Mokslas, studijos ir ekonomika

Ko turėtume pasimokyti iš šiaurietiškos laimės

2026-07-04T12:09:39.478-07:00

„Skandinavija yra penkių savaičių atostogų, praktiškai nemokamo universiteto, vienerių metų tėvystės atostogų, lengvos vaikų priežiūros ir labai laimingų piliečių kraštas.“ [1]

Ši citata tiksliai atspindi Šiaurės šalių modelio, socialinės ir ekonominės sistemos, kuriai prioritetą teikia tokios šalys, kaip Norvegija, Švedija ir Danija, siekdamos subalansuoti didelius mokesčius su patikimomis viešosiomis paslaugomis ir neprilygstama darbo ir asmeninio gyvenimo pusiausvyra, esmę.

Šios garsiosios Skandinavijos politikos realybė apima:

• Penkių savaičių atostogos: tokiose šalyse, kaip Norvegija ir Švedija įstatymu nustatytos minimalios apmokamos atostogos yra 25 dienos (arba 5 savaitės) per metus.

• Beveik nemokamas universitetas: valstybiniuose universitetuose paprastai nemokamos studijos piliečiams ir ES/EEE studentams. Nors kai kurios šalys (pvz., Norvegija) įvedė studijų mokesčius ne ES/EEE užsienio studentams, aukštasis mokslas, palyginti su JAV, išlieka labai subsidijuojamas.

• Vienerių metų tėvystės atostogos: tėvams suteikiamos dosnios apmokamos atostogos. Pavyzdžiui, Švedijoje tėvai dalijasi iki 480 dienų apmokamų tėvystės atostogų.

• Lengva vaikų priežiūra: ikimokyklinis ugdymas yra labai subsidijuojamas valstybės, todėl išlaidos yra mažos ir prieinamos šeimoms.

• Laimingi piliečiai: Šiaurės šalys nuolat užima aukščiausias vietas metinėje Pasaulio laimės ataskaitoje, daugiausia dėl stipraus bendruomenės palaikymo jausmo ir mažo finansinio nerimo lygio.

1. What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jul 4, 2026. By Nicholas Kristof and Marthe Thu.

What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness

2026-07-04T11:57:33.598-07:00

“Do you know how to get an American company to grant you excellent wages and amazing benefits, even for an entry-level job?

Move to Norway and take the job there.

Construction workers, hotel maids, gas station attendants and store cashiers will typically earn more than $20 an hour plus evening or weekend bonuses, about five weeks’ paid vacation each year, a pension, maternity and paternity leave that add up to a year and paid leave when a child is sick. You may even get paid time off if you move homes.

Those are broadly the terms for Norwegian and foreign companies alike, including the likes of 7-Eleven shops, Burger King restaurants and ExxonMobil-affiliated gas stations. Which raises the question: If American and other international firms can offer such munificent terms for retail jobs in Norway, could they do so in our country?

We’ll get to that, but what unfolds here is a result of the Nordic social and economic model, which aims to reduce inequality, boost opportunity and optimize the quality of life — providing a lift, in particular, for those at the lower end of the income scale. What we tend to think of as “low wage” jobs aren’t truly low-earning in Norway, and they also come with state-provided health care and child care, plus strong unions that ensure that layoffs or firings are rare.

You want security, health care and the American dream? Look to Scandinavia.

“We actually live the American dream,” Jens Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway who is now the finance minister, told me. “The American dream, it’s more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.”

Skeptics have argued that generous welfare benefits and the resulting high taxes have held back the Nordic economies. Perhaps a bit. “Farewell, Nordic model,” The Economist wrote in 2006. But Norway is now richer than the United States per capita, and Norwegian workers are more productive than American workers, with higher output per hour. Scandinavians live longer than Americans, and people are happier. The five Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — all rank among the six happiest countries in the world in the World Happiness Report, based on Gallup polling.

Yet the Nordic countries are themselves facing significant challenges, including fiscal pressures, immigration, widening inequality and perhaps some breakdown in the social consensus. Some doubt whether the model can survive here, let alone be exported to countries that are larger, less homogeneous and more suspicious of taxation.

On the other hand, it’s not an alien model but, for Americans, a path we once blazed. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, told me that the United States and Scandinavian nations pursued similar policies from the 1940s through the 1960s. That was the period when the United States rapidly expanded educational opportunities, had strong unions and, in the 1940s, experimented with universal child care. The post-World War II period is sometimes thought of as a golden age, for the economic pie both grew and was sliced more equally.

“The U.S. in the mid-20th century was sort of like Scandinavia today,” Katz said. But America changed course in the 1970s and eventually embraced the Reagan revolution.

One reason for the retreat, I’ve argued, was racialized political rhetoric that characterized some safety-net programs and investments in opportunity — used by Americans from all walks of life — as handouts primarily benefiting Black people, with a particular emphasis on caricatures of the “welfare queen.”

It’s also true that the American economy in the 1970s was underperforming and markets did need a kick in the pants in the form of deregulation. Meanwhile, the Nordic countries largely continued their investments in human capital and reducing inequality.

Although I’ve been visiting the Nordic countries for decades, I became more interested in their model over the past 15 years because of the struggles of my hometown in rural Oregon. Mills and factories closed, meth arrived, and three school friends died while homeless on the streets.

I can’t help thinking that they might be alive today if they had been born in Scandinavia with its strong social safety net.

How does this system work in practice?

Consider Hauk Kjaeran, 24, a waiter at Nektar restaurant in Oslo. He has been at his job for only a few months but is paid more than $25 an hour, not including tips.

He also gets five weeks’ vacation, earns a pension, is entitled to hefty parental and sick leave and is studying to be a sommelier, all paid for.

A full workweek in Norway is 37.5 hours, but Kjaeran asked for a 60 percent contract. “I have some other stuff to do, and I like my freedom as well,” he explained.

One waitress at the restaurant is on leave, sailing around the world with friends. I asked the restaurant owner, Veslemoey Hvidsten, what she thought of her missing employee.

“She wanted to do this,” Hvidsten said. “So we said, ‘Yeah, why not?’”

Hvidsten emphasized that her aim isn’t to squeeze every last penny she can out of her restaurant, and that happy employees are better for customers and for her business.

“That’s how we build the whole country,” she added. “Taking care of each other.”

When Americans discuss the Nordic system, they sometimes suffer from three misunderstandings.

The first is that these are socialist countries. While they are often run by social democrats, they have market economies. Sweden did experiment in the 1970s and ’80s with quasi-socialist policies, but the upshot was an economic crisis. As Johan Norberg, a Swedish writer, put it: “We have been socialists and we’ve been successful — but never at the same time.”

The second misunderstanding is that because of their strong welfare systems, citizens of Nordic countries lie around while collecting benefits. Sure, some people do manipulate the system, but the labor force participation rate is higher in Nordic countries than in the United States.

The third is that in the case of Norway, its success is mostly a reflection of its oil wealth. Oil has given Norway a nice cushion, but the country has also managed the cushion unusually well — putting it in what is one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Moreover, according to Geir Axelsen, the director-general of Statistics Norway, the increase in female labor force participation in Norway since the early 1970s appears to have added roughly as much to the country’s gross domestic product as oil has.

Indeed, women are an underappreciated component of the Nordic economic engine. Historically, American women had higher rates of labor force participation than did women in most other countries, but Scandinavia now easily surpasses the United States by this metric. In 2025, some 56 percent of American working-age women were in the labor force; in Sweden and Norway, the figure was around 62 percent; in Iceland, 70 percent.

Having the flexibility to work part time or adjust hours is one factor that almost certainly increases the share of women in the labor force in Nordic countries.

Another factor is the availability of high-quality day care. Norway’s system, which is typical, takes children from the age of 1, and the cost is about $120 per month. For low-income families, it’s nearly free.

“If it wasn’t for this kindergarten, we wouldn’t have three kids,” Mats Brekke, a solar engineer, told me as he dropped by the day care center in Oslo where his middle child spends the day. He had his 10-month-old daughter on his arm; she’ll start in August.

The day care center where I met Brekke was in a working-class Oslo neighborhood, with bright rooms and a diverse group of children playing with one another — all rattling away in Norwegian. That’s one aim of the system: encouraging children in immigrant communities to embrace being Norwegian from an early age.

“Especially for children who come from other countries, like immigrants or refugees, it will help them to integrate,” said a teacher, Worod Alkazemi, herself an Iraqi Norwegian who says she was molded into a Norwegian a generation ago as a little girl in day care.

One-fifth of Norwegians are either immigrants or their children, often from countries like Syria or Somalia with conservative social cultures. Day care centers try to nurture Nordic social attitudes, which tend to be more liberal.

To understand how the Nordic socioeconomic system evolved, I dropped by the office of Kalle Moene, an economist at the University of Oslo. The system began in the 1930s, he said, when workers in thriving sectors of the economy agreed to hold down their wage demands to support sectors that were struggling.

That principle — sacrificing to help those not doing so well — still underpins the region’s business model. Norwegians who are better off are willing to give up some income to ensure that people in blue-collar jobs get by.

Moene argues that this wage compression promotes innovation and dynamism by boosting the profitability of growth industries and by lowering profits in lagging industries.

“The lowest wages become higher, destroying bad jobs,” Moene said. “The highest wages become lower, creating more good jobs.”

In addition, the social safety net in Nordic countries means that workers are less fearful of trade and technology costing their jobs. This makes it easier to embrace policies that boost growth overall but threaten some positions, Stoltenberg said.

I wonder if wage compression may also have resulted in political compression. There seems to be less political toxicity in Nordic countries than in the United States and many other countries. By international standards, civility reigns. Right-wing nationalists exist here, but haven’t made as many inroads as in Germany, France or Britain.

Eirik Lae Solberg, the governing mayor of Oslo, is an important figure in the country’s conservative party. He opposes the country’s wealth tax and generally thinks Norwegian taxes are too high. But by American standards, he would count as liberal.

“I strongly believe that what we do in the Nordics to provide opportunity for all is growth-promoting,” Solberg told me. “In the U.S., I would probably be on the left.”

For all the success of the Nordic model to date, it is under great pressure. Many social benefits are expensive, and paying for them is a growing challenge as the population ages and requires more elder care.

“Every institution in the society is under strain,” said Shazia Majid, a columnist at VG, a Norwegian newspaper. She noted that because so many women are working, they aren’t able to care for aging parents — at-home labor that would probably fall to women more often than to men — and the system is financially pressed even as it needs tens of thousands more health workers.

Immigration adds to the challenges, particularly in Sweden, where a quarter of the population is now made up of immigrants or their children. Violent crime, often linked by commentators to immigration, is a serious problem in Sweden (although the country is far from being the world’s “rape capital,” as some lurid right-wing accounts claim).

Serious observers, most notably Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank president and a former prime minister of Italy, suggest that Europe has lost some of its competitiveness, and that sentiment resonates in the Nordics as well. I think there’s something to that, but the hand-wringing can be overdone in the case of the Nordic countries.

Sweden ranks No. 2 in the Global Innovation Index, produced by the World Intellectual Property Organization, ahead of the United States at No. 3. Finland and Denmark are also in the top ten.

I’ve been talking about Nordic policies, but what if the big driver of success isn’t policy so much as norms? These are traditionally homogeneous societies that maintain village values of mutual support. When researchers “lost” wallets in 40 countries around the world, the two countries with the highest rates of the wallets being returned (when they contained money) were Denmark and Sweden.

My sense is that norms and policies reinforce each other. Iyad el-Baghdadi, a prominent Palestinian in Norway who was accepted as a refugee, said that Norwegians had been extraordinarily welcoming and kind. But it’s not just that, he added: “It’s that this is the system.”

Stoltenberg offered an example of policy molding norms. In the 1980s, he and others pushed for paid paternity leaves in part to ensure that dads would spend time with their newborn children. This social engineering worked: Fathers now are deeply involved in caring for children, taking some of the load off mothers. “That’s perhaps one of those reforms that have really changed Norway,” Stoltenberg told me.

Is the Nordic model replicable? Could convenience stores and gas stations in America pay their cashiers and attendants $20 or more an hour plus a pension and five weeks’ vacation?

One challenge, economists told me, is that relative to many American workers, Norwegian laborers often have higher literacy rates, appear more able to pass a drug test, can handle technology better and can be relied upon to stay in their jobs longer, meaning that employers benefit from a more experienced, more productive work force. In effect, Nordic employers can pay more in part because workers generate more income.

In that sense, learning from the Nordics is not as simple as raising minimum wages and seeing happiness soar. Rather, it’s the challenge of investing in human capital from early childhood through university-level education, pushing relentlessly to broaden opportunity at every level.

All this raises taxes. But it also raises skills and makes workers more productive. From a distance, we see how much Nordic workers get; up close, you see also how much they contribute.” [1]

In summary:

“Scandinavia is the land of five-week vacations, virtually free university, one-year parental leaves, easy child care — and very happy citizens.”

This quote accurately reflects the core of the Nordic model, a social and economic system prioritized by countries like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark to balance high taxes with robust public services and unparalleled work-life balance.

The reality behind these celebrated Scandinavian policies includes:

• Five-Week Vacations: Statutory minimum paid holiday leave is 25 days (or 5 weeks) annually in countries like Norway and Sweden.

• Virtually Free University: Public universities are generally tuition-free for citizens and EU/EEA students. While some nations (like Norway) have introduced tuition fees for non-EU/EEA international students, higher education remains heavily subsidized compared to the US.

• One-Year Parental Leave: Parents are granted generous paid time off. In Sweden, for example, parents share up to 480 days of paid parental leave.

• Easy Child Care: Early childhood education is highly subsidized by the state, keeping costs low and accessible for families.

• Happy Citizens: Nordic countries consistently rank at the very top of the annual World Happiness Report, largely due to a strong sense of community support and low levels of financial anxiety.

Lithuanian Conservatives, led by Kubilius, and Liberals, led by Steponavičius, tried to make America from Lithuania. Those of us, who seek higher education, are gifted, but cannot afford tutors and compete with the rich at exams, must take bank loans and pay high tuition fees at Lithuanian universities. No happy talented eager workers for Lithuania. Our pathway to Nordic lifestyle is now closed.

Aping America is not working in Lithuania. America is very rich country. We don’t have these natural riches. Only thing we have are our people. We stopped using all of them. We need some level of talent density to compete. We are below this level. Rich between us studying for free are leaving in droves looking for greener pastures, more interesting work.

A massive exodus of young professionals, coupled with high tuition rates (€1,300 to €15,000 per year) and a competitive student loan system, has undeniably fueled a talent drain. This reflects the friction between traditional Nordic social models and the post-Soviet market reforms championed by past Kubilius-Steponavičius leadership.

While the state has tried to expand access to state-funded spots, structural barriers like private tutoring costs and reliance on loans make it difficult for gifted students from lower-income backgrounds to compete equitably at university entry exams. When top graduates cannot find engaging work at home, they often seek better opportunities elsewhere.

1. What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jul 4, 2026. By Nicholas Kristof and Marthe Thu

JAV Medicare draudimo vaistams nuo viršsvorio poveikis yra sudėtingas --- Svorį mažinančių, vaistų aprėptis yra naudinga pacientams, tačiau Volstryte matematika yra sudėtingesnė

2026-07-04T08:42:58.681-07:00

"Medicare pradėjo aprėpti senjorams skirtus svorio mažinimo vaistus. Pacientams, kurie ilgą laiką buvo atskirti nuo GLP-1 bumo, atidarymas yra tikras įvykis. Volstritui tai nėra netikėta antraštė.

Milijonai amerikiečių vartoja tokius vaistus kaip Wegovy ir Zepbound. Tačiau federalinis įstatymas draudžia Medicare mokėti už vaistus, naudojamus svorio kontrolei. Tiek daug senjorų, negalinčių sau leisti narkotikų, buvo palikti nuošalyje.

Eli Lilly ir Novo Nordisk, „Zepbound“ ir „Wegovy“ kūrėjams, „Medicare“ visada buvo didelis prizas: didžiausias vaistų paklausos telkinys šalyje ir viena didelė nutukimo gydymo priemonė, kurios negalėjo pasiekti. Tačiau kol kas atsipirkimas jiems bus lėtas ir sunkus.

Kai kuriais skaičiavimais, net 20 milijonų JAV senjorų turi antsvorio arba yra nutukę.

