major Iranian cities.

Mahsa’s killing galvanized a broad-based, pro-democracy uprising. Today millions of university students, worker’s unions, dissidents, ethnic, religious, sexual and other minority groups recognize that the status of women and girls is inextricably bound to the inclusive democracy they seek. They understand that you cannot divide women’s rights from human rights and universal dignities.

In the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution, too few Iranian men showed solidarity as the regime ransacked the rights of their wives, mothers, daughters and sisters. But over the last year, they have stood united with Iranian women against a gender apartheid regime that maintains power by silencing everyone who doesn’t share its intolerant, Islamist ideology.

Pop singer Mehdi Yarrahi was jailed in August for his song “Roosarito” (“Your Headscarf”) in which he champions women to remove the mandatory veil. Prominent dissident Majid Tavakoli appears to be days away from having to serve yet another lengthy prison sentence for his liberal advocacy. Images of hospitalized and intubated 31-year-old protester Javad Rouhi, — tortured to death while imprisoned — are eerily similar to the viral images of Mahsa last year.

Indeed, while much of the international coverage of Iran’s protests in the past year have focused on the role of women, the vast majority of the more than 500 Iranians who have been killed by authorities during these protests have been young men. The movement’s rallying cry has captured the national aspiration.

Nowhere is this notion reflected more profoundly than in singer and songwriter Shervin Hajipour’s song “Baraye” (Because of) — perhaps the most compelling manifesto expressing the longings of the Iranian people — that won the inaugural Best Song for social change Grammy in 2023. The song became the international anthem for “Woman Life Freedom,” channeling societal discontent with lyrics that touched on themes of poverty, economic hardship, corruption, environmental mismanagement, human rights abuses, gender inequality and a yearning for an ordinary life.

Mahsa Jina Amini was young, a woman, a member of religious and ethnic minority groups. She represented Iran’s vibrant diversity — the antithesis of the homogenous, intolerant, geriatric, male, Shia clerics who rule the Islamic Republic. History has shown us that when women are on the frontlines, democratic movements not only have a higher chance of success, but also a better outcome for all who seek their rights and their freedoms. The centrality of women’s rights in this movement only strengthens the objective of a free, secular and democratic Iran. That’s why Iran’s “Woman Life Freedom” revolution not only endures, but is one of the most important and promising political movements in modern Middle East history.

For children in the U.S., the back-to-school season evokes a mix of emotions: nostalgia for another summer ended, excitement about seeing friends again and learning new things, and the butterflies that accompany any major life change. It is a time for many kids to pick out a new lunchbox and recommit to learning as they embark on their journey to adulthood.

Tragically, for Ukraine’s children, this back-to-school season is about trying to survive Russia’s war of aggression. The U.N. Secretary-General’s annual report on children and armed conflict has documented hundreds of cases of abuse by Russia’s armed forces, including the killing and maiming of children resulting from attacks with heavy artillery, multiple-launch rocket systems, and air strikes. In addition, the U.N. report noted 480 attacks on schools and hospitals attributed to Russia’s armed forces and affiliated armed groups. Ukraine’s children have witnessed, and experienced, events that will haunt them forever: seeing loved ones killed, forcibly displaced, or abused as well as their homes and communities destroyed.

How do we know the extent of these abuses? The Conflict Observatory—a program supported by the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations in partnership with Esri, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, Planetscape Ai, and Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab—has provided independent documentation of the impact of Russia’s war on Ukraine’s civilian population, and especially on children.

Read More: The Growing Pains of Kyiv’s Youth Captured in Photos

One particularly depraved element of Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine stands out: the forcible transfer and deportation of Ukraine’s children. In February 2023, the Conflict Observatory provided some of the most comprehensive empirical data that Russia is systematically and forcibly relocating Ukraine’s children. Russia has transferred children to camps in occupied areas of Ukraine or deported them to camps in Russia. It is placing others up for so-called “adoption” or in “foster care” with Russian families. The patterns of these transfers and deportations are chilling: in some cases, families were offered free summer camp experiences only to have contact with their children severed. In other cases, care facilities were emptied of children, with no records as to their whereabouts. 

As Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., stated before the Security Council, “Children are literally being ripped from their homes.” Once in Russia’s custody, some Ukrainian children are subjected to pro-Russia re-education programs, indoctrination, and military training. Some are told their parents do not want them, and some are punished if they don’t conform and fully renounce their Ukrainian identities. Russian citizenship has been foisted upon many of them as part of a widespread system of forced “passportization.”

