Saudi Arabia and other producers must cut oil prices, global central banks “immediately” needed to slash interest rates, and foreign companies must ramp up investments in US factories or face tariffs. The EU — which came in for particular opprobrium — must stop hitting big American technology companies with competition fines.

Trump’s demands came amid a frenetic first week in office in which the president launched a blitzkrieg of executive orders and announcements intended not just to reshape the state but also assert America’s economic and commercial supremacy. Tariffs of up to 25 per cent could be slapped on Canada and Mexico as early as February 1, riding roughshod over the trade deal Trump himself negotiated in his first term.  China could face levies of up to 100 per cent if Beijing failed to agree on a deal to sell at least 50 per cent of the TikTok app to a US company, while the EU was told to purchase more American oil if it wanted to avoid tariffs. Underscoring the new American unilateralism, Trump pulled the US out of the World Health Organization, as well as exiting the Paris climate accord for a second time.

This proposal throws a “hand grenade” at international tax policymaking, says Niels Johannesen, director of the Oxford university Centre for Business Taxation at Saïd Business School. The move suggests a determination to “shape other countries’ tax policy through coercion rather than through co-operation”, he adds.

“Those around Trump have had time to build up a systematic, methodological approach for protectionist trade policy and it shows,” says former UK trade department official Allie Renison, now at consultancy SEC Newgate. The approach will be to build up a case file of “evidence” against countries, she says, and then use it to extract concessions in areas of both economic and foreign policy.

The question remains how far Trump is willing to go. The danger of trampling on the rules-based order, says Jeromin Zettelmeyer, head of the Bruegel think-tank, is a complete breakdown in the diplomatic and legal channels for settling international disputes. If Trump were to pull out of a wider range of international frameworks, such as the WTO or the IMF, he warns, then the arrangements that help govern the global economy could get “substantively destroyed”.

Some caution against being awestruck by Trump’s threats or his espousal of capitalism without limits, because his agenda was so incoherent. “What we are seeing is huge doses of American hubris,” says Arancha González, dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po. “We are blinded by the intensity of all the issues put on the table and by Trump’s conviction. But we are not looking at the contradictions. It’s like we are all on an orange drug

Pioneered by our team and now widely used as a standard in the field, RCS is the classically hardest benchmark that can be done on a quantum computer today. You can think of this as an entry point for quantum computing — it checks whether a quantum computer is doing something that couldn’t be done on a classical computer. Any team building a quantum computer should check first if it can beat classical computers on RCS; otherwise there is strong reason for skepticism that it can tackle more complex quantum tasks.

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other.

The most famous of Israel’s foundational claims — that it was a necessary sanctuary for one of the world’s most oppressed peoples, who may not have survived without a state of their own — is at the root of this complication and undergirds the prevailing viewpoint of the political-media-entertainment nexus. It is Israel’s unique logic of existence that has provided a quantum of justice to the Israeli project in the eyes of Americans and others around the world, and it’s what separates Jewish Israelis from the white supremacists of the Jim Crow South, who had no justice on their side at all.

“It’s kind of hard to remember, but even as late as 2014, people were talking about the Civil War as this complicated subject,” Jackson said. “Ta-Nehisi was going to plantations and hanging out at Monticello and looking at all the primary documents and reading a thousand books, and it became clear that the idea of a ‘complicated’ narrative was ridiculous.” The Civil War was, Coates concluded, solely about the South’s desire to perpetuate slavery, and the subsequent attempts over the next century and a half to hide that simple fact betrayed, he believed, a bigger lie — the lie that America was a democracy, a mass delusion that he would later call “the Dream” in Between the World and Me.