Tačiau baseinas, į kurį galima patekti per naują Medicare kelią, žinomą kaip tiltas, yra daug mažesnis. Programa, leidžianti reikalavimus atitinkantiems senjorams gauti vaistus už 50 USD per mėnesį, yra laikina, o jos taisyklės yra griežtesnės nei vaistų Maisto ir vaistų administracijos patvirtinimai, todėl reikalaujama didesnės svorio slenksčio arba rimtos susijusios būklės.

Neįtraukiami visi, gaunantys GLP-1 draudimą pagal standartines Medicare vaistų išmokas nuo diabeto, miego apnėjos ar susijusių ligų.

Paleiskite tuos filtrus ir skaičius atrodo kuklus. KFF, nešališka sveikatos tyrimų grupė, nustatė Medicare teiginius ir įvertino 3,8 milijono senjorų, iš daugiau nei 13 milijonų turinčių antsvorį arba nutukusių. Agentūra sutinka: jos Medicare direktorius Chrisas Klompas sakė, kad programa prasidės „vienaženkliais milijonais“.

Iš to seka pajamų matematika. Evanas Seigermanas, „BMO Capital Markets“ analitikas, artimiausiu metu pritraukia maždaug 3 mlrd. Padidinkite dalyvavimą, ir šis skaičius gali būti didesnis. Šie skaičiai nėra nereikšmingi, tačiau reikia daug, kad padarytų reikšmingą skirtumą dviem įmonėms, kurių bendras metinis GLP-1 pardavimas siekia 80 mlrd. USD.

Ir net kuklus atvejis numato švarų diegimą, o tai, ką naujos vyriausybės programos suteikia retai. Gydytojai turi patvirtinti, kad pacientai atitinka griežtus kriterijus. Vaistinės turi nukreipti pretenzijas nepažįstamais kanalais. Kaip teigia Scottas Kahanas, Nacionalinio svorio ir sveikatingumo centro direktorius, iš pradžių tikėkitės painiavos ir žagsėjimo.

Tada ateina dalis, kurią sunkiau nuspėti. Programa egzistuoja tik todėl, kad vyriausybė sukūrė ją kaip laikiną sprendimą dėl įstatymo, kuris draudžia Medicare padengti svorio metimo išlaidas. Jis turėjo būti trumpas, šešių mėnesių perėjimas prie nuolatinės, draudikų valdomos išmokos pagal Medicare D dalies vaistų planus, vadinamus Balance.

Tačiau planas jį perduoti 2027 m. žlugo. Per mažai privačių planų sutiko prisiimti išlaidas, o balandžio mėn. vyriausybė neribotam laikui atidėjo „Balance“, pratęsdama numatytą „Bridge“ terminą ir apmokėdama sąskaitas iki 2027 m. Draudikai galėtų įsitraukti iki 2028 m., tačiau niekas jų neverčia, ir jie vieną kartą atsisakė dėl paprastos priežasties: šios kategorijos draudimas padidina įmokas visiems.

Jei matematika nepasikeis, sakė Kahanas, tai gali tapti tiltu į niekur. Pasak jo, kas galėtų tai išgelbėti, yra įrodymas, kad vaistai atsiperka dėl geresnės sveikatos ir mažesnės vartotojų sąnaudos.

Seigermanas sakė, kad ilgalaikėje perspektyvoje ši galimybė gali išaugti į kažką prasmingo, o jei įsisavinimas viršys lūkesčius, tai tikrai turės teigiamą poveikį. Tačiau tas pats netikrumas nukerta kitą kelią. Sunku sukurti švarų modelį aplink politiką, kuri galėtų tyliai tapti nuolatine arba išnykti savo dabartine forma.

Programa yra labai svarbus durų atidarymas, nes kai kurios tyliai užsidaro. Šių vaistų nuo nutukimo, kuris yra pagrindinis jų augimo variklis, komercinė aprėptis pradėjo trauktis. Daugiau nei ketvirtadalis didžiųjų įmonių teigia, kad šiemet ar kitais metais prideda kriterijus, o daugelis kitų planuoja atsisakyti aprėpties svorio metimo tikslais.

„Bridge“ šiandien sudaro nedideles pajamas, tačiau vyriausybės parama gali tapti labai svarbi svorio metimo vaistų tiekėjams ir pacientams. „Wall Street“ atveju tai yra kintamasis, į kurį reikia žiūrėti, o ne į jį remtis.” [1]

1. Medicare for Obesity Drugs Is Tricky --- Coverage for weight-loss drugs is a win for patients, but the math is more complicated for Wall Street. Wainer, David. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 July 2026: B10.

Medicare for Obesity Drugs Is Tricky --- Coverage for weight-loss drugs is a win for patients, but the math is more complicated for Wall Street

2026-07-04T08:37:31.909-07:00

“Medicare began covering weight-loss drugs for seniors. For patients long shut out from the GLP-1 boom, the opening is a real milestone. For Wall Street, it isn't the windfall the headlines suggest.

Drugs such as Wegovy and Zepbound are used by millions of Americans. But federal law bars Medicare from paying for medications used for weight control. So many seniors unable to afford the drugs have been left behind.

For Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, the makers of Zepbound and Wegovy, Medicare was always a big prize: the nation's largest pool of drug demand, and the one big market obesity treatment couldn't reach. But for now the payoff to them will be slow and hard.

By some estimates, as many as 20 million U.S. seniors are overweight or obese.

But the pool that might gain access through Medicare's new pathway, known as Bridge, is far smaller. The program, which lets eligible seniors get the drugs for a $50 monthly copay, is temporary, and its rules are tighter than the drugs' Food and Drug Administration approvals, requiring a higher weight threshold or a serious related condition.

Anyone receiving GLP-1 coverage through standard Medicare drug benefits, for diabetes, sleep apnea or related conditions, is excluded.

Run those filters and the number looks modest. KFF, a nonpartisan health-research group, mapped Medicare claims and estimated 3.8 million seniors eligible, out of more than 13 million who are overweight or obese. The agency agrees: Its Medicare director, Chris Klomp, said the program would start in the "single-digit millions."

The revenue math follows from there. Evan Seigerman, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, pegs the near-term opportunity at roughly $3 billion a year in added sales, assuming modest uptake. Push participation up, and the figure could be higher. Those numbers aren't trivial, but it takes a lot to make a significant difference for two companies whose combined annual GLP-1 sales are running north of $80 billion.

And even the modest case assumes a clean rollout, something new government programs rarely deliver. Doctors must attest that patients meet strict criteria. Pharmacies must route claims through unfamiliar channels. As Scott Kahan, director of the National Center for Weight and Wellness, puts it, expect confusion and hiccups at the outset.

Then comes the part that is harder to predict. The program exists only because the government designed it as a temporary workaround to a law that bars Medicare from covering weight loss. It was meant to be brief, a six-month on-ramp to a permanent, insurer-run benefit through Medicare's Part D drug plans, called Balance.

But the plan to hand it off for 2027 fell apart. Too few private plans agreed to take on the cost, and in April the government shelved Balance indefinitely, extending the intended timeline for Bridge and continuing to foot the bill through 2027. Insurers could step in for 2028, but nothing compels them to, and they balked once for a simple reason: Covering this category pushes premiums higher for everyone.

Unless that math changes, Kahan said, this risks becoming a bridge to nowhere. What could rescue it, he said, is proof the drugs pay for themselves through better health and lower downstream costs.

Longer term, the opportunity could grow into something meaningful, Seigerman said, and if uptake outruns expectations, there is real upside. But that same uncertainty cuts the other way. It is hard to build a clean model around a policy that could quietly become permanent, or disappear in its current form.

The program is a crucial door opening as some are quietly closing. Commercial coverage of these drugs for obesity, a major engine of their growth, has begun to retreat. More than a quarter of big companies say they are adding criteria this year or next, while many others are planning to drop coverage for weight-loss purposes.

Bridge represents modest revenue today, but government support could become crucial for weight-loss drug providers and patients. For Wall Street, this is a variable to watch, not yet one to bank on.” [1]

Karinė pramonė skatina verslo inovacijas --- Ryšys tarp karo ir prekybos siekia Amerikos įkūrimo laikus

2026-07-04T06:01:21.244-07:00

„Praėjusį pavasarį JAV armijos pulkininkas Jeffrey Kainas patyrė apreiškimą: šaudmenys labai panašūs į ledus.

Kainas, kuris yra armijos operacijų Europoje vadas, žiūrėjo vaizdo įrašą apie naujas skaitmenines „Palantir Technologies“ sistemas, kurias jo padalinys ką tik pradėjo naudoti operacijoms ir tiekimo lygiams stebėti. Vaizdo įraše vieno iš „Palantir“ privačių klientų, „Wendy's“, vadovas paaiškino, kaip ta pati skaitmeninė sistema padeda greitojo maisto tinklui valdyti „Thin Mints“ skonio „Frosty“ mišinio atsargas visuose savo restoranuose.

„Tai mane pribloškė.“ „Pagalvojau: štai ką mes ir darome“, – prisimena Kainas. „Mūsų atveju tai 155 artilerijos šūviai, bet tai ta pati koncepcija.“

„Palantir“ dalyvavimas yra tik vienas iš daugybės atvejų JAV istorijoje, kai susipynė pramonė ir nacionalinė gynyba. Per visą žmonijos istoriją karas nuolat davė pelno kai kuriems, o kartu ir skatino verslą.

Pavyzdžiui, kryžiaus žygiai paspartino tarptautinių finansų plėtrą ir paskatino dvigubos apskaitos atsiradimą.

Tačiau būtent JAV kaip niekad anksčiau sujungė karą ir privatų verslą, kiekvienam įgalinant ir spartinant kitą.

„Santykiai peržengia bendradarbiavimo ribas ir yra tikra partnerystė siekiant JAV nacionalinio saugumo tikslų“, – sako atsargos JAV armijos generolas Josephas Votelis, dirbęs privačiame sektoriuje ir su juo, siekdamas skatinti bendradarbiavimą.

Santykių ištvermė yra pastebima, sako Votelis, kaip ir „subtilus, bet nuolatinis perėjimas nuo karinės prie civilinės pramonės lyderystės tokiose srityse kaip moksliniai tyrimai ir plėtra, naujos technologijos, nauji gamybos metodai ir naujų sričių – ypač kibernetinės ir kosmoso – atvėrimas“. dabar.“

Amerikos karo ir verslo ryšys taip sustiprėjo, kad prezidentas Dwightas D. Eisenhoweris – atsargos armijos generolas – perspėjo apie tai, ką jis pavadino kariniu-pramoniniu kompleksu.

„Potencialus pražūtingam netinkamai paskirstytos galios iškilimui egzistuoja ir išliks“, – sakė jis savo 1961 m. atsisveikinimo kalboje apie naujai sukurtą „nuolatinę didelio masto ginklų pramonę“.

Šios infrastruktūros sukūrimas užtruko beveik du šimtmečius. Springfildo ginklų sandėlis – vyriausybinė gamykla, įkurta Vašingtono įsakymu 1794 m. – buvo to, kas vėliau tapo privačios pramonės ramsčiais, įskaitant keičiamas dalis, gamybą konvejeriu, valandinį atlyginimą ir etatinius profesionalius vadovus, pradininkas.

Pilietinis karas buvo pirmasis didelis pasaulyje konfliktas, kurį nulėmė pramonės galia. Pramoninės Šiaurės gamyklos gamino šaudmenis tokiais kiekiais, kurių agrariniai Pietūs negalėjo pasiekti. Springfildo ginklų sandėlis, kuris 1860 m. pagamino mažiau nei 10 000 šautuvų, per kitus ketverius metus pagamino daugiau nei 800 000. metų.

Sąjungos vadai sustiprino šiuos pranašumus, pasinaudodami privačiais šiauriniais geležinkelių tinklais, sukurtais prekybai, kurie buvo platesni nei Konfederacijos jungtys.

Per vėlesnį pusšimtį metų be didesnio karo JAV kariuomenė susilpnėjo, o verslas sprogo – jį dar labiau paskatino Pilietinio karo pramonės plėtra. Paauksuoto amžiaus verslumas pasirodė esąs labai svarbus Amerikos pergalėms XX amžiuje.

Išradėjas Nikola Tesla 1898 m. pademonstravo radijo bangomis valdomo laivo prototipą Madison Square Garden arenoje Niujorke. Kaip ir brolių Wrightų skrydžio meistriškumas 1903 m., iš pradžių jis nesulaukė didelio kariuomenės susidomėjimo, tačiau karas netrukus tai pakeitė.

Ginklų dizaineris Johnas Mosesas Browningas XIX a. pabaigoje sukūrė klestintį verslą, gerokai patobulinęs šaunamųjų ginklų vidinius mechanizmus, kurių kulminacija buvo siaubingai mirtini kulkosvaidžiai. Jo kompanijos M2 .50 kalibro modelis, sukurtas po Pirmojo pasaulinio karo, vis dar gaminamas ir plačiai naudojamas.

Antrojo pasaulinio karo metu prezidentas Franklinas D. Ruzveltas verbavo patyrusius pramonininkus vadovauti privačiojo sektoriaus gamybos šuoliui. Automobilių gamintojai gamino lėktuvus, o maisto konservų gamintojai – šaudmenų dėžes. Dėl ryžtingo efektyvumo siekio vidutinis krovininio laivo „Liberty Ship“ surinkimo laikas sutrumpėjo nuo maždaug aštuonių mėnesių iki vos vieno mėnesio iki 1945 m.

JAV gamyklos aprūpino sąjungininkų sovietų pajėgas atsargomis.

Kai Eisenhoweris paskelbė savo perspėjimą, Sovietų Sąjunga jau buvo tapusi pramonės lydere. Užuot konkuravęs dėl Maskvos gamybos, Vašingtonas pasirinko išradingumu atsverti sovietų mastą. Pradėjusi nuo kosmoso lenktynių, JAV kariuomenė pasirašė dešimtmečius trukusią partnerystę su Amerikos verslu, kuri taip pat pertvarkė pasaulinę prekybą.

Pentagonas finansavo privačias įmones, kurios kūrė raketas, orlaivius, kompiuterius ir naujas medžiagas ginklams ir sistemoms, gyvybiškai svarbioms nacionaliniam saugumui.

Skaitmeniniai kompiuteriai pirmą kartą buvo sukurti vandenilinių bombų sprogimams modeliuoti.

Jumbo reaktyvinis lėktuvas „Boeing 747“, kuris aštuntajame dešimtmetyje demokratizavo oro susisiekimą, buvo įmanomas tik dėl galingų reaktyvinių variklių, sukurtų septintajame dešimtmetyje didžiuliam kariniam transporto lėktuvui C-5.

Maždaug tuo pačiu metu Amerika stengėsi aprūpinti savo besiplečiantį karą Vietname. Malcomas McLeanas, Naujojo Džersio gyventojas, komercinis krovinių siuntėjas, kuris propagavo naują idėją iš anksto pakuoti krovinius į dideles metalines dėžes, troško Pentagono sutarties. Taigi, jis investavo savo lėšas į konteinerių terminalo statybą Vietnamo Cam Ranh įlankoje.

Jo gabenimo konteineriai išsprendė kariuomenės krovinių problemas ir sukėlė revoliuciją pasaulinėje prekyboje. Grįžę į JAV tuščiais, konteineriai sustojo industrializuotoje Japonijoje, kad surinktų nebrangias vartojimo prekes, kurias pagriebdavo Amerikos pirkėjai.

JAV kariuomenė Vietname nelaimėjo, bet kapitalizmas laimėjo Šaltąjį karą. Amerika ėmėsi skaitmeninio atitikmens – kardų pavertimo plūgais. Vyriausybė suteikė viešą prieigą prie GPS, kuris buvo sukurtas kariams ir ginklams valdyti. Ji privatizavo internetą, kuris iš pradžių buvo paskirstytas ryšių tinklas, skirtas atlaikyti branduolinį karą.

Vėliau kilęs dot-com bumas įkūnijo taikią prekybą, tačiau netrukus išsiplėtė į saugumą ir karą. „PayPal“ dešimtojo dešimtmečio pabaigoje leido prekiauti tarp vartotojų precedento neturinčiu mastu, tačiau pritraukė sukčių, todėl jos įkūrėjai sukūrė skaitmeninę sistemą sukčiavimui aptikti. Po 2001 m. rugsėjo 11 d. teroristinių išpuolių, įskaitant Peterį Thielą, įmonių vadovai suprato, kad jų technologijos gali padėti vyriausybei išaiškinti teroristus. 2003 m. jie įkūrė įmonę „Palantir“.