Russia has responded to condemnations of its unconscionable actions with a barrage of denial, disinformation, and propaganda. Russian officials have claimed that this system is actually a grand humanitarian gesture in place to protect the most vulnerable children from the ravages of war. But the U.N.’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that the transfers were not justified by safety or medical reasons and did not satisfy the requirements set forth by the laws of war.

At the Munich Security Conference last February, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris announced the Biden Administration’s conclusion that members of Russia’s forces and other officials committed crimes against humanity in connection with the deportation of Ukrainian civilians, including children who have been forcibly separated from their families. As President Joe Biden noted, Russia is trying to steal Ukraine’s future by stealing its children.

The people of Ukraine have rightfully demanded accountability. Prosecutors, advocates, and human rights lawyers have launched a concerted campaign aimed at securing justice in domestic and international courts, even as Russia’s brutal and unprovoked war continues unabated.

Read More: How One Group Rescues Ukraine’s Children from Russia

The U.S., E.U., and U.K. have joined Ukraine in these efforts through the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group. The ACA is designed to support Ukraine’s prosecutors, operating in their own national judicial system, to identify and charge those responsible for the crimes committed in Ukraine. This innovative multilateral initiative is deploying teams of experts—many of them veterans from the world’s war crimes courts—to assist. The ACA is helping to triage the 100,000 plus potential war crimes that Ukraine has recorded to date; build case files against alleged culprits; track the location of suspects; and ensure due process, even for those charged with the most horrific crimes.

More broadly, an unprecedented 43 states referred Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The ICC so far has issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights (a misnomer if there ever was one), Maria Lvova-Belova. They stand accused of the forced deportation or transfer of children—a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which is devoted to the protection of civilians. Additional arrest warrants are anticipated. In response, Dmitry Medvedev, a former President and Deputy Chair of the Security Council of Russia, suggested that the arrest warrants should be used as toilet paper. The U.S. has expressed support for the ICC’s investigation and is assisting it.

At home, Congress amended the War Crimes Act to allow for the prosecution of war crimes if the perpetrator is found in the U.S., regardless of their nationality or where the crimes took place. Attorney General Merrick Garland has also formed an ace War Crimes Accountability Team within the Department of Justice to pursue potential cases in U.S. courts. In the meantime, the U.S. has sanctioned individuals and entities connected to the transfer or deportation of Ukraine’s children. Several European states have formed a Joint Investigative Team to coordinate with each other and the ICC. Finally, a new International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression has been set up in The Hague, the justice capital of the world, to prepare for prosecutions for the crime of aggression. A seasoned prosecutor from the U.S. Department of Justice will be assisting in this effort.

Given the scale of criminality by members of Russia’s forces and Russian officials, achieving justice will be a generational effort. It will require perseverance from prosecutorial authorities the world over to collect evidence, prepare case files, and move quickly when perpetrators come within their jurisdictional reach. Those responsible should know that impunity is elusive, the arm of international justice is long, and war crimes prosecutors are tenacious. Many will not rest until those responsible for the terrible crimes committed against Ukraine’s people—including crimes against those most vulnerable—are held to account.

Ukraine’s children deserve nothing less.

If you’re a parent, you often feel that life today is complicated, overloaded, and moving at warp speed. Technological advances like AI are creating exponential change, the world is getting hotter, and the future is hard to imagine–both for ourselves and our kids. The world is brimming with uncertainty as life races forward. Scientists are calling our era “The Great Acceleration,” and it’s creating unprecedented challenges for us as we raise our children.

As mental health professionals working with families, we meet so many parents who are afraid that their kids aren’t equipped for all this change and uncertainty—and to be honest, we’re worried, too. In our practices, we see wonderful, talented kids who are also brittle and anxious, struggling with motivation, acting out with anger and frustration, or disappearing into their devices. Teens who struggle to know themselves, faltering into adulthood. And the data confirms that kids’ mental health is truly suffering: According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, in 2021, more than 40% of high school students showed signs of depression and even pre-pandemic nearly one in three adolescents had an anxiety disorder.

Parents want so much to help, but we’re stuck in an outdated model for how to do so. Parents of younger kids worry their child will be left behind—or if they aren’t ahead of the curve, an early reader, or in the advanced math group. Parents of teens worry they should focus on the “right” extracurriculars, the “right” college.  But in a time of unprecedented change, being “right” or “ahead” shouldn’t—and simply, can’t—be the goal. The goal posts move before kids can ever reach them.

Instead of prioritizing pushing our kids ahead, we should be equipping them to stay grounded, able to bend in the wind without breaking: unafraid of uncertainty, able to cope with tough feelings, not dependent on others for motivation, evaluations, or solutions. Parents’ loving but fearful focus on achievement of all kinds–academic, athletic, extracurricular–in the hopes of fueling kids’ future success is misplaced. Kids today don’t need more achievement —they need more adaptability. Less focus on their IQ and more on their AQ.