The hallmarks of The Atlantic’s coverage include variations of Israel’s seemingly limitless “right to defend itself”; an assertion that extremists on “both sides” make the conflict worse, with its corollary argument that if only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jewish-supremacist government were ousted, then progress could be made; abundant sympathy for the suffering of Israelis and a comparatively muted response to the suffering of Palestinians; a fixation on the way the issue is debated in America, particularly on college campuses; and regular warnings that antisemitism is on the rise both in America and around the world.

the overall pattern reveals a distorting worldview that pervades the industry and, as Coates writes in The Message, results in “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.” “The view of mainstream American commentators is a false equivalence between subjugator and subjugated,” said Nathan Thrall, the Jerusalem-based author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, as if the Israelis and the Palestinians were equal parties in an ancient tug-of-war.

For Coates, the problem for the industry at large partly stems from the perennial problem of inadequate representation. “It is extremely rare to see Palestinians and Arabs writing the coverage or doing the book reviews,” he said. “I would be interested if you took the New York Times and the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and looked at how many of those correspondents are Palestinian, I wonder what you would find.” (It’s a testament to just how polarizing the issue is that many Jewish Americans believe the bias in news media works the other way around, against Israel.)

American mainstream journalism, Coates says, defers to American authority. “It’s very similar,” he told me, “to how American journalism has been deferential to the cops. We privilege the cops, we privilege the military, we privilege the politicians. The default setting is toward power.”

in the total coverage, in all of the talk of experts and the sound bites of politicians and the dispatches of credentialed reporters, a sense of ambiguity is allowed to prevail. “The fact of the matter is,” he said, “that kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb shit they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some motherfuckers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists.”

When I asked Coates what he wanted to see happen in Israel and Palestine, he avoided the geopolitical scale and tended toward the more specific — for example, to have journalists not be “shot by army snipers.” He said that the greater question was not properly for him; it belonged to those with lived experience and those who had been studying the problem for years.

“I have a deep-seated fear,” he told me, “that the Black struggle will ultimately, at its root, really just be about narrow Black interest. And I don’t think that is in the tradition of what our most celebrated thinkers have told the world. I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide, in defense of a state that is practicing apartheid, I won’t be able to just sit here and shake my head and say, ‘Well, that is unfortunate.’ I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned.”

even more important, many advocates argue, is how the two reforms together can change how candidates and elected officials of all stripes approach their jobs, by adjusting the incentive structure they operate under. Increasingly, many states and districts are solidly red or blue, meaning the general election is uncompetitive, and the key race takes place in the primary. That’s a problem, because the primary electorate is by and large smaller, more partisan and more extreme than the general electorate. Right now, with politicians worrying more about the primary than the general, they’re more focused on playing to their base than on reaching beyond it and solving problems, critics argue.

By allowing multiple candidates to advance, Final Four/Five shifts the crucial election from the primary to the general. And RCV means the votes of Democrats in red districts and Republicans in blue ones still matter, even if their top choice remains unlikely to win. Together, it means candidates are rewarded for paying attention to the entire general electorate, not just a small slice of staunch supporters. As a result, it encourages candidates — and elected officials, once in office — toward moderation and problem-solving, and away from extremism.

“Wednesday night, we witnessed over two hours of fear-mongering and gaslighting, of cynicism and whataboutism, of canned talking points and memorized one-liners,” Hasan said. Despite the “pious-sounding, high-minded” tone struck by many candidates, their responses lacked substance and underscored their lack of seriousness in the race. “Forget a vision for America. These people have no vision for the Republican Party — a party that lost the House in 2018, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020 and only narrowly regained the House in 2022,” he added. “It was another reminder that the Republican Party of the United States is not a normal center-right or conservative party… These are political pygmies, trailing a disgraced front-runner who is facing 91 criminal counts in four different jurisdictions.”

The broader issue is that the video industry finally seems to be facing what happened to the print and music industry before them: the Internet comes bearing gifts like infinite capacity and free distribution, but those gifts are a poisoned chalice for industries predicated on scarcity. When anyone could publish text, most text-based businesses went from massive profitability to terminal decline; when anyone could distribute music the music industry could only be saved by tech companies like Spotify helping them sell convenience in place of plastic discs.

thanks to COVID a lot of people fell out of the habit of going to the movie theater, and it appears around 25% of the audience permanently found something better to do with their time; that same reality applies to TV. Just as newspapers once thought the Internet was a boon because it increased their addressable market, only to find out that it also drastically increased competition for readers’ attention, Hollywood has to face the reality that the ability to make far more shows extends not only to studios but also to literally anyone.