Kovodamas Irake ir Afganistane, Pentagonas ne kartą kreipėsi į privačias įmones pagalbos spręsdamas mirtinus iššūkius, tokius kaip savadarbiai sprogstamieji įtaisai.

Prieš dešimtmetį aukščiausi Pentagono pareigūnai suprato, kad pavojingai atsilieka skaitmeninių technologijų srityje, todėl pasinėrė į Silicio slėnį, kurį Pentagonas padėjo įkurti prieš kelis dešimtmečius. Ten technologiškai išprusę pareigūnai rado pirmąsias dirbtinio intelekto programas mūšio lauke, naudodami algoritmus slaptiems užpuolikams Irake sekti.

Šiandien Pentagonas grumiasi su atrofavusia Amerikos pramonės baze ir skuba pritaikyti dirbtinio intelekto technologijas, kurias privačios įmonės įpynė į savo sistemas – pavyzdžiui, šaldytų desertų valdymo sistemą, kurią Kainas atrado.

„Komercinės technologijos yra geriausios pasaulyje, ypač JAV komercinės technologijos“, – neseniai sakė Gynybos departamento vyriausiasis skaitmeninių ir dirbtinio intelekto pareigūnas Cameronas Stanley. „Taigi, mes esame komercinė organizacija.“ [1]

1. Business & Technology -- USA250: Military Industry Fuels Business Innovation --- Connection between war and commerce goes back to the country's founding. Michaels, Daniel. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 July 2026: B4.

Military Industry Fuels Business Innovation --- Connection between war and commerce goes back to the America's founding

2026-07-04T05:57:08.992-07:00

“Last spring, U.S. Army Col. Jeffrey Kain had a revelation: Ammunition is a lot like ice cream.

Kain, who is chief of Army operations in Europe, was watching a video about new digital systems from Palantir Technologies that his unit had just started using to track operations and supply levels. The video featured a manager from one of Palantir's private customers, Wendy's, explaining how the same digital system helps the fast-food chain manage its inventory of Thin Mints-flavored Frosty mix across its restaurants.

"It blew my mind. I thought: That's what we're doing," Kain recalls thinking. "In our case it's 155 artillery rounds, but it's the same concept."

Palantir's involvement is just one of countless instances across U.S. history interweaving industry and national defense. Throughout human history, war routinely yielded profit for some, while also advancing business.

The Crusades, for example, sped development of international finance and spurred creation of double-entry bookkeeping.

But it was the U.S. that fused war and private business like never before, with each enabling and accelerating the other.

"The relationship goes beyond collaboration to true partnership in pursuing U.S. national-security objectives," says retired U.S. Army Gen. Joseph Votel, who has worked in and with the private sector to promote cooperation.

The relationship's endurance is notable, Votel says, as is "the subtle but steady shift from military to civilian-industry lead on things like research and development, emerging tech, new methods of manufacturing and opening new domains -- cyber and space in particular now."

America's war-business connection grew so deep that President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- a retired Army general -- warned about the danger of what he called the military-industrial complex.

"The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist," he said in his 1961 farewell speech, of the newly developed "permanent armaments industry of vast proportions."

That infrastructure took almost two centuries to develop. The Springfield Armory -- a government factory established on Washington's orders in 1794 -- pioneered what later became pillars of private industry, including interchangeable parts, assembly-line manufacturing, hourly wages and full-time professional managers.

The Civil War was the world's first major conflict decided by industrial might. Factories in the industrializing North churned out munitions in volumes the agrarian South couldn't touch. The Springfield Armory, which made fewer than 10,000 rifles in 1860, disgorged more than 800,000 over the following four years.

Union commanders amplified those advantages by tapping private northern rail networks, created for commerce, which were more extensive than the Confederacy's connections.

During the ensuing half-century without a major war, the U.S. military waned and business exploded -- supercharged by Civil War industrial expansion. Entrepreneurialism of the Gilded Age proved critical to American victories of the 20th century.

Inventor Nikola Tesla in 1898 demonstrated a prototype radio-guided boat at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Like the Wright brothers' mastery of flight in 1903, it initially drew little interest from the military, but war soon changed that.

Gun designer John Moses Browning built a thriving business in the late 1800s by vastly improving firearms' internal mechanisms, culminating in terrifyingly deadly machine guns. His company's M2 .50-caliber model, developed after World War I, is still in production and widely used.

During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recruited seasoned industrialists to lead a private-sector manufacturing surge. Carmakers produced airplanes, and food canners made ammunition boxes. A headlong drive for efficiency cut the average time needed to assemble a "Liberty Ship" freighter from around eight months to barely one month by 1945.

U.S. factories kept allied Soviet forces provisioned.

By the time Eisenhower issued his warning, the Soviet Union had become an industrial peer. Rather than compete to outproduce Moscow, Washington opted to offset Soviet scale with ingenuity. Starting with the Space Race, the U.S. military underwrote a decadeslong partnership with American business that also remade global commerce.

The Pentagon funded private companies to develop rockets, aircraft, computers and new materials for weapons and systems vital to national security.

Digital computers were first created to model hydrogen-bomb explosions.

The Boeing 747 jumbo jet, which democratized air travel in the 1970s, was only possible thanks to powerful jet engines developed in the 1960s for the massive C-5 military transport plane.

Around the same time, America was struggling to supply its expanding war in Vietnam. Malcom McLean, a New Jersey commercial shipper who championed the new idea of prepacking cargo into big metal boxes, hungered for a Pentagon contract. So, he invested his own money to build a container terminal in Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay.

His shipping containers solved the military's cargo woes -- and triggered a revolution in world trade. Returning to the U.S. empty, the containers stopped in industrializing Japan to collect inexpensive consumer goods that American shoppers snapped up.

The U.S. military didn't win in Vietnam, but capitalism won the Cold War. America embarked on the digital equivalent of turning swords into plowshares. The government granted public access to GPS, which had been created to guide troops and weapons. It privatized the internet, which began as a distributed communications network designed to withstand a nuclear war.

The ensuing dot-com boom embodied peaceful commerce, but soon expanded into security and war. PayPal in the late 1990s allowed peer-to-peer trade on an unprecedented scale but drew swindlers, so its founders developed a digital system to detect fraud. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, company leaders including Peter Thiel realized their technology could help the government sniff out terrorists. They created a company, Palantir, in 2003.

Fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon repeatedly turned to private companies for help addressing deadly challenges such as improvised explosive devices.

A decade ago, top Pentagon officials realized they had fallen dangerously behind on digital tech and so dived into Silicon Valley, which the Pentagon had helped establish decades earlier. There, tech-savvy officials found the first battlefield AI applications, using algorithms to track stealthy attackers in Iraq.

Today, the Pentagon is grappling with America's atrophied industrial base while racing to adopt AI technologies that private companies have woven into their systems -- like the frozen-dessert management system Kain stumbled on.

"Commercial tech is the best in the world, especially U.S. commercial tech," the Defense Department's chief digital and AI officer, Cameron Stanley, said recently. "So we are a commercial-first organization."” [1]

„Roche“ vėžio vaistas rodo potencialą bandymuose

2026-07-04T05:39:44.133-07:00

Divarasibas, naujos kartos KRAS G12C inhibitorius, kurį gamina „Roche“ / „Genentech“, lenkia savo konkurentus (pvz., „Amgen“ „Lumakras“ ir „Bristol Myers Squibb“ „Krazati“), daugiausia dėl didesnio stiprumo, geresnio selektyvumo ir žymiai geresnių išgyvenamumo rezultatų sergant nesmulkialąsteliniu plaučių vėžiu (NSCLC).

Divarasibo pranašumą patvirtina svarbūs tiesioginių tyrimų duomenys:

• Didesnis išgyvenamumas: III fazės „Krascendo-1“ tyrime divarasibas statistiškai reikšmingai pagerino tiek išgyvenamumą be ligos progresavimo (PFS), tiek bendrą išgyvenamumą (OS), palyginti su pirmosios kartos patvirtintais inhibitoriais.

• Didesnis stiprumas ir selektyvumas: Ikiklinikiniai tyrimai rodo, kad divarasibas veiksmingiau, nei ankstesnės kartos vaistai, užrakina KRAS G12C baltymą neaktyvioje („išjungtoje“) būsenoje, sėkmingai sustabdydamas, naviką skatinantį, signalizavimą.

• Valdomas saugumo profilis: Nepaisant didesnio veiksmingumo, divarasibas nesukelia naujų saugumo problemų; Jo šalutinio poveikio profilis išlieka panašus į senesnių gydymo būdų ir laikomas „valdomu ir grįžtamu“.

„WSJ“ miglotai, bet entuziastingai, apibūdina klinikinių tyrimų rezultatus:

„Roche Holding“ teigė, kad vaistų kandidatas vėlyvos stadijos tyrime su anksčiau gydytais pacientais, sergančiais tam tikro tipo išplitusiu plaučių vėžiu, parodė geresnį potencialą nei esami gydymo būdai.

Šveicarijos vaistų gamintojas ketvirtadienį pareiškė, kad jo eksperimentinis vaistas divarasibas pasiekė pagrindinius ir pagrindinius antrinius tikslus tiesioginiame klinikiniame tyrime, kuriame jis buvo lyginamas su patvirtintais gydymo būdais „Amgen“ „Lumakras“ ir „Mirati Therapeutics“ „Krazati“.

„Divarasibas“ reikšmingai pagerino tiek bendrą pacientų išgyvenamumą, tiek laiką, kurį jie išgyveno be ligos paūmėjimo, teigė „Roche“. Priduriama, kad jokių naujų saugumo signalų nenustatyta.

„Roche“ teigė, kad pateiks duomenis sveikatos priežiūros institucijoms, siekdama kuo greičiau pradėti gydymą.“ [1]

1. Business News: Roche Cancer Drug Shows Promise in Trials. Calatayud, Adria. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 July 2026: B3.

Roche Cancer Drug Shows Promise in Trials

2026-07-04T05:36:14.429-07:00

Divarasib, a next-generation KRAS G12C inhibitor by Roche/Genentech, outperforms its competitors (like Amgen's Lumakras and Bristol Myers Squibb's Krazati) primarily by offering greater potency, better selectivity, and significantly improved survival outcomes in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Divarasib's superiority is backed by landmark head-to-head trial data:

• Superior Survival Rates: In the Phase III Krascendo-1 trial, divarasib achieved statistically significant improvements in both progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) compared to first-generation approved inhibitors.

• Greater Potency and Selectivity: Preclinical studies indicate that divarasib locks the KRAS G12C protein in an inactive ("off") state more effectively than previous-generation treatments, successfully halting tumor-driving signaling.

• Manageable Safety Profile: Despite its stronger efficacy, divarasib does not introduce new safety concerns; its side effect profile remains comparable to older treatments and is considered "manageable and reversible".

The WSJ vaguely but enthusiastically describes the clinical trial results:

“Roche Holding said a drug candidate showed better potential than existing therapies in a late-stage study with patients with a type of advanced lung cancer who had been previously treated.

The Swiss drugmaker said Thursday that its experimental drug, divarasib, met its primary and key secondary objectives in a head-to-head clinical trial that compared it against approved treatments Amgen's Lumakras and Mirati Therapeutics's Krazati.

Divarasib showed meaningful improvements in both patients' overall survival and the time they survived without the disease worsening, Roche said. No new safety signals were identified, it added.

Roche said it would submit the data to health authorities with the aim of launching the treatment as soon as possible.” [1]

1. Business News: Roche Cancer Drug Shows Promise in Trials. Calatayud, Adria. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 July 2026: B3.

Skanu ne visada reiškia sveika: itin perdirbti maisto produktai, siejami su didesne demencijos rizika --- Nustokite duoti jūsų vaikams pjaustyto kumpio. Tuojau pat.

2026-07-03T21:14:03.892-07:00

„Nauji tyrimai rodo, kad mityba, kurioje gausu itin perdirbtų maisto produktų, yra susijusi su padidėjusia demencijos rizika, papildydama augantį sveikatos problemų, susijusių su tokiais maisto produktais kaip sausainiai supakuoti, dešrainiai ir traškučiai, sąrašą.

Trečiadienį „American Journal of Public Health“ paskelbtame tyrime nustatyta, kad žmonių grupė, kuri teigė valganti daugiausia itin perdirbtų maisto produktų, turėjo 58 % didesnę riziką vėliau susirgti demencija ir 46 % didesnę riziką susirgti kognityviniais sutrikimais nei tie, kurie teigė valgę mažiausiai.

Tyrime dalyvavo daugiau nei 5300 JAV suaugusiųjų, kuriems buvo 50 metų ir daugiau, ir jie buvo stebimi vidutiniškai beveik devynerius metus. Harvardo T. H. Chan visuomenės sveikatos mokyklos ir kitų institucijų tyrėjai siekė išnagrinėti itin perdirbtų maisto produktų poveikį, atsižvelgdami į įvairius kitus veiksnius, turinčius įtakos sveikatai, įskaitant išsilavinimą, pajamas, rūkymą, fizinį aktyvumą ir alkoholio vartojimą.

Kadangi tyrimas yra stebėjimo, jis negali įrodyti, kad itin perdirbti maisto produktai sukelia demenciją ir kognityvinius sutrikimus.

Vienas iš galimų ryšio paaiškinimų yra tas, kad mityba, kurioje gausu itin perdirbtų maisto produktų, yra susijusi su nutukimas, 2 tipo diabetas ir širdies ir kraujagyslių ligos, o šios ligos didina demencijos riziką, teigė dr. Alexas Henney, Liverpulio universiteto endokrinologas, tyrinėjęs itin perdirbtus maisto produktus ir demenciją.

Nauji tyrimai atskleidžia daugiau tiesioginių galimų priežasčių, kodėl ryšys tarp itin perdirbtų maisto produktų ir demencijos kyla, teigė kardiologas ir Tuftso universiteto „Maistas yra medicina“ instituto direktorius dr. Dariushas Mozaffarianas.

Šie rezultatai papildo daugybę mokslinių įrodymų, siejančių mitybą, kurioje gausu itin perdirbtų maisto produktų, su sveikatos problemomis, įskaitant nutukimą, širdies ir kraujagyslių ligas bei 2 tipo diabetą. Trumpo administracija, vadovaujama sveikatos ir žmogiškųjų paslaugų sekretoriaus Roberto F. Kennedy jaunesniojo, ėmėsi eilės veiksmų, kad paskatintų žmones atsisakyti daugelio maisto produktų, kurie laikomi itin perdirbtais.

Administracija išleido naujas mitybos gaires, kuriose patariama amerikiečiams vengti labai perdirbtų maisto produktų su pridėtiniu cukrumi ir druska. Mitybos tyrėjai paprastai apibrėžia itin perdirbtus maisto produktus kaip produktus, kuriuose yra ingredientų, kurių paprastai nerastų namų virtuvėje, pavyzdžiui, emulsikliai, naudojami maisto tekstūrai pagerinti, ir daug fruktozės turintis kukurūzų sirupas.

Tyrimas parodė, kad mityba, kurioje gausu minimaliai perdirbtų maisto produktų Maisto produktai, tokie kaip švieži vaisiai, daržovės, neskaldyti grūdai, žuvis ir neperdirbta mėsa, buvo susieti su sumažėjusia demencijos ir kognityvinių sutrikimų rizika. Žmonės, kurie valgė mažiausiai perdirbtą maistą, turėjo 41 % mažesnę demencijos riziką, palyginti su tais, kurie valgė mažiausiai.

Daugelis itin perdirbtų maisto produktų yra nesveiki, nes juose yra daug pridėtinio cukraus, natrio ir sočiųjų riebalų. Tačiau vien šie veiksniai, atrodo, iki galo nepaaiškina jų ryšio su sveikatos problemomis, teigia tyrėjai.

Mokslininkai analizavo tam tikrų rūšių itin perdirbtų maisto produktų poveikį. Jie nustatė, kad perdirbta mėsa, tokia kaip šoninė, dešrainiai ir pjaustytas kumpis, buvo susieta su didžiausia demencijos ir kognityvinių sutrikimų rizika.

Grupė, kuri valgė daugiausiai itin perdirbto maisto, vidutiniškai suvartodavo kilogramą tokių produktų per dieną, daugiau nei keturis kartus daugiau nei tie, kurie valgė mažiausiai.