AQ, or Adaptability Quotient, is a buzzy new business term, but we believe the “intelligence” of adaptability is the skill kids most need. Adaptability allows humans to survive and innovate. Uncertainty abounds, and parents struggle to try to have the answers to questions they’ve never even considered. But our kids don’t need answers all the time, or to believe that answers always exist. Our reassurance is hollow anyway. Perhaps, then, the word “maybe” should be our new parenting mantra. If we can admit when we don’t know and learn to be ok with it, it might help them thrive in the “maybe,” too.

Every time our child asks for certainty, we should take a cue from the emoji of the wondering, shrugging lady in the purple shirt. When we parent for adaptability, we are empathetic, supportive, but not overly involved or reactive. Think about offering curiosity and asking them what they think the solution should be. We need to provide kids with the confidence that while we, and they, don’t have all the answers, we will still be ok. We can adapt.

Read More: There’s a Mental Health Crisis At Work Because Life Is Changing Too Fast

Sounds good, right? But how do you do it? It’s not easy and may require shifting your parenting mindset. It might look like focusing less on physical safety or comfort, and more on what helps kids develop psychological strength. Things like mindfulness and self-care, learning to tolerate difficult emotions, and practicing resilience in the face of failure; valuing our connections with one another and focusing on gratitude over grievances; redefining success as not what you achieve but how you adapt.

Once we decide to prioritize building adaptability in our kids, how to do it becomes a series of strategic choices across childhood. Here are some strategies for your playbook:

Do less

Less is often more with parenting, and much of the time doing nothing is the hardest – and best – parenting move.  Allow your child to feel hurt or afraid or uncomfortable.  Be present, be empathetic, just don’t immediately intervene.  A kid will only become adaptable when given the opportunities to do so.  And they will sense a parent’s confidence in them in that pause.  

Manage uncertainty, instead of fixating on it

At best all we can provide our kids is the illusion of control rather than actual absolute safety, and this cycle of fearing danger and the unknown increases anxiety and makes kids fragile.  For example, when we track our kids’ whereabouts via their phones, we’re assuaging our own anxiety at the expense of their freedom and independence. To build adaptability, parents need to equip their kids to manage uncertainty and risk and to express confidence rather than fear.

Set–and hold–some limits on our on-demand, instant gratification world.

Help your child develop self-control over the unlimited amount of dopamine (a feel-good brain chemical) available to them thanks to modern life. Don’t let kids become dependent on technology’s frequent hits of neurochemical reinforcement that keep us scrolling, playing, and posting.  We can all become immune to real life’s more subtle but far more sustaining pleasures if we spend too much time in the digital world.  Get your kids outside, let them be bored, encourage low-tech creativity and real-life interactions with others.

Embrace difficult emotions like fear, sadness, and uncertainty. 

Teach your child to be awake to themself, to know how they feel and to be unafraid of those feelings. Show them that feelings are simply clues, not facts, and that often if we wait long enough, they will change by themselves.  Accept their emotional discomforts just like inevitable physical discomforts. Practice riding the wave.  

Parenting is hard, and good intentions can have a boomerang effect. Too much help erodes independence. Too much praise saps motivation. Too much protection can grow anxiety. Finding the balance is always challenging. But we all need to make peace with our fundamental lack of control over what we so badly desire: providing our kids the smoothest possible path to a happy and successful future.

Read More: A Tool for Staying Grounded in This Era of Constant Uncertainty

Instead, let’s equip our kids for whatever terrain they encounter. For an unknowable future with jobs we’ve never imagined and technological advances we have not yet dreamed.  Let’s prepare them to be successful in the ways that count: In knowing themselves, and in being independent, creative thinkers who can adapt and overcome challenges—who can hit the curveball out of the park, and who can recover from striking out. 

Recently I faced consoling a patient of mine who couldn’t understand why I was unable to “hop on the phone” to discuss her new back pain. When she finally got an appointment with me weeks later, I decided to be honest. I shared that I had 1,300 patients who call me their primary doctor. After I’m done seeing patients at 5 PM, I tend to 50 to 100 messages and notifications. I take three to four hours of work home with me every night.

I didn’t share these stats to elicit sympathy, but soon our roles had reversed. My patient overflowed with apologies and demanded to know who was doing this to me.

This is the paradox that defines modern American medicine: Doctors are working harder and longer, all while patients can access us less. As a practicing internal medicine physician and oncologist, I believe we reached this unsustainable state due to fundamentally misaligned division of labor – between human and machine, between doctors and support staff, and between what is paid for and what good medical care requires.