Inside an online platform everything, even reality, is just content and content just begets more content. And in a world run by big platforms, a person’s post becomes discourse, discourse creates memes, memes inspire a fandom, and fandoms become social movements. And over the last decade, as platforms flattened everything into content, most news publishers, hiding behind antiquated ideas about objectivity and made desperate from vanishing ad revenue, allowed themselves to be flattened, as well. And now, even though they don’t think of themselves as a competing news fandoms, they absolutely are.

I don’t think the way people react to news stories in 2023 is all that different from how it’s ever been. Here are two great threads comparing funny mean-spirited reactions to the Titanic sinking to the similar memes everyone made this month about the imploded submarine billionaires. But now, if you don’t like what’s in the newspaper you can just write your own thing and get more readers than it did.

Can’t possibly comprehend that extreme levels of wealth created an environment of arrogance that led to a submarine vaporizing a bunch of guys in the middle of the ocean? Just tweet that that’s not actually what happened. The fact the Russian coup didn’t even last a full day and no one got arrested sounds suspicious to you? Easy. Just make up something else.

Eventually every platform wanted the same kind of content, but to fit specific algorithms and specific demographics, which no one would bother to do, so the same videos just got posted everywhere until none of the networks felt distinct from each other and every site just pivoted away from the whole idea.

I wrote five scripts during my season and a half on TZ, and I was deeply involved in every aspect of every one of them.   I did not just write my script, turn it in, and go away.   I sat in on the casting sessions.   I worked with the directors.   I was present at the table reads.   “The Last Defender of Camelot” was the first of my scripts to go into production, and I was on set every day.   I watched the stuntmen rehearse the climactic sword fight (in the lobby of the ST ELSEWHERE set, as it turned out), and I was present when they shot that scene and someone zigged when he should have zagged and a stuntman’s nose was cut off… a visceral lesson as to the kind of thing that can go wrong.   With Phil and Jim and Harvey Frand (our line producer, another great guy who taught me a lot), I watched dailies every day.    After the episode was in the can, I sat in on some post-production, and watched the editors work their magic.   I learned from them too.

Streamers and shortened seasons have blown the ladder to splinters.   The way it works now, a show gets put in development, the showrunner assembles a “mini-room,” made up of a couple of senior writers and a couple newcomers, they meet for a month or two, beat out the season, break down the episodes, go off and write scripts, reassemble, get notes, give notes, rewrite, rinse and repeat… and finally turn into the scripts.   And show is greenlit (or not, some shows never get past the room) and sent into production.  The showrunner and his second, maybe his second and his third, take it from there.   The writer producers.   The ones who already know all the things that I learned on TWILIGHT ZONE. The junior writers?  They’re not there.   Once they delivered their scripts and did a revision of two, they were paid, sent home, their salary ended.   They are off looking for another gig.

In many cases they won’t be asked to set even when the episodes they wrote are being filmed.   (They may be ALLOWED on set, if the showrunner and execs are cool with that, but only as a visitor, with no authority, no role.   And no pay, of course.   They may even be told they are not allowed to speak to the actors).

One of the things the AMPTP put forward in their last offer to the WGA is that some writers might be brought onto sets as unpaid interns, to “shadow” and “observe.”   Even that will not be an absolute right.   Maybe they will be let in, maybe not.   These are the people who wrote the stories being filmed, who created the characters, who wrote the words the actors are saying.   I was WAY more than that in 1985, and so was every other staff writer in television at the time.

Mini-rooms are abominations, and the refusal of the AMPTP to pay writers to stay with their shows through production — as part of the JOB, for which they need to be paid, not as a tourist —  is not only wrong, it is incredibly short sighted.   If the Story Editors of 2023 are not allowed to get any production experience, where do the studios think the Showrunners of 2033 are going to come from?