Tam tikri itin perdirbtų maisto produktų priedai, pavyzdžiui, emulsikliai, gali pakeisti žarnyno mikrobiomą taip, kad gali sukelti uždegimą. Uždegimas siejamas su daugeliu sveikatos problemų, įskaitant demenciją. [1]

1. U.S. News: Ultraprocessed Foods Linked to Higher Risk of Dementia. Petersen, Andrea. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 04 June 2026: A3.

Tasty Not Always Means Healthy: Ultraprocessed Foods Linked to Higher Risk of Dementia --- Stop giving your children sliced ham. Right now.

2026-07-03T21:07:28.870-07:00

“Eating a diet high in ultraprocessed foods is associated with an increased risk of dementia, new research shows, adding to the growing list of health problems linked to foods such as packaged cookies, hot dogs and chips.

In a study published Wednesday in the American Journal of Public Health, the group of people who reported eating the highest amount of ultraprocessed foods had a 58% higher risk of later developing dementia and a 46% increased risk of developing cognitive impairment than those who said they ate the least.

The study involved more than 5,300 U.S. adults ages 50 and older and followed them for almost nine years, on average. The researchers, from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and other institutions, aimed to home in on the effect of ultraprocessed foods by accounting for a range of other factors that affect health, including education, income, smoking, physical activity and alcohol use.

Because the research is observational, it can't prove ultraprocessed foods cause dementia and cognitive impairment.

One likely explanation for the link is that diets high in ultraprocessed foods are associated with obesity, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and those illnesses raise the risk of dementia, said Dr. Alex Henney, an endocrinologist at the University of Liverpool who has studied ultraprocessed foods and dementia.

Emerging research is revealing more direct potential reasons for the link between ultraprocessed foods and dementia, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at Tufts University.

The results add to a body of scientific evidence linking diets high in ultraprocessed foods to health problems including obesity, cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes. The Trump administration has made a series of moves under the direction of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to nudge people away from many foods considered ultraprocessed.

The administration issued new dietary guidelines that advise Americans to avoid highly processed foods with added sugars and salt. Nutrition researchers generally define ultraprocessed foods as items containing ingredients that wouldn't generally be found in a home kitchen, such as emulsifiers -- used to improve the texture of food -- and high-fructose corn syrup.

The study found that diets high in minimally processed foods, such as fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish and unprocessed meats, were linked to a decreased risk of dementia and cognitive impairment. People who ate the most minimally processed foods had a 41% lower risk of dementia compared with those who ate the least.

Many ultraprocessed foods are unhealthy because they are high in added sugars, sodium and saturated fat. But those factors alone don't appear to fully explain their links to health problems, researchers say.

The scientists analyzed the effect of specific types of ultraprocessed foods. They found that processed meats, such as bacon, hot dogs and sliced ham, were linked to the highest risk of dementia and cognitive impairment.

The group that ate the most ultraprocessed foods had an average intake of a kilogram a day of such products, more than four times as high as those who ate the least.

Certain additives in ultraprocessed foods, like emulsifiers, can alter the gut microbiome in a way that might cause inflammation. Inflammation has been implicated in many health problems, including dementia.” [1]

1. U.S. News: Ultraprocessed Foods Linked to Higher Risk of Dementia. Petersen, Andrea. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 04 June 2026: A3.

Ar ekspertai gali atsikratyti grupinio mąstymo?

2026-07-03T20:39:16.488-07:00

„Kevinas McCaffree'as ir Colinas Wrightas savo straipsnyje „Būdas mesti iššūkį moksliniuose žurnaluose grupiniam mąstymui“ (gegužės 28 d.) įvardija svarbiausius akademinės bendruomenės iššūkius. Apsvarstykite šiuos penkis jų plano, kaip spręsti akademinių tyrimų krizę, papildymus:

Pirma, tyrimų autorius įvardyti kaip institucijas, o ne asmenis. Tai verčia katedrų vedėjus, dekanus, provostus ir tyrimų viceprezidentus prisiimti atsakomybę už kiekvieno siūlomo leidinio teisingumą. Esamos priežiūros sistemos pasirodė esančios apgailėtinai nepakankamos.

Antra, reikalauti, kad prieš publikuojant būtų dalijamasi duomenimis ir juos atkartojant, kai tai pagrįstai įmanoma. Jei tai būtų padaryta tinkamai, tai būtų tik nedidelis vėlavimas. Be to, tai būtų tvirtas tyrimų išvadų teisingumo patvirtinimas ir, žinoma, sumažintų augantį atsiimtų tyrimų skaičių.

Trečia, publikuoti tyrimus, kurie atitinka aktualių tyrimų kriterijus – tyrimus, kurie atsako į aktualius klausimus, apibūdina realias problemas, į kurias atsakymai nėra akivaizdūs ir kurių išvados yra operatyviai pagrįstos.

Ketvirta, apriboti nerimtų tyrimų publikavimą. Šokiruojančiai mažai akademikų paskelbtų tyrimų kada nors cituojama. Vis dėlto daugelis universitetų ir toliau apdovanoja publikacijas pagal kiekybę, o ne kokybę.

Penkta, prasmingai apdovanokite recenzuojamus darbus tiek prieš, tiek po kadencijos. Jei norima patobulinti „uždarą sistemą, kuri saugo prastus ir politiškai motyvuotus tyrimus“, pastangos užginčyti melą turi būti tinkamai apdovanotos.

Charles Crespy

Dekanas emeritas

Centrinio Mičigano universitetas

Mount Pleasant, Mičiganas

---

Nemokslinis pasaulietis, kaip aš, manytų, kad mokslo bendruomenė jau turi tokius mechanizmus. Tačiau, deja, žmogaus prigimtis, matyt, yra stipresnė už vadinamąją sąžiningą ekspertizę, net ir tarp mokslininkų. Manau, kad tai dar kartą įrodo, jog Įkūrėjai žinojo daugiau nei progresyvūs žmonės, tokie kaip Woodrow Wilsonas, apie tai, kaip valdyti mūsų institucijas. Turėti tikrai nešališkus ekspertus bet kurioje srityje yra įmanoma, bet ar tai būtų vyriausybė, ar net mokslas, žmogaus prigimtis per dažnai tam trukdo.

Patrick G. Brown

Orlando, Florida

---

Nustojau skaityti recenzuojamus žurnalus savo srityje, nes jie beveik visi yra iš to paties audinio. Žurnalų straipsniai, regis, atspindi grupės politines ir intelektualines nuostatas, o ne idėjų, požiūrių ir tyrimo būdų spektrą.

Gaetano A. LaRoche, Ed.D.

„Niujorkas“ [1]

1. Can Experts Rid Themselves of Groupthink? Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 04 June 2026: A14.

Can Experts Rid Themselves of Groupthink?

2026-07-03T20:37:04.934-07:00

“Kevin McCaffree and Colin Wright identify critical challenges for academe in their op-ed "A Way to Challenge the Groupthink of Scholarly Journals" (May 28). Consider these five additions to their blueprint for addressing the crisis in academic research:

First, identify authors of research as institutions -- not individuals. This forces department chairs, deans, provosts and research vice presidents to own the veracity of every proposed publication. Existing oversight frameworks have proven woefully inadequate.

Second, require data sharing and replication prior to publication where reasonably feasible. If done properly this would be only a minor delay. Moreover, it would offer a powerful endorsement of the veracity of the research findings and, of course, reduce the growing number of retractions.

Third, publish research that meets the criteria of relevant research -- studies that answer questions that are timely, describe real problems, for which answers aren't obvious, and for which findings are operationally valid.

Fourth, limit the publication of frivolous research. Shockingly little of the research published by academics is ever cited. Yet many universities continue to reward publication based on quantity, not quality.

Fifth, meaningfully reward peer review in both pre- and post-tenure evaluations. If the "closed system that protects shoddy and politically motivated research" is to be improved, efforts to challenge falsehoods must be appropriately awarded.

Charles Crespy

Dean emeritus

Central Michigan University

Mount Pleasant, Mich.

---

A nonscientific layman like me would think that the scientific community would already have mechanisms like this in place. But, alas, human nature is apparently stronger than so-called honest expertise, even among scientists. I guess that once again proves that the Founders knew more than progressives like Woodrow Wilson did about how to govern our institutions. Having truly unbiased experts in anything is possible, but whether in government or even science, human nature too often gets in the way.

Patrick G. Brown

Orlando, Fla.

---

I have stopped reading the peer-reviewed journals in my field because they are nearly all of the same cloth. The articles in the journals seem to reflect the political and intellectual preferences of the in-group rather than a range of ideas, viewpoints and ways of researching.

Gaetano A. LaRoche, Ed.D.

New York” [1]

1. Can Experts Rid Themselves of Groupthink? Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 04 June 2026: A14.

The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men

2026-07-03T20:27:04.009-07:00

“This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

If you travel deep into the New Right, what you find at the moment is a constant yearning for something very old. Not just a time when America was great but also a time when men were great, when men were men. You hear it in Costin Vlad Alamariu, who’s better known as Bronze Age Pervert, and his longing for the Bronze Age.

Archival clip of Costin Vlad Alamariu: I am here just to spread the political views of the ancient Hittite Empire or the ancient Mitanni Empire

You hear it when the pastor Doug Wilson yearns for the time before the 19th Amendment.

Archival clip of Doug Wilson: The net effect of women’s suffrage was not an advance in women’s rights but rather part of a push to replace covenanted entities like families with raw individualism.

You hear it in the increasingly constant idealization of 1950s America.

Archival clip

Tucker Carlson: Why wouldn’t you design a system consistent with nature?

Chris Williamson: What would that look like to you?

Carlson: It would look like what we had before Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique,” before lifestyle feminism dominated every institution in the West.

There was a time when all this could be dismissed as a fringe movement on the fever swamps of the internet. But Bronze Age Pervert is a favorite of young Trump staff members. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon. And Tucker Carlson is, well, Tucker Carlson.

These are not all fringe figures. And it’s not just them. It’s a much broader thing on the New Right, which increasingly wants a return and is theorizing for how to create a return to very old ideas of how men should be, to very old policies that centralize the power they wield and the way society is ordered.

Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of “Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights” and “The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea.”

She has just written a great cover story for The Atlantic mapping this world, which she calls “masculinism,” talking to many of its key figures and trying to understand its core ideas.

Ezra Klein: Helen Lewis, welcome to the show.

Helen Lewis: Thank you.

I want to start with a clip from Scott Yenor, a professor at Boise State University, that I think is a good place to start.

Archival clip of Scott Yenor: Our independent women seek their purpose in life in midlevel bureaucratic jobs like human resource management, environmental protection and marketing.

They are more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be. Without connections to eternity delivered through their family, such medicated, quarrelsome and meddlesome women gain their meaning through the seeming participation in the global project.

They are agents of the new world but not new life. Such women are now the backbone of every left-wing cosmopolitan party in the Western world.

I thought that was as concise a description of this masculinism that you’ve been reporting on as I’ve heard from any of its subjects. Tell me about him and the view of society you understand him to be spinning out here.

Well, as you heard, it’s one that’s not afraid to be offensive.

But the essential thesis is that it’s women’s role in life to have children and modern women have been deluded instead into pursuing careers that aren’t real jobs and that they’re not doing anything of any merit anyway, and therefore, their lives will essentially be empty and pointless.

But I like my job, and I also feel that my job is of equal social worth to Yenor being in a think tank, right? He’s hardly a cancer surgeon. Calm down, son.

I find it intriguingly repellent, and I think a lot of people do as well.

One of the things I heard in that clip is an echo of the JD Vance miserable-cat-ladies clip that went around in the 2024 campaign.

Archival clip of JD Vance: We are effectively run, in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.

I mention that because it can be easy to look at Yenor and some of the people we talk about and think, “Oh, this is a fever swamp right-wing movement. This is when you’ve clicked on too many posts on X and the algorithm has found something out about you that you wish it didn’t know.”

But one of the arguments you make in this piece is that masculinism has become a unifying theory on a MAGA right that in other ways is coming apart. Defend that.

You can see the splits of MAGA very obviously at the moment over the war in Iran, American support for Israel as a military ally, protectionism versus free trade. There are all these interesting currents that are going on.

However, if you asked, “Do you think feminism has gone too far?” how many people in the MAGA coalition are going to push back on that and say, “Actually, I think we should give more jobs and opportunities to women”?

It is this one thing that basically everybody can agree with: Traditional gender roles are better. Equality has been a failed pursuit. It’s maybe even an illegitimate pursuit. Empathy, which is feminine by nature, has been misused and is ruining our politics because women and their parties that represent them — the Democrats — feel sorry for all these underdogs who aren’t really underdogs; they’re kind of cancers on our society, like violent criminals or illegal immigrants.

So this is a very coherent ideology. And the reason that I wanted to write the piece is I think people are now quite familiar with the idea of the manosphere and the Andrew Tate type of provocateurs who are creatures of the algorithm.

And I wanted to say: Well, hang on a minute. Actually, there is a really serious ideological and political project here behind this. It has got people in think tanks, it’s got people who are working in politics, and it has got its intellectual outriders.

But this isn’t just some oversteroided guys in tight T-shirts parading around in nightclubs for Instagram. These are people who want to completely restructure American life into a way that they find more agreeable, and they want to use legal instruments and political instruments to do so.

What does that vision look like?

The simplest way to say it is that men would be the breadwinners and women would be homemakers.

The reference point always tends to be the 1950s, but it’s a very fake, Pleasantville, black-and-white, picket-fence version of the 1950s. Lots of families did not, in fact, live in that way.

For example, one of Yenor’s most controversial proposals is this idea of the family wage, the idea that you would restore discrimination in the job market by saying it’s OK to preferentially hire men, married men, that it’s OK to promote them more, to pay them higher salaries. What we want to do is essentially restore a traditional way of life, in which men are the ones who go out and earn money and women’s money, if anything, is back to being pin money. It’s secondary.

It’s worth it for you to expand on that. The core critique and the core politics here is that modernity has thwarted masculinity.

The arguments here shift between this 1950s nostalgia for when you had the single breadwinner family. In some cases it’s very Christian, and in some cases it’s very pagan, but this spiritual level of politics seems, to me, to have this dimension of “Modernity is hollow.”

People are working — as you mentioned, particularly women — these [expletive] jobs in human resource management and in marketing and environmental protection, and men are caged in these little offices and doing retail work that is beneath them.

Yenor in his quote says, “Agents of the new world but not new life.” There’s all this emphasis on what life is — the good, the beautiful, vitality, vitalism. Can you talk about that dimension of the spiritual sell being made?

Yeah, I think that is part of it, because another thing that often comes up is the idea that women are on a huge amount of anxiety medication and antidepressants.

You have this situation in which women having anything that they feel is wrong in their lives is taken as proof that they’ve picked the wrong course in life, and if only they would pick this alternative vision of femininity, they would be happy.

This is part of the exchange that I had with Doug Wilson, the evangelical pastor — that this is not a new phenomenon. It was something that Betty Friedan was writing about in “The Feminine Mystique” when she was talking specifically about the unhappiness of stay-at-home housewives. She said they’re taking medication like cough drops.

The bit that I struggle with, as somebody who loves reading historical novels, historical fiction, historical biographies, is: Are we absolutely sure that women in 1700 were living these incredibly blissful lives?

That’s not what you get from the literature of the period. In my first book, which is a history of feminism, I wrote about some of the women who wrote to Marie Stopes, who was our version of Margaret Sanger, a contraceptive pioneer. They were describing lives of despair, where they had far more children than they can afford and they didn’t know how to stop having any more. They were exhausted by their late 30s from this relentless tide of childbearing.

But that era has now passed into memory long enough that it is susceptible to being revitalized into this tradwife vision that is sold to people on Instagram because no one can really remember what it was like to live in those conditions anymore.

Let me try to think about how to do this, because when I get into a literature, I’m usually a generous reader and I leave with more sympathy for it than I came in. I read your piece, and then I read “The Last Men” by Charles Cornish-Dale, Raw Egg Nationalist. I read “Bronze Age Mindset,” and it’s one of the first times I can really remember coming out of something like this and thinking, “Oh, there was so much less there than I thought.” Like, I just assumed people were making some reasonable arguments.

But I want to try to be generous before I get into that reaction. So let me ask it this way: As you were talking to these people, as you immersed yourself in this literature, which parts of the critique or the diagnosis of modernity and its ills and ailments did you find recognizable or find yourself responding to?