As a doctor, I am no stranger to hard work. But the ways doctors’ workloads are exploding are largely clerical and bureaucratic. Ironically, a big culprit is electronic medical records. Paper records were converted to electronic charts over a decade ago, with the incredible potential to connect enormous amounts of patient data seamlessly. However, the very technology that was supposed to reduce doctors’ work has drastically increased it. Doctors today spend two hours doing computer tasks for every one hour facing patients. Ordering something as simple as Tylenol requires doctors to click between fourteen and sixty-two times, with the confusion causing errors in up to 30 percent of cases. The number of clicks in one ten-hour shift in the emergency room approaches four thousand. Nearly 60 percent of doctors’ notes are identical, and therefore redundant, to the previous ones. The practical result is that doctors spend hours digging through disorganized charts, sleuthing for critical patient data that gets buried under an avalanche of noise. In an era where multibillion dollar software promises to ease data-sharing, the process for providers to input and find health data remains manual, labor intensive, and error prone.

Our current solution to these technologic glitches is leaning on people to serve the needs of the electronic charts. It was supposed to be the other way around. Support staff becomes crucial, yet patching logistical holes often falls to doctors. Recently I prescribed a medication that took 22 clicks, waiting on hold with an insurance company, tracking down a denial letter, writing an appeal, documenting all these phone calls, and keeping my patient apprised through messaging. How many of those steps needed to be done by me? In my estimate, only about half of my daily work actually needs to be done by an MD. The best run clinics understand this and train medical assistants to do much more than stock clean gowns and take vital signs. These clinics also hire nurses who can manage tasks such as refilling prescriptions, triaging patient calls, and answering messages. But while team support and delegation has caught on in the hospital setting, it lags in primary care where the doctor often plays all roles at once.

Managing a patient’s case in this fragmented system requires better tech and team support. It also requires time. In comes the final mismatch: between what is paid for and what medical care requires. Despite pushes in recent years for payment models that focus on value, the vast majority of health care organizations in the U.S. still operate according to fee-for-service. Here, health organizations or doctors get paid based on discrete services they provide. In primary care, that service has been commodified into the office visit. Nothing else directly counts as paid work: not communicating with patients in between visits, not following up on test results, not digging through medical records, and not discussing cases with other doctors. Moreover, fee-for-service generally reimburses more for visits with new patients than appointments with patients following up. With the financial incentives stacked to book as many patients as possible in face-to-face visits, appointments get compressed to fifteen minutes and a typical primary care doctor’s panel swells to over 2,000 patients. All the extra works spills into doctors’ off hours. Meanwhile, each patient competes against thousands for coveted appointments. When attempts to secure timely appointments fail, patients turn to messaging, moving the deluge for doctors to another uncompensated channel that many practices are now trying to disincentivize by tacking on a charge.

The result is a perfect storm that drives good doctors out of traditional medical practices while patients lose outlets to communicate with them. I wish I could have called my patient. But doctors must pick their poison: they speed up and miss important details, spend their nights and weekends carrying over work, or leave. The options for leaving include going part-time (because everyone knows the secret that part-time is actually full-time), joining concierge practices that cap at 200 patients compared to 2,000, or quitting medicine entirely. Patients who can’t get appointments navigate their own lose-lose options: they try to self-manage medical concerns, turn to urgent care or emergency rooms for non-emergency issues, or get billed when they send messages asking for help.

Fixing this crisis will involve profoundly rethinking how we allocate the resources we already have. For years, the labor needed to assemble disparate pieces of a fragmented health care system continued to climb, while the party line to doctors remains the same: Just one more thing. One more click. One more message. One more workaround. Just squeeze it in, we don’t know how, but do it anyway, and do remember if anything goes wrong the responsibility is fully yours. This way of thinking is why primary care doctors are tasked with squeezing 26.7 hours of work into a single day. It is why nearly half of doctors report burnout with bureaucratic demands the number-one cause (this stayed true both before and during the Covid pandemic). And it’s partly why the average wait to see a new doctor is 26 days and getting longer. Some fixes like changing payment models will be harder to spread. But other improvements, such as training staff to tackle clerical work and investing in quality improvement initiatives to augment the technology, can be made now. With every proposed innovation, we must finally take seriously the questions: Does this help doctors or make their lives harder? Will this let doctors know their patients better or deepen the divide?

For a doctor who has led life-and-death emergency responses to talk so fervently of paperwork and scheduling might seem ridiculous. It is. But ignoring the mundane is how medicine reached this untenable state; putting it off any longer is costing us time, energy, and lives.