I do find the battery cage idea of humanity to be quite compelling. I’m sure my life would be better if I took more exercise, got outside more, took a screen break, didn’t doomscroll. I think all of those things are reasonable.

I think the American diet is hideous, particularly for lower-income Americans. So I don’t think all of those things are ridiculous. That’s something that comes up a lot in “The Last Men” — the idea that elites are keeping you fat, that they’re keeping your testosterone low if you don’t eat enough meat, that vegans are oppressing you ——

That vegetarianism is a tool of social control to sap our vitality and make us easier and more obedient as subjects.

But it’s very interesting. Clearly, that has caught on, because Arnold Schwarzenegger was an executive producer for a documentary about being vegetarian, except he’d rebranded it as plant-based. It was all about how you could be an incredibly good weight lifter if you were on a plant-based diet. You could have incredibly strong erections on a plant-based diet.

So clearly it has seeped into that discourse that there is something unmanly about not eating meat.

But I think I like that book more than you did. Maybe my expectations are lower, but the thing that I found interesting about it was that it moved from saying it is impossible to be a man fully in a liberal democracy — there’s a line in there that says essentially that — because of the fact that you’re being kept in these rubbish jobs and you have low testosterone, all this kind of stuff.

Then you get to the end, and you ask, “What are we doing, then?” And there’s a bit, like: Well, you should chuck out your plastic chopping board. And I was just like, “Oh, I was sort of expecting you to advocate fascism at the end. But you’ve kept it lower. You’ve kept it more achievable.”

That was the bit where I slightly parted company from it.

[Laughs.] That’s where you parted company?

Let me describe the argument of this book, because it gets at something that I want to try to do here, which is it brings up some things really worth talking about and then goes in some really wild directions. You can correct me if you feel I am being unfair in any part of this.

“The Last Men” is an argument that begins by saying what we need is a hormonal theory of politics, and the hormonal theory of politics is this, and this part is real: There has been, over the decades, a measurable and sustained drop in testosterone in men across a number of countries, in sperm quality and count among men across a number of countries.

There’s also — and this is a big topic of discussion on this side and an important one that I wish the left would take more seriously — been a sustained drop in fertility rates across many, many different countries.

Relatively few liberal democracies are now at replacement rate or above, if any of them are. I think Israel is.

Although whether Israel’s a liberal democracy is its own question.

He starts there and says: Look, the core of masculinity, the Greek word “thymos,” is testosterone. This thing that Francis Fukuyama’s talking about in “The End of History and the Last Man,” this thing that Nietzsche is talking about — it’s just testosterone.

We are destroying testosterone, and we’re destroying it with endocrine-disrupting chemicals that are in all the things we buy, destroying it with bad diet, destroying it with chemicals in the water.

And it is creating and is maybe an effort to create — and this is where things begin to go a bit off the rails — a docile form of man who is suited for the longhouse of liberal democracy and not suited for the displays of dominance and hierarchy and the conquest and excellence that has driven civilization forward and defined man forever.

Then, as you say, it ends with a stirring call to throw out your plastic cutting boards and filter your water.

But this is the argument. There’s some stuff I agree with on chemicals, some stuff I’m generally worried about, like hormonal changes, and then the sense that what’s really happening here is the destruction of what it means to be a man — literally the vital fluids that make men manly.

That’s the book.

Right. But there is an obvious overlaid political valence on this, which is this idea that if you’re high T, you’re risk-taking, you’re possibly violent, and you don’t mind about inequality. It’s about the strong dominating the weak.

Therefore, liberal democracy is inherently feminine because it’s more concerned with making sure that the weak don’t suffer too much, that there are equal rights for all. It’s very easy to see how that vision of masculinity maps onto MAGA rightism. Definitely.

When I start drilling down into the examples, I find it tricky. Young men, for example, have much higher testosterone than old men. So if women shouldn’t be in leadership positions, maybe old men shouldn’t be in leadership positions because they don’t have the requisite thymos, either.

Oh, you’re not saying that? So, actually, you’re just making very large, sweeping claims that men are one thing and women are another thing. That kind of stuff falls apart in your hands.

But don’t you think it does speak to some people? I think it speaks to people who have a female boss and they resent it and they find it slightly emasculating. The kind of people who, if a woman upset them, the word “bitch” would be pretty close to their lips, right?

Like, “How dare you speak to me like that? You’re just a woman.” And I think that’s closer to the surface in men, even men who are otherwise impeccably liberal, than perhaps we sometimes like to acknowledge. So I can see why this stuff does have a relatively wide appeal.

And the person of Donald Trump in the 2024 election became a vehicle for this feeling.

This guy who stood up and pumped his fist, covered in blood, after an assassination attempt, instead of cowering behind his Secret Service guards or a lectern or staying on the floor. This guy who would say anything he wanted to say, no matter who it offended, who did not play by the rules of feminized society.

This man who kept driving forward through adversity — lawsuits and electoral losses — and made his own reality around him.

Trump, for all his sedentary lifestyle and obesity and the fact that he’s advanced in age — and I haven’t measured his testosterone, but it’s probably not that high anymore — represents what masculinity is supposed to be, which is an effort to dominate other people in a bid to achieve greatness for yourself, your kin, your country.

Liberal democracy had thwarted that until he came back and busted through and showed you could still do this.

It’s an incredible cherry-pick, isn’t it, about Trump as the ultimate alpha male?

This is what I find very difficult about all of this literature — is that it just implies that everybody is a Ken doll or a Princess Sparkle.

Trump is at the same time a man who wears more makeup than I do most days, a man who loves “Sunset Boulevard,” you know? The man loves a musical. It’s one of his better qualities.

You know what I mean? Those aren’t the things that they’re emphasizing.

Interior decorating.

Exactly. [Laughs.]

Which I like about Trump. I’m not dissing him here. But so much of these people are engaged in a very Judith Butlerian level of gender performance. It is the most cisgender performance of heteromasculinity you could possibly imagine.

Trump, in some ways what makes him appealing — he’s got some of that, but then he’s got the other thing, too, because he’s actually not, at his core, an insecure, thwarted, little goblin.

Yeah. I personally find that much more appealing than I do the very pompous “We’re all going to have a sauna together, us guys, but it’s definitely not gay” kind of very terrified homophobia that sometimes comes out of some of those communities.

I want to try to run through some of these ideas. One of the founding fathers of this in the New Right is Bronze Age Pervert. Can you describe who that is?

He is a thinker whose real name is Costin Alamariu. He’s Romanian American, and he has a whole persona about bodybuilding and eugenics and Nietzsche.

Those are maybe his three favorite things. There’s almost an “I am Dracula” level to hamming up the accent. Once again, this is somebody who’s playing a character on the internet.

The way I describe the book — which is aesthetically interesting, even if, intellectually, it becomes a bit tedious — is that it has this really Nietzsche-for-gooners quality. It’s very Romantic poetry but filtered through 4chan lingo.

I want to play a clip of this interview he did with Michael Malice in 2024, talking about the problems of modernity.

Archival clip

Bronze Age Pervert: Why is it disgusting? It’s because it privileges safety and mere life, the preservation of life, at the expense of things that are exciting and great and free, you know?

When I wrote this book in 2018 — sorry to keep talking, Mike, if I may go on.

Michael Malice: No, this is why you’re here.

Bronze Age Pervert: When I wrote this book in 2018, some people liked it because I expressed myself directly and with humor and so on, and they said, “OK, BAP, this is very nice, but is it really true?”

And then what happened — people will say now I planned it. No, I didn’t plan it. The pandemic happened, which basically, I think, demonstrated the truth of what I’m saying. And the pandemic, in my view, was a mass sacrifice of the world’s youth to the desires of disgusting old people who sacrificed the youth and also to women, frankly, especially the middle-aged, sterile woman who made the pandemic procedures her whole life. It gave meaning to her life. I saw it in action, you know?

Malice: I can’t tell you how much joy it brings me to hear you with your accent say the phrase “these middle-aged, sterile women.” It’s just — mwah.

This book, “Bronze Age Mindset,” got written up in The Claremont Review of Books. There are reports that most young staff members in the Trump administration had read it. It had become a piece of code passed back and forth — samizdat.

The reason I think that clip is interesting is it combines the two things the book does, which is this sense that there is something more than mere life — he says, “The preservation of life at the expense of things that are exciting, great and free” — with the campy provocateurism, like: Oh, it makes me so excited to hear you say “middle-aged, sterile women.”

What’s this idea about privileging safety and mere life over things that are exciting and great and free?

Well, this is the idea that women, because of their lack of comparative thymus and testosterone, are weak and empathetic and they don’t want to put themselves in situations of danger. This is the idea that essentially the whole world has one giant H.R. department telling you that you’re not allowed to do the things you want to do anymore, particularly the kind of things that young men want to do.

I can understand why people feel like that, but I also think a huge amount of complacency has driven it. I don’t think people would be talking like that in a time when they had lost three of their eight children to a preventable disease before the age of 2.

I don’t think they would’ve been talking about that immediately after World War I, when you could quite easily have lost four of your sons in a completely pointless advance two miles across France.

This is an ideology that is born out of fat modernity itself. The luxury that they have to play with these ever so spicy ideas are because they’ve never lived these lives.

If you went over to somewhere that is currently in the middle of a conflict and you said to them, “Are you all enjoying this incredibly dangerous masculine experience that you’re having?” I think they’d actually like a stable food supply and peace.

It’s ironic that they talk about Fukuyama, because this is what he predicted in “The End of History and the Last Man.” He said that you’re going to end up with people who are just bored, full of ennui, and they’re going to have to find things to now entertain themselves because they don’t have the material deprivations and challenges that previous generations had.

That’s what I hear when I hear that. I hear, “Oh, we’re all having a go at Karens on a podcast. Isn’t it so spicy?” What has this got to do with the Spartans? This is just the fake, cosplay version of masculinity that everybody’s indulging in.

These people could sign up to the Army. They could go and serve in a war, and they’ve not chosen to do that. They’ve chosen to become podcasters. Interesting.

The LARPing point of that is very important because it is a bunch of intellectuals in elite competition with other intellectuals, a bunch of humanities academics. I mean, Bronze Age Pervert went to Yale, was it?

He’s definitely spent a few terms teaching, I think at Emory. And that’s the same with Jonathan Keeperman — L0m3z — who was an academic. Cornish-Dale has a Ph.D.

Many of my friends are academics. I can see how it slightly deranges people.

This is an elite overproduction problem.

As soon as I was thinking about this, I started thinking about Peter Turchin’s idea of surplus elites. Some of these people, perhaps they didn’t fit in socially at universities and colleges, perhaps they didn’t fit in politically, but they had that same kind of yearning in them to be intellectuals and to be taken seriously, and this provides an outlet for that.

One thing that I find interesting about the modern right is it can’t seem to decide on when its nostalgia is for.

There’s a dimension of it that’s for the 1950s. I think of that as more where Trump has based his remembrance of politics, and he was around for that, so fair enough.

But then you have people who seem to be looking back to earlier in the country’s history. But it has stretched way beyond that now, all the way to a premodern, much more directly pagan view.

There’s a lot of primitivism in all of this, a lot of “Society is filled with chemicals and endocrine disrupters.” It connects to the MAHA movement in that way.

But this question of: When were human beings human? When were men men? When were women women? There actually isn’t agreement on it.

No, you’re right.

Somebody like Wilson, Pete Hegseth’s congregation founder, basically wants to live in Salem circa 1650, as far as I can see.

Archival clip of Wilson: The liberation of women was a false flag operation. The true goal was the liberation of libertine men. And in our day this was a goal that has largely been achieved. These were men who wanted the benefits for themselves that would come from easy divorce, widespread abortion, mainstream pornography and a promiscuous dating culture. The early 20th century was characterized by the Christian wife. The early 21st century is characterized by the tattooed concubine. And these sons of Belial all have the chutzpah to call it progress for women.

That’s his vision. Other people have that vision of 1950s suburbia. Other people look to the Romans or the Greeks or the Spartans, even. There’s a big excitement about the Spartans.

Others take inspiration from Nietzsche, which is interesting to me. Nietzsche is writing these critiques of modernity at the end of the 19th century, at which point, he’s making all the same criticisms about his society that they’re making now.

And you think: Well, hang on a minute. This is a vastly less industrialized society. This is before the invention of antibiotics — all of this kind of stuff. So how can this be exactly the same criticism now?

And it goes in the other direction, too. One of the things I read for the piece was this very famous essay on the longhouse by L0m3z, which is constantly referred to. His idea is that there were these matriarchal societies or there were these communal dining halls that were overseen by a den mother and they were ruled by petty bitching and backbiting and ostracism, while the men were going out doing manly things.

One of the things I thought was, “Oh, that’s interesting. I wonder what society he’s referring to then? I should go out and read a bit more about what these places were actually like.”

And he’s not referring to anything. He says there’s no specific historical referent, and he says, in any case, one can’t really define the longhouse, lest it lose its force to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces it imagines.

I thought, well, that’s extremely convenient, isn’t it? You’re invoking this terrible thing that happened in history, except it didn’t happen in history in any way that you can concretely describe, and in any case, you don’t want to define it, because it’s more a vibe, really.

But this is the grammar of a lot of this, this constant “Are we joking, or are we serious?”

When you talk about almost any of these people, almost any of these books, it’s all the ethos of the troll, where the real argument is being smuggled in, gift-wrapped in irony and imagery and jokes and “Oh, I’m only kidding” and “Are you really offended?” such that to argue with it has a little bit of the quality of arguing with smoke.

And in some ways that is its point. One of the things many of these screeds say explicitly is that they’re a reaction to empiricized, bloodlessly technocratic modernity. There’s an idea that to cohere things into that fact-based form is to force yourself into a form of argumentation that by its very nature misses deeper truths about life.

Right. But that does get on my nerves because as somebody who spent a decade writing about feminism, the thing that you constantly got assailed with was: Why? You’re just talking about feelings. You’re not talking about facts. If you look at the facts, they’re against you. And so it’s quite odd to have pivoted into an era in which apparently, no, actually, we’re not that interested in facts. We’re just interested in vibes again. [Laughs.]

But yeah, I think that’s exactly right.

I thought a lot about what the point of the offensiveness of the language is, and clearly part of it is to signal: We’re all guys in here. You’re cool with this.

Like an initiation rite, essentially. If you don’t blanch at somebody using the N-word in the group chat, that’s it; you’re allowed in the club.

The other thing is about this idea that you just trip up liberals. Essentially you say, “I want to sterilize retards,” and then everybody goes, “How dare you say the word ‘retards’?” But what you’ve done is you’ve invoked a very old idea about sterilization of the unfit for breeding, and the idea would be just as abhorrent if you used extremely clinical language about it as your deliberately offensive, firework language.

But you’ve trapped your opponents at the level of going, “Uh, uh, uh,” about the exact words in which you’re wrapping it.

I will say I had a really quite negative reaction to a bunch of this. The part of it that I could recognize and the part of it that I do understand why it connects to people is that it is an effort to pull up ideas of the Romantics, ideas from Nietzsche, into a modernity that often feels very hollow.

You talked about this, I think, as battery cage modernity. When he’s talking about more than mere life and probably what he’s talking about in the book, the thing that he is often getting at and articulating in a way that is 4chan poetic is: There has to be something more than this. There has to be a way that is more authentic to be a human being, more authentic to expressing the energy of life that moves within us, that we don’t know how to talk about but we do feel and that modernity has very little language for, particularly disenchanted modernity, than this.

The place where the book has genuine moments of appeal and inspiration is in the channeling of that sense, which is a very old sense, that there is some form of immediate experience that industrial society alienates us from.

I think that’s probably why Nietzsche is such a reference point, because you have the sense of an intellectual who is not appreciated or known in his own time. As the story goes, Nietzsche goes mad after seeing a horse being beaten in the street and spends the last decade of his life just sitting in a corner, his mind completely broken.

An icon of masculinity if there ever was one. [Laughs.]

An icon of masculinity. Massive mustache, to be fair. He did have a very impressive mustache.

But he also had these delusions of grandeur, right? He’s got a book that’s, I believe, called “Why I Am So Wise.” The idea of the Übermensch is that everybody around you is essentially cattle and you’re not.

That is every member of the intellectual dark web’s theory of the universe: Oh, there are sheeple, and everybody else is them, but I alone have seen through it.

There is this inherent narcissism about the idea of being an Übermensch that doesn’t surprise me that that’s a reference point there.

The Christianity I struggle with more. I’m not religious myself, but I was raised in a very religious household. My parents are Catholic. My dad was a deacon in the Catholic Church. My mom was a religious studies teacher.

Their practice of Christianity was, I think, an incredibly positive one. They would go and give the sacrament to the sick, and they’d go and visit nursing homes, people who didn’t have anyone else to visit them. They would volunteer in soup kitchens, for example. Their idea of Christianity was the one that was based around service to other people.

I don’t really see a great deal of link between that and this version. Even in the persona of Jesus in the Gospels, he says, “Blessed are the meek.” He is, in some ways, an incredibly feminine figure, a passive one. He lets things happen to him. He doesn’t storm into Pontius Pilate’s front room with an AK-47 and gun everyone down. He lets himself be killed to die for our sins.

Therefore, there’s this interesting sense that Jesus is slightly an embarrassment to some of these people. In this American Christianity, particularly evangelical Christianity, they’ve had to retcon him as a much more masculine figure than the biblical record suggests.

I raised this with someone, one of the pastors in Wilson’s church who I interviewed, and I said, “It’s really hard to match up your idea of this masculine, patriarchal Christianity with the Bible.”

And he said: Oh, yeah, but remember when Jesus overturned the tables in the temple, the money lenders? So there has been an attempt to go back through the Christian tradition and find the bits you like.

Often these guys are more keen on St. Paul than they are on Jesus, because St. Paul was a preacher. He was a controversialist. He was someone who had a divine revelation. And then he was also somebody who was patriarchal. There are lines from there saying: Godly women should be quiet. Women shouldn’t be preaching.

So the relationship with Christianity is also very tense, I think.

Well, there’s a desire for the order or the perceived order of the Catholic or Greek Orthodox Church. Not for the social radicalism of Jesus Christ.

Well, it’s also very funny because successive popes just turn out to be a terrible disappointment to them, which is just, as somebody who was raised Catholic, very funny.

Like: Have we got another pope? Does he agree with —? No, no, no. He also keeps saying things about the poor. Ugh, gross.

[Laughs.] Yeah, this is a particular problem.

But there’s a split — I heard Louise Perry talk about this, and it helped me think about this connection — between the pagan side of the New Right and the Christian side of the New Right.

Bronze Age Pervert is on the pagan side. I want to go back to what you were saying about hierarchy and the Übermensch and Nietzsche. This is a quote from his book. He writes that Nietzsche:

never forgot that the fundamental fact of nature is inequality, and this is something these people, the followers of Heidegger, and Heidegger himself to a great degree, all forget. It is madness to ask the common prefab run of man to fashion his own way, his own “religion” — the many find solace and meaning only in submission. It is good that this is so, and they shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed for it. So much of the modern idiocy is based on shaming those who would find true pleasure in submission! The long chain of being is held together by command and obedience.

This is really the core politics of this book and a lot of these, which is that we have ended up in this Christianized liberal democracy that believes in equality and in doing so are subverting and denying the hierarchical dominance and obedience structures of nature.

Right. But when you read some of that stuff, don’t you think it’s a bit like how people who regress to their past lives always end up thinking that they would’ve been Cleopatra? They would never have been some guy who died as a toothless peasant at the age of 12. There is a belief that if they lived in these ancient hierarchical societies, they would be one of life’s winners.

I went back through my notes from when I was reading “The Last Men,” and I had written, “Do we want to return to a civil service run by eunuchs?” Is Elon Musk ready to make the ultimate sacrifice? Because that’s much better if you have a professional eunuch class, who are looking after democracy.

No, there’s loads of stuff from this period that they don’t want to take back, and all of it is really predicated on the idea that if you want to go back to Roman times, you’re going to be a Roman citizen, not a slave. You’re one of life’s winners, so that’s inevitably what you would have ended up as.

The thing I kept coming back to was this thought experiment by the philosopher John Rawls, the veil of ignorance: You should make decisions not knowing which side of the outcome you’d end up on.

If I said to you, “Do you honestly want to take your chances if you could be any citizen in the Roman Empire at any time or any citizen in America today?” — I think almost everybody would take their chances being born in contemporary America rather than thinking that you were going to end up as Caligula.

Probably not. You’re probably going to end up as a 12-year-old girl who got raped by her master every night. But then I think this comes back to this idea that they are special people and therefore they don’t live in a society where they’re able to exercise that specialness anymore.

Sure. This will start getting into this real discussion of masculinity.

I guess the argument they would make is — let me try to steelman this — of course they don’t like Rawls because we don’t live behind the veil of ignorance, and acting as if we did and ordering society as if we did turns out to have this fundamental problem.

It subverts the natural way men are supposed to be, which is the expression of these competitive, aggressive, ambitious, even violent instincts, which maybe we didn’t realize it at the time, but we now know are a potent driver of civilizational progress, and we fall into stagnation and decadence when they are thwarted.

That’s what I understand them to be saying. When you talk to them, is that what you hear, or is that a misread?

No, I think that’s reasonable. There is a light side version of that, which is that here in the developed world, we live in aging societies, and that has profoundly shaped how decisions are made, in ways that we’re only really just beginning to reckon with now.

I’m not sure if that’s so much about gender as it is about an aging society. If you live in a much younger society, then the young people are the dominant force, and they set the rules.

Well, at the moment, we live by the baby boomers and the social conditions that they find most amenable to them.

But the other bit that I think is worth taking away from this — I don’t want to dismiss all this stuff out of hand — is: I do think that there is a place in society for male spaces. I made a program for the BBC about gurus. “New Gurus,” it was called. And one of things I did was I went to a Brazilian jiujitsu gym, and I talked to older guys who had lived a life, and they were teaching younger men about controlling their aggression and how to channel that into positive ways.

I’ve written in “Difficult Women” about the problems of boys in school, which again, I think are real. I think there are lots of boys who find it really difficult to sit still for eight hours a day, and they are not encouraged to burn off their energy, and the whole school model has been framed around this idea of the good girl who sits there passively and just digests information in a way that doesn’t suit lots of boys.

The New York Times had a really interesting report a couple of months ago about A.D.H.D. diagnoses in teenagers, and one of the things I took away from that is that in adulthood lots of them don’t end up on medication that they start as teenagers, because they find a job that suits them better than being cooped up in school, put into this box that is particularly restrictive for boys.

If we’re going to take some of this ideology, perhaps we do say that girls and boys, on average — maybe there are some differences between them and that we need to be more attentive to the ways in which some bits of modern society aren’t set up well for boys.

It’s worth dwelling on this for a minute. I’ve had Richard Reeves on the show, who’s written a lot and done a lot of work on this.

One place a lot of these ideas have magnetized toward, because it acts as a genuine, true justification for the idea of something being wrong, is that there is something going wrong for men and boys.

We talked about falls in testosterone and sperm quality. That’s measurable and strange, and it’s been going on for many decades, and we should think about it and worry about it.

But you also have men’s wages not doing great. You have girls performing much better than boys in high school, much more likely to enroll in college. Men today are five times as likely as in the ’90s to say they don’t have any close friends. They are almost four times as likely to die by suicide.

Sometimes this can all get framed as a competitive race with girls — as if it would be fine if both genders were dying by suicide at the same rate. But that’s not the way I think about it. Boys are not doing great on their own terms, and the sense that perhaps society’s evolved in a way — whether that is in terms of the chemical soup and the microplastics that we’re all exposed to from childhood now all the way up to the structure of school, the structure of the workplace — the idea that these spaces have not developed in ways that are good for boys and men is not a crazy thought. And it’s something worth, when you look at this data, taking seriously.

It’s not a crazy thought. I think of it differently to that. I think that there are girl-specific problems and there are boy-specific problems. And then there are some problems that affect all young people, like screen usage.

But you break that down, and it affects boys and girls in different ways. Again, these are averages, with huge amounts of exceptions. We’re always talking about very broad brushstrokes here. But there is some evidence that things like comparing yourself to other bodies and faces on Instagram hits girls particularly harder. Social contagions of particular things hit girls harder.

And then at the same time, you get boys who are funneled toward crypto, gambling, day trading. Those things are more heavily peddled to men. We know that a majority of problem gamblers are men.

But we’re still steeped in this idea that everything is a neat oppressor-oppressed binary.

In the case of gender, there are still things and ways in which — sexual violence being a very obvious example — women are oppressed by men. But I think we can also get to this stage where we say it’s not actually a competition.

A lot of the time, capitalism is doing unpleasant things to both boys and girls. In the service of social media companies making a profit, girls are being shown huge amounts of very filtered images of what faces can look like.

I think we just probably need to find a slightly new way of talking. I try to discourage feminists from framing everything in a “Men are doing this to us” kind of way.

The real downfall of a lot of this discussion is it’s almost impossible to have a conversation about men on its own terms in lots of these parts of the right without it having to be, at some point, women’s fault.

If we could just break that chain, those conversations would be a lot healthier, and I think liberals would be a lot happier to participate in them.

If it can be, “Actually, maybe we got some bits of the Covid response wrong; schools should have opened earlier in California,” that’s a conversation people are going to be much happier to have if it’s not done as, “Some childless cow did this to you.”

Because at that point, I’m like, “I’m out. I’m not interested in what else you have to say at that point. If you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head, then we won’t have this argument.”

There’s this interesting dimension in a bunch of these books and in culture broadly where it feels as if you’re watching men import what has more traditionally been a huge problem for women and girls really quite rapidly, which is this obsession with unrealizable body aesthetics.

Bronze Age Pervert, true to the name, is known for constantly posting pictures of tanned and muscled male bodies.

Cornish-Dale, or Raw Egg Nationalist, is a weight lifter and talks a lot about that in his book. There’s this whole idea of the pursuit of beauty as a way of aligning yourself to higher good.

This is from the “Bronze Age Mindset” in its weird internet grammar:

In same way see from all this that aesthetic physique has the most cosmic significance, and it is because of what I have said so far that aesthetic bodies are a “window to the other side,” because they are the pinnacle of nature.

The book is full of hatred for the obese. He keeps calling them yeasty physiques.

You now see Clavicular, who is one of the biggest streamer of the moment, who is this looksmaxxer who has, I think, become deranged and is clearly in a very unhealthy spiral — appearing in court, reportedly overdosing on a livestream. He has this crazy stack of testosterone and other things that have made him infertile. You’re watching a mass social body dysmorphia emerge very rapidly among men.

One thing I see in the stuff in the New Right — this is the one place where they seem to have an idea of self-mastery or discipline for men, but it’s all this homosocial weight-lifting competition.

That’s the interesting thing about it — is that it’s all done for other men. You used to find people on the men’s-rights internet talking about women as intrasocial, intrasexual competition and the fact that they were all doing these things for each other.

I just think about that a lot — that a lot of this is done to impress other men at the same time as having this intense anxiety about homosexuality.

That quote you brought out has this deep eugenic quality to it. If you go back and read Buck v. Bell, the famous eugenic judgment by the Supreme Court, this idea of the unfit, the morons, the imbeciles and then the physically handicapped and the degenerate — that Nazi language.

There is the idea that there are life’s winners, who are physically perfect and mentally acute, and then there are life’s losers, and you can even read in their features that they are subhuman.

That’s got such a long, dark history, even in America, on the left as well as the right. In California there were thousands of people sterilized for mental and physical disabilities in the 20th century.

These are ideas that were in circulation, and they could be again. We like to think that all of these things just got ruled out completely after World War II. Why? So many other things that you would never have thought would come back have come back.

This idea that there are subhumans — you find all that so often in the right-wing discourse on things like X.

You see it all over these books, too. There’s an explicit passage in “Bronze Age Mindset” where he talks about the problem of the Jews and they’re pallid and nerdy. They’ve made everybody want to be intellectual, conceptual, not connected to the real vital forces of being alive.

I mean, this is very old-fashioned antisemitism. And he tries to soften it by saying: Well, when I say the Jews, I’m not saying just the Jews or all the Jews.

But it’s straightforward. He uses the term directly, which is maybe to say all this is very old.

This is all very old, and it expresses itself as old. It’s Bronze Age. It’s going back into Christian nationalism. It is all making this argument that modernity has taken a wrong turn.

It has taken a wrong turn in all of this equality among men and women, among people of different races and ethnic backgrounds — the idea that people in different countries have equal worth.

A lot of it is framed as a debate about gender roles or sexual facts, but a huge amount of it is just about the past versus the present and whether our modern values are a betrayal of our baser and more fundamental instincts.

That’s why it’s appealing. Because it’s saying: If you are alive today and unhappy, it’s because of modernity. And it may be any other number of other things, but it specifically addresses itself to people who are alienated by society in whatever way it might be and latches onto that.

To go back to the broader manosphere, who does someone like Andrew Tate appeal to? It’s young teenage boys. It’s at that period of age when you’re getting all these messages about how men are patriarchs and toxic masculinity and blah, blah, blah. But you are maybe small and frightened and you don’t really know if you’re going to have any friends or girls who are going to want to date you. It preys on people at the most insecure moments of their life.

For a long time, the men’s-rights internet was specifically aimed at recent divorcés, who are also absolutely primed to hear some thoughts about how women are pretty awful. And I think that is really sad because that’s the bit where I find these people quite predatory, if they are taking people who have got genuine personal problems and supplying a ready-made bad guy for them to fixate onto, which is probably not going to go anywhere.

Like, what can you do about these things? If you think that the world is rigged against you — and this is funny because they all believe very much in having agency — but if you feel that the world is this gynocracy, then how are you supposed to navigate that? You just keep consuming more of their content and wallowing in your own stew.

We’ve been talking here about various essays and books written by the men of this. But one of the most influential essays in the space that is also framed as more of an actionable set of policy ideas is by Helen Andrews in her essay “The Great Feminization.”

Who is Helen Andrews, and what was the argument of that piece?

Helen Andrews writes for Compact magazine, and the argument it starts with is Larry Summers being ousted from president of Harvard in the 2000s.

This is the first moment when there were so many women in academia that they had a hysterical overreaction to his public comments that maybe there weren’t so many women in STEM because of the innate lack of aptitude or interest, essentially.

And this is portrayed as a warning sign of the feminist freak-outs that are going to dominate the next two decades.

Then Andrews goes on to make the case that you have far more female lawyers, far more female doctors, far more female academics, and they are not interested in the pursuit of truth and justice and rigor; they are driven by feelings.

In the law, that will translate to the fact that they will just feel quite bad for criminals and not want to discipline them and punish them appropriately.

In academia, it means that you stop asking hard questions with uncomfortable answers and you instead end up having a hippie, Kumbaya drum circle where everybody talks about their positionality.

And there is obviously something there that spoke to a lot of people. I mean, the reason that I wrote about it is that, again, I had this sense of smoke and sand, and then I tried to go through the specific evidential claims that were being made and see whether or not they stack up.

There’s this incredible quote: “Wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” The idea essentially is that if you get too many women in an organization, it will collapse into bitching and backbiting and all the things that characterized that period of — whatever you want to call it — peak woke of 2020.

It was an incredibly viral essay. I wrote a lot of articles taking issue with some of the things that happened in that period. I don’t know if you can separate out correlation and causation in all of those times. I don’t think you can ever draw a neat line that shows when women in an organization get above 60 percent, then the organization collapses.

That’s the claim that, basically, Andrews makes, which is that these bureaucracies run by women become just self-perpetuating and squalid.

Well, go and read “The Government Inspector” or something like that. Kafka was onto this when it was all men. This is just a quality of bureaucracy. It’s just now that we have moved into a situation in which a majority of people in things like H.R. and university administration are female, that it’s become yet another sign of creeping, evil feminization.

The other one that got to me was, I looked into the Summers thing. First of all, his reported comments were very much skimming the surface of what his private emails to Jeffrey Epstein reveal his views on gender to be, and I’m not entirely confident that I want to say that his colleagues, who obviously knew him a lot better, didn’t think: This is a very good chance to get rid of somebody who we think might be a liability to us. Often, in cancellations that I’ve covered, there has been something else going on — something office-politics-y going on.

The other thing that I found out was 2006, the year that happened, four-fifths of Harvard’s tenured faculty were men. So the claim is that there was a feminist backlash to the things he said, but it took place within an organization that was still, at that point, ruled and run by men. It’s not as simple as: Suddenly Harvard became a citadel of women and therefore, at that point, it didn’t tolerate anybody saying anything it disagreed with. There’s much more complicated things going on.

I found that essay so strange and maddening. She was on Ross Douthat’s show debating that, which is an episode worth watching.

Exactly the same problem. In that episode of Ross’s show, she was on with Leah Libresco Sargeant, and they bring up a discrimination case, which she frames as being: Some women objected to a slightly porny poster. And it turns out to have been a pretty explicitly pornographic poster. The woman in a very male-dominated workplace experienced that as sexually aggressive.

Once you get to that stage with an essayist where you go: I’m going to have to go and follow your every single citation down the rabbit hole to find out if you’ve really represented this or have you come to a conclusion first and just have this chain of stuff that lines up?

That, to me, is fatal. Like you, I try to read things with an open mind. I think she captured something important that many people felt; otherwise there wouldn’t have been such a reaction to it. But I became increasingly annoyed at the vibesiness of it.

Well, there’s just this reality that the essay avoids confronting in any way.

Her basic argument, among other things, is: Cancellation is an explicitly female way of meting out punishment. Cancellation is a feminine punishment, whereas getting punched in the face is a male punishment. So this age of cancellation has just reflected the tipping point of women taking over work forces.

Among just other completely obvious questions about this: Is cancellation an exclusively female way of doing things? Or when the Trump administration went around getting people fired for saying a bad thing about Charlie Kirk after his murder or when they went around firing anybody who had used the term “diversity” in a grant application, was that cancellation being done by a very male-dominated structure?

It’s constant to watch what she is describing as an outcome of female domination and to say: No, this is quite obviously what social media makes possible and that the period in which she’s talking is a period of algorithmic social media taking over as the primary communication platforms — in this period you also had Slack coming into workplaces — and it creates this capacity for individual instances to be raised up to ricochet everywhere.

But you can just look around. Look on the right, as you’re noting. I mean, did the Communists not cancel people? Did they handle everything by having an upfront, direct discussion about their differences in which the men hashed it out and got to a truth outcome?

Was Senator McCarthy actually secretly a woman?

[Laughs.]

This is a really big thing we should know. But even the word “ostracism” comes from the ancient Greek practice of writing down people’s names on a stone or pottery tablet, and then they are banished from the city.

That is done in a society in which women were explicitly second-class citizens. You can take all the women out, and people will still decide that there are sometimes ways that you settle disputes that don’t involve violence.

But you’re right. This is a correlation-causation question. Yes, obviously things like cancellations and indirect conflict have increased, but is that just part of a wider social shift away from violence?

Someone like Steven Pinker would argue that’s just true. We live in a less violent society than our equivalent countries were in 1800, when people were dueling.

Is that about women’s entry into the public square? Maybe it is, but maybe it’s also about a bunch of other things, too.

Here’s the other thing that I found very strange in a bunch of these different books, and what you just said gets at it. They don’t really try to argue normatively that the changes have been bad.

So, I think dueling was bad.

Big strong. You heard it here first.

The way we have gotten — maybe until the very recent past but over time — better and better and better at living in complex societies without falling into civil war with one another has been a human advance.

The self-mastery we have developed and the virtues of liberal democracy that often became taken for granted, even if not always followed, reflected progress.

One thing I found strange about BAP, about “The Last Men,” which particularly I found this flaw in, is that he has this thing about how if you rub testosterone gel on men and then put them in a dominance game, they’re more comfortable with hierarchy.

Is that good? Like, am I supposed to prefer that they don’t look for more win-win outcomes?

I mean, I don’t want to be slathered in testosterone and become worse at cooperation. I have enough trouble limiting my own competitive instincts as it is.

[Laughs.]

It’s in Andrews’s piece, too, which — if I’m going to be maximally generous — is talking about the H.R.-ification of modernity. And yes, in modernity, you have a lot of big institutions, and as institutions get bigger, they bureaucratize, and this can be a problem. I’ve written a book, “Abundance,” in part about the problems of institutional incentives taking over.

But nevertheless, there is a dynamic here where you are trying to make complexity and scale work at a very high level, and that does require you to have rules, procedures, approaches to managing difference that are not dueling.

And I bring this up because I think it’s a weakness in the piece but also because I think it gets to something that is significant, which is: The implicit vision and sometimes the explicit vision of masculinity in these books I found deeply depressing, almost repellent.

It’s funny you say that because it made me think, “None of these things are the things that I love about men.”

I’m someone who’s always had loads of male friends. I’ve been happily married for a decade, and some of the things I love about men are, for example, their ability to become completely, nerdily obsessed with very stupid things — just that level of intensity of focus.

I absolutely love my dad’s terrible jokes that have passed into family lore that we all repeat back to him.

There are just so many different models of masculinity that are just — I think the word I would put is “comfortable.” That idea of the great thing — that you become a dad or you follow your interests and you become comfortable with the person you are and you just radiate that.

Maybe you are a bit weird. Maybe you’re into model trains, whatever it might be. That’s all good. You like to read a lot of books about World War II. All of these things are very true of many of my friends.

I was just having a conversation about it with somebody who said, “Oh, yeah, my friend’s boyfriend got really into all this stuff,” and of course they’re not together anymore.

Women don’t want to be with anxious, controlling men, and as a result of the fact that they can earn their own wages and we have divorce, they don’t have to be. So you have to find some way in which they have to put up with it.

But I just think if you really want a successful relationship with a woman, probably looksmaxxing is less good than being thoughtful, sending a gift occasionally. [Laughs.]

I think if you asked a bunch — I mean, I’m speaking on behalf of all women here, always a good idea.

But if you said, “Do you want a 10 out of 10, incredibly chiseled-ab boyfriend, or do you want one who will have dinner ready for you when you’ve had a really long day out?” Almost all of them, I think, would probably pick the small thoughtful acts of kindness over the stone cold hottie. I just think that’s how it works.

A big part of this political project is very difficult to accomplish if women don’t have to put up with it.

But what I find so unsettling about the visions of masculinity in lots of these books is they seem so anxious at the same time as calling women anxious. They seem so unsettled, so on edge. They don’t feel happy. They feel stressful to me.

That’s me reading them, as a woman. I don’t know if you had that same experience as a man.

I’ll go maybe further than you, as a man who loves being nerdily obsessed with issues.

I think it is fair to say that a vision of masculinity has to begin, at some level, with recognizing that biologically men are stronger, more aggressive — just physically. And as such, masculinity in its healthy spaces and its healthy development has tended to insist on self-mastery and discipline.

It is a way of channeling strength and competitiveness and aggression — and yes, testosterone and thymos — in a direction that is prosocial, in a direction that is committed to its obligations to others, to children.

I am amazed at how little there is about fatherhood in these books.

As with many eugenicist fans, lots of these people don’t have kids themselves while making lots of attacks on childless cat ladies. Lots of these people also don’t have children.

Yes. As I read more of this and I read some of the people you had written about — this is what I mean that I came out less sympathetic to all this than I went into it.

I had assumed that all this talk about virtue, somewhere somebody was going to talk about what I understood to be virtues. But no, they just like the word “virtues” because it sounds old, and they like old things because they think it was better before.

There are no virtues anywhere here.

You have Nick Fuentes, this incel in a basement railing against women. He’s unmarried, has no children, does not connect himself in obligations to others, to community, to any of the things that build the kind of civilization he claims to want.

Wilson, a Christian nationalist pastor who, as you mentioned, is a founder of the sect Hegseth is in. Hegseth has tweeted Wilson’s attacks on women voting. Wilson, who has severed his Christianity from all of the humility and care and compassion and radicalism that you just read in the words of the Bible. I mean, where is the Sermon of the Mount in any of his work?

I find it appalling. This was the part that I found myself having a more emotional reaction to. Where are any good men here?

I’m not against the critique that the left did not create space for a healthy vision of masculinity. I agree with that critique. But this is so [expletive] warped, where these people have ended up.

This is a terrible vision of what it means for you to be a man, what it means to be an adult.

Yeah, I don’t want to live in the world that they envision.

I think it’s also a recipe for anxiety. This idea that you have to have a woman that you control and if she does things, if she’s disobedient, that’s a bad reflection on you and it’s humiliating to you, I think, is a recipe for both violence in relationships but also deep insecurity and unhappiness.

For me, the vision of equal partnerships is just that it’s so much more relaxing. You have freely chosen each other, and every day you make that commitment to stay together. It’s not like if one of you leaves, you’ll be destitute or you’re living in fear all the time. You have freely made this commitment.

To me, that is a much more positive vision for a heterosexual relationship than the kind of thing that I’m seeing in this, which is about capturing a woman and holding on tight to her and having these kids that are there because essentially they’re miniature versions of you that perpetuate your empire.

You see that in Musk’s belief that he wants to use surrogates to make himself the modern Genghis Khan.

Archival clip of Elon Musk: So many friends I know have zero or one kid. That’s why I’m always banging the baby drum. Because I’m like, “Man, civilization’s going to collapse.” I’m like, “Where do you think people come from? Like, some magical [expletive] people factory?”

Where’s the bit in that about how joyful it is to be raising children? The idea that these are their own, independent human beings, that they’re not really the carriers of your glorious surname into eternity?

I didn’t have a particularly emotional reaction to it, and I think I’ve just burned out my circuits after 15 years of writing about feminism, because I just feel like misogyny is so deep a bigotry, it’s so casually indulged, it’s not treated seriously.

If these guys were going around saying, “I don’t think Black people should vote. I don’t think Jews should vote,” it wouldn’t be seen as, “Oh, aren’t they kind of cute? And they’re putting some edgy things in them.” Has even Fuentes not gone that far?

Whereas you can say it about women because there’s an assumption that it’s a part of a continuum that starts with stand-up comics doing stuff about how their girlfriend is annoying. This is all good, rambunctious, battle-of-the-sexes fun.

I know that these people despise me and everything about my life, and I sort of don’t care because I like my life and I think it’s a pretty good life. There is service involved to other people, and I try to think about other people more than I think about myself. And all of those things I do find a bit missing in this literature.

I think also why it’s so popular now is that a lot of it is essentially self-help, and that is the dominant literary genre of the age and the dominant social media genre of the age.

This is what I want to say about it, because this is where I feel very strongly about it: I care about it because it is actually popular. Not necessarily some of the individual people we’re talking about here, but Tate clips, Fuentes clips — these things are exerting a real cultural pull.

It is self-help, and it is self-help that has been cleaved from any kind of genuine prosociality. It is self-deformation. And that is really dangerous.

I see this in a weird way with Clavicular, this looksmaxxer. Here’s somebody who has cleaved the desire to become maximally attractive from all the things that desire is supposed to do for you.

He has talked about how it has made him infertile. He has talked about how he couldn’t possibly have a girlfriend because of the lifestyle he now leads. It’s as if we have taken the urge and severed it from the purpose, and so we have turned it pathological.

I watch him, and I don’t think what he’s doing is good for him. I don’t think it’s what attractiveness means, and I worry about all these young boys who are now growing up in an online environment where they’re being told this is what it means to be attractive. I don’t think this is what women find attractive. But it’s cleaved off from all these other things that make somebody a compelling person — their warmth, their imperfections also.

I will say this: Liberalism broadly had so little of value to say about what it meant to be a man or a boy for so long, and we created this social media world and often partnered with the people running it — Mark Zuckerberg, a liberal in good standing for many years — and abandoned kids into this farm of extremism and created a space where any of this could thrive, where there wasn’t a better competitor to it.

There’s a lot going on in society. None of it’s monocausal. But I really worry about this world in which this is what is passing for self-help, because if you followed it, you would not help yourself. You would make yourself into someone much worse, and many people are.

And that is a failure not of these trolls but a failure of the mainstream to have a vision of human flourishing and self-improvement that feels vital to people.

Yeah, I think about this a lot. It’s a cliché to say at this point, but for people who have lost religion, you have lost a lot of community and regularity to your life and a rhythm of your life, too.

The church in which I grew up, we had Palm Sunday and then Easter and then the harvest festival and then Advent and Christmas. There is a sense of life’s occasions being marked. There are baptisms and funerals. There is confession. There’s a chance to offload your sins. There are rituals within that that are probably deeply helpful to people as anchors within their lives.

And while I can’t say I have personal faith anymore, I think that it is a shame to have lost those structures in life, and I don’t know if there is a way to recreate them.

And I don’t think any of this would be happening if we weren’t all essentially spending six hours a day staring at a tiny little portal into madness. I wish I could give it up. I feel like one of those people who goes, “Well, of course eating meat is terrible.” And they’re like, “Do you still like burgers?” I do, and that’s probably also true.

But with the digital world, we have essentially hooked everybody up to a little dopamine drip, and I think that the effects of that are, particularly on young people, who are still forming their opinions — if you look now at young men and women’s political attitudes, you find this replication of young women are more left wing and young men are more right wing in lots and lots of countries now. It’s a really interesting finding.

Part of it, I think, has to do with sex-segregated algorithmic feeds and people spending more time in segregated online spaces than they do in the playground or the local youth center or the pool hall or wherever it might be. Those are really unhealthy things.

Alice Evans, the sociologist, has this theory about young people deradicalizing each other if they can just spend enough time together.

I think you’re right to continue to bring this back to an almost spiritual discussion because these ideas wouldn’t be so popular if they weren’t filling up a lack and a feeling of ennui and alienation. I would like those to be filled in a better way. But the starting point for that is recognizing that those feelings exist.

One thing this whole movement takes very seriously is aesthetics. And at every level of it, from Trump himself — who is very concerned with how the people around him look, how the spaces around him look, concerned in his own way with beauty — all the way down to these people like BAP, who at least put a certain conception of beauty, the physical form at the center of their politics.

One of the things I do think they’re onto is that aesthetics has been almost an empty ground of politics for a long time. I do think there’s a hunger for more beauty in our lives, for politics to have aesthetic opinions.

I’m curious how you weigh that, the constant performance and camp of this movement but also the consistent belief that one of the problems with modernity is we’ve abandoned having sufficient views and emphasis on the beauty of our surroundings, our spaces, our culture.

That’s so interesting. I hadn’t ever really thought about it like that, but you’re right. I think every political party now has to pay such attention to aesthetics. It’s just that MAGA has an aesthetic — if someone said to you, “What’s the Kamala Harris aesthetic?” I’m not sure you could really sum it up. Or “What’s the Democratic aesthetic?”

For a while, it was “Nevertheless, she persisted” or “I’m with her.” Again, these are very female-focused slogans. Lightweight, corporate you-go-girl-ism. But I wouldn’t say that I think that the left has got a consistent aesthetic.

I mean, the far left does. This is why you get all these mean jokes about people with blue fringes and whatever it might be and Palestine plushies and stuff like that. But the mainstream Democratic Party does not have a consistent aesthetic in the way that MAGA does.

To the extent that MAGA women often look a particular way and MAGA men look a particular way.

I think about this a lot, and I’ve wanted to try to figure out how to do something about it. It does seem to me that the left has done too little thinking about its own aesthetic.

The Zohran Mamdani campaign had a real aesthetic. It had colors. He dresses in a very certain way everywhere. Obama, of course — you go back to the famous “Hope” and “Change” posters. That movement had, in its own way, an aesthetic.

But one reason you see a much more thoroughgoing one in MAGA — an aesthetic that runs through not just the candidates and their graphic design but also the things they put on Twitter about architecture, the executive orders about classical architecture and beauty, what should be in a museum — is that it’s fundamentally a movement about the past. It gives you the capacity to choose an aesthetic from the past you prefer and say, “That is beauty.”

And when you’re dealing with liberalism or other forms of left ideology or more left ideology in the American context, it’s harder because you can’t reach backward as naturally. If you’re so focused on critiques of the past, then endlessly you have to modernize it.

“Hamilton” by Lin-Manuel Miranda has a real aesthetic, and what it does is it combines an aesthetic of the past into this multicultural update, so it’s simultaneously honoring it and critiquing it. But that’s actually hard to do.

So one of the reasons that the left has more trouble answering the question of “What is beautiful?” is that the past is not a safe place for it to go.

That’s also related to optimism versus pessimism, because there is a version of that. Andy Burnham in England is now running in a by-election from which he hopes is a springboard to then run for the Labour leadership and become prime minister.

He put out an advert. Now, the soundtrack is Oasis, so there’s a ’90s nostalgia. But a lot of the shots were of new skyscrapers that have gone up in Manchester, and his point there is: We are building stuff. Here is the place the future’s being built — which I always thought would be the centerpiece of any kind of Gavin Newsom presidential run, right?

It would be like, “California, the place of the future.” There’s a bit of a problem with that, though, which is that — and again, this maybe comes back to the aging society — how many people in America are excited about the future versus how many of them think it’s a vale of joblessness, declining living standards, a heating planet?

Who hates Waymos — which I think are awesome, having been to San Francisco recently, I felt like I was sitting in the future — but who hates them more than taxi drivers’ unions? Who hates driverless trains more than train drivers’ unions?

If they want to reclaim the idea that they’re going to have futuristic aesthetics, that could be kind of awesome. But they would have to also deal with the fact that many people do not look forward to the future with a desperation to get there.

The difficulty for that aesthetic is that the left is very skeptical of technology, and A.I., in particular, has widened that skepticism.

If you can’t have an aesthetic of the future that is in some ways sci-fi and a little technopunk, then you’re not left with very much. You don’t like the past. You’re not comfortable with the future. Trump is president in the present, and I think it’s hard.

But I will say this is one of the places where I’m most sympathetic to a thing happening in the New Right, even if I don’t like where they take it, which is that culture is very powerful and the aesthetics of culture are very powerful. Trump’s version of it is very specific, with U.F.C. on the lawn for the 250th and Hulk Hogan at the Republican National Convention.

His aesthetics, in a funny way, are very camp, but they’re at least very central to him and his vision of politics, and we’re in a much more visual culture. The way the platforms have moved is much more visual.

And I don’t think political movements that do not have both a visual identity and a visual perspective, a perspective on what is beautiful and what is to be culturally prized, are going to compete well in this era.

But that’s also about the left tastemakers’ hatred of the middlebrow.

Just to take architecture. You have to show that you are a refined person by liking Brutalism, and if you just preferred a nice Doric column and a nice whitewashed whatever it might be, that’s kind of basic. That’s what normal people who don’t know anything about architecture like.

The problem is that there are far more normal people than there are people who know a lot about architecture, and I think Trump has got that. Trump just has the tastes of a normie person. He has the taste of a normal person who’s got a lot of money rather than elite taste.

I think there was a piece about this at the time of the 2016 election. Everything he owns is covered in gold, which is what you’d think: If I suddenly had loads of money, why wouldn’t I cover everything in gold?

Whereas if you’re a high-net-worth person who flies on private jets and reads Condé Nast Traveler magazine, everything should be muted earth tones.

So his exact lack of taste, in an elite sense, is read by normal, everyday people as: He likes basic things that are easy to appreciate and nice. He presumably wants that ballroom to look like the Roman Forum that people might have seen on their holiday in Italy.

This is a bit about the left’s hatred of the middlebrow and the popular and the mainstream.

The best politics are always cringe.

You mentioned “Hamilton.” I love “Hamilton” as much as a white liberal millennial could, but I went back to see it a couple of years ago, and I was like, “Oh, this is Obama-era cringe.”

It’s so earnest and sweet, and now everything is so cynical and jaded that it’s quite hard to put yourself back into the state to be able to appreciate someone who’s just straightforwardly hopeful about the upward progress of America. So it does kind of read as cringe.

But again, just in the same way that having no shame is a very useful asset in American politics, having no sense of cringe is probably also quite good.

I wish you could tell that to all the Democratic consultants.

[Both laugh.]

We’ve been talking about what these ideas mean for men — for their formation, for their possibilities, what kinds of grievances they emerge from, but what do they mean for women?

One element of your piece is really looking at what people who are at the vanguard of this movement are saying should be done and how the world should work. What are these people proposing?

Well, there’s a suite of ideas. The rollback of no-fault divorce. Take it back to the idea that someone in the couple is to blame for divorce and they therefore get penalized.

One of the reasons that the feminist movement was very against that is that it was used to punish women, essentially to say, “You have been adulterous and disobedient, and therefore, your kids should be taken away.”

I’ve written in support of no-fault divorce — we only got it in Britain within the last decade — because I think that the one thing you need when you’re trying to get through a relationship if you have kids is: Yes, this is a divorce, but this is also a co-parenting negotiation and turning that into an adversarial fight from the very start is unlikely to end well. But that doesn’t fit this kind of masculinist paradigm.

The Heritage Foundation put out a report in January that said they wanted a Manhattan Project to support families. They are against dating apps, day care, single-parent benefits ——

Supporting a certain kind of family.

Right, exactly. They want marriage tax breaks. They want the American economic system and tax system to be regeared toward being friendlier to the types of families that they think are the best ones.

It’s perfectly legitimate for them to make that argument. The reason that we have a situation that we do is that people didn’t like the idea that the children of a single mother were kind of starving over a principle. So I think they have an uphill argument on that.

And then you get the wilder fringes. Doug Wilson — we have mentioned him a couple of times — has an aspiration in 200 years that he wants household voting.

Archival clip

Sam Harris: In the fullness of time, a single woman would still be able to vote, but once she married, then her husband would vote for her? Is that ——

Wilson: Yeah. Well, her husband wouldn’t vote instead of her. Her husband would cast the vote that she and her husband and household that he was representing the whole household.

Harris: But presumably he would have the power to simply decide what the household should be voting. I mean, isn’t he in the leadership position there?

Wilson: Yes, he would have — if they disagreed, he would break the tie, and he might break the tie by going with her desires, or he might break the tie his way.

More pressingly, he also thinks women shouldn’t serve in combat roles in the military.

Archival clip of Wilson: Women are created by God to be life givers, nurturers. That’s how they’re created. That’s their function. That’s their form. That’s their creational identity. God gave them to be life for us. And you shall not take a woman who is given for the nurturing of life and turn her into a death agent.

And now, if I had to put my hand on my heart, I think that is also what Hegseth believes.

Archival clip of Pete Hegseth: Because I’m straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.

And he has an aesthetic demand for his Army. He wants an Army of people without beards. He’s very clear about this.

And I think Trump has that, too, right? There was that famous reporting about Trump not wanting disabled veterans in his parade. He’s got a vision of what he thinks an army should look like.

All of that stuff is already happening. You’ve got the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who has basically put out an ambulance-chasing lawyer’s ad saying:

Archival clip from commercial: Are you a white male who’s experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Contact the E.E.O.C. as soon as possible.

There is also a hunger for using the instruments of the pro-D.E.I. bureaucracy in the other direction and saying: Well, we think now it’s white men’s turn to get treated to some of this, to be treated as a protected group and get some special latitude in some of these hiring decisions.

Scott Yenor wants to, for example, reinstitute male-only military colleges.

He thinks that having women in military training colleges, again, affects these very manly, vigorous, slightly bullying standards and they make everything a bit of an H.R. bureaucratic nightmare.

There’s also, obviously, the Dobbs decision a couple of years back, which is worth thinking about here.

Some of these things feel as if they’re just not on the table, like repealing the 19th Amendment. Wilson can talk about that all he wants, but it’s not going to be a demand of the Republican Party anytime soon.

On the other hand, things make their way in in weird ways. One question I have had is: Does this become a real agenda? Particularly after Trump, because one way he’s able to hold this very strange coalition together is giving everybody a little bit, and then he’ll also happily represent the opposite.

He has such individual power over the Republican Party that what he says goes. The people behind him, the Vances and Hegseths and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s — nobody has that kind of power. So actually, they are often more true believers than he is. I don’t think Trump is reading Bronze Age Pervert or any of this stuff.

And on the other hand, they have to promise more, and they will have to promise more to try to pull these influencers and institutions and churches and so on into their orbit.

If this was to start getting traction as ideas, what would that look like?

But I think you’ve got to think about it equivalent to the campaign to end Roe v. Wade. It was a stretch goal of the religious right for decades, and in the interim, what they did was make it much, much harder to have an abortion in the states where they controlled the statehouses — imposing regulation and legislation.

There’s stuff in Project 2025, for example, about making it harder to produce and distribute abortion pills. You just find ways that are small tweaks, by imposing burdens on people that you just nudge and nudge and nudge toward your desired end state.

But as you say, I think it’s relatively unlikely that JD Vance is going to go in front of the American people in 2028 and say, “Guys, vote for me. Well, half of you.” Or “Women, enjoy voting for the last time. You won’t get to again,” because it’s wildly unpopular, in the same way that complete and total abortion bans are unpopular.

But the one thing you would say about the American political system is, unfortunately, it is very friendly to minoritarian ideas. It is easy to capture and for people who have got things that wouldn’t pass a referendum to nonetheless smuggle them through by controlling bits of government bureaucracy that no one pays attention to, by controlling statehouses, for example.

That’s how I see this agenda going forward. It will be through little, tiny tweaks to the tax code or things like that.

I guess it will also be through culture and through how we treat one another and what is proposed. I don’t know if you read this piece in New York magazine by Sam Adler-Bell about the women leaving the MAGA right. I found it to be a very moving and very sad piece.

It’s all these women who were influencers or involved in right-wing politics. Maybe they didn’t like what they felt to be the schoolmarmishness of the left, or maybe they had more Christian and conservative views, and they sort of nodded along and played along and even harnessed and argued for a lot of this.

Then they woke up one day and realized that the men around them were treating them like [expletive] and that they were being cruel to them. And what was promised to them as a return to a traditionalism where they were cherished and respected and would not have to be medicated and working a useless job was actually just a way of justifying not being treated with any respect or consideration at all.

That piece really reminded me of a book from the 2000s by Ariel Levy called “Female Chauvinist Pigs,” and it’s about the way that women coped with working in really male-dominated work forces, where they were like, “Hell yeah, I love going to the strip club with the guys.”

The implicit promise was: Yes, there are women up onstage who we think are whores and whatever, but I’m an honorary guy. And then there comes a moment when you find out you’re not an honorary guy. Actually, oh, no, they think this way about all women.

And I think it was the philosopher Kate Manne, her theory of misogyny was that it promised an exemption for good girls. If you do things right as a woman, then you kind of get exempted from it. And then you’ve crossed one of those invisible tripwires, and you discover that you’re on the outside now.

I read that piece, and I oscillated between sympathy and “What did you think was happening here?”

And I guess that’s the point about the semi-jokey, semi-ironic sexism because we live in this incredibly feminized gynocracy, and then you find out, actually, it’s extremely unironic sexism.

But also, I think the interesting thing is: What is the left doing wrong that all of these things happen and people have direct experience of misogyny, and yet they still don’t feel that the left is for them?

That gets into the macropolitics of this. One, I do think there’s genuine challenges for the left here on how to sense some of the underlying alienation, grievance and upset and find a way to meet it with something healthy, something more virtuous and something more ambitious than this.

But there’s also this reality that this might all be a huge political disaster brewing for the right. I have this basic theory that whichever side controls Twitter pays for it.

[Laughs.] Yeah.

I feel this very, very strongly.

It’s because they just can’t stay normal. They just have to let themselves go and let their unchained id all over the place.

And you’re right. In the 2010s it was liberals going, “You’ve worn a traditional Chinese dress while being Katy Perry. Kill her.” Then now it’s just, “Oh, let’s do some open racism of the type that is actually extremely unpopular with the American public at large, like right out there in the open.”

Yeah. So you have maximum liberal dominance of Twitter around 2020. Trump is banned from the platform after the effort to overturn the election.

And Democrats convince themselves in that period of a lot of things that the public doesn’t believe, and they lose touch with where a lot of voters are. By 2024, they pay for that, and it gets thrown back in their faces in these ads where Kamala Harris is talking about gender reassignment surgery for immigrants in prisons.

This all came out of a very certain culture, and it led, in part — it’s not the only thing; there was inflation and a lot of other causal factors. But it led, in part, to a pretty devastating loss.

But now the fever swamp that matters is on the right, and they control X. I’ve had people on the right say to me that Musk has created a huge problem for them because he didn’t realize it — or maybe didn’t care — but it was actually the liberal moderators who were solving the right wing’s misogyny and neo-Nazi problem for the right.

And now all those people are out, and Fuentes and everybody else is out in public.

If the left can find an appealing politics for itself, it does have this opportunity of facing a right that has driven itself somewhat crazy and has many of the key people associated with it, who are quite influential, just offering an incredible and almost endless series of terrible things they’ve said or terrible people they’ve associated with, who — normie voters in Ohio and Colorado, that’s not what they were looking for.

One of the most interesting things that anyone said to me during my reporting for this piece was when I asked Wilson about Fuentes, and he just condemned his language, even though Wilson has called women “small-breasted biddies” and “Jezebels” and all this kind of stuff.

But he said the way that Fuentes talks about women is very disrespectful. And then he said: I think he’s a fed. I think he’s a federal agent.

This is a conspiracy theory that Fuentes is actually a stealth mole for the left just to sow dissent.

Does he know who runs the federal government right now, Doug Wilson? Like, Trump and DOGE just didn’t manage to fire Fuentes’s paymaster? [Both laugh.]

They didn’t find him. Well, yeah.

Oh, well, nevertheless.

But it is kind of fascinating, right? The Fuentes appearance on Tucker Carlson crystallized this. You have a whole movement that has built itself on basically the idea that nannying women will tell you not to say the bad words, and we’re the guys who don’t agree with that.

Fuentes — I quote him in the story — said: I think women should be put in gulags. Like Hitler put his enemies in gulags, we should do that with women.

And now no one can say anything against that, because that would mean you were a cuck. Like, you were just a pantywaist H.R. department.

And it didn’t matter for Fuentes on sexism. It mattered for him over antisemitism, because there were enough powerful people in that coalition who just went: This is our line.

That was fascinating to me, that you’ve made your whole politics about having no line, so how the hell is anybody supposed to now ever go back and enforce anything?

I think about the culture war ads. You mentioned the sex-change stuff — “Kamala is for they/them,” which is an incredibly influential ad. I think that worked because it tapped into a sense that Democrats are focused on irrelevant issues for tiny minority groups.

However, I think that the Republicans should be very mindful of the other side of that, which is Trump in the middle of a huge inflation shock oncoming, gas price rising, going: I actually don’t care about any of that.

If you try, in that context, to rerun your culture war playbook, people are going to say, “Why are you talking about the Jews? Could we hear a bit more about gas prices, please, and a little bit less about this kind of stuff?”

I think that’s a good place to end.

Always, our final question: What are a few books you’d recommend to the audience?

I was trying to think about what novel would be interesting and resonant with this discussion. So I have “Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry” by B.S. Johnson, an English writer from the 20th century. It is about a young alienated guy who discovers double-entry bookkeeping, the idea that for every debit, there’s a credit.

He decides that for every slight that’s been done to him, he gets now to enact one on society. So someone brushes past him, and then he gets to do something bad. I think it really captures some of that sense of an uncaring world and that kind of alienation. That’s my first book recommendation.

My second recommendation is very exotic, and I’m very sorry, I can’t think of a less Ezra Klein book, but I’m going to try to sell you on it anyway. Nancy Mitford’s biography of Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV of France.

Nope?

No, I’m not arguing. I’m listening.

How much do you like French royal history? I’ve never had you down as someone who’s massively into it, but try it.

Mitford was a brilliant historical biographer. She wrote biographies of Frederick the Great and of Louis XIV, the Sun King.

But I think this one is extraordinary. Louis XV is the king before the revolution — that was Louis XVI. And this is a portrait of Versailles during that period, which is where all these French nobles were cooped up. They didn’t go and visit their lands, and they had no idea of what it was like to live in the rest of the country.

It is this sparkling anthropological study of an elite that has no idea that the shadow of the guillotine is creeping up on them.

And then my final choice: When I was researching my book on genius, one of the most insane stories that I found was about the genius sperm bank. So I brought “The Genius Factory” by David Plotz, which is the story of one mad eugenicist millionaire who decides that the way to solve all of America’s problems is to get lots of Nobel Prize winners to donate their sperm and give it to couples to make babies.

Let me just shock you: It doesn’t go well. A lot of the people turn out not to be Nobel Prize winners. A lot of the people involved in it are very odd indeed, and then when the press finds out, the whole thing kind of melts down.

One of the only people we know who was involved with that is William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for his role in the invention of the transistor and later became an enthusiastic proponent of racial theories of I.Q.

It’s a California story, let me shock you. How about that? It’s a classic California tale of sperm and entrepreneurship and eugenics.

Those are my three.

I can’t believe you did that to California here at the end of the show.

Helen Lewis, thank you very much.

Thank you.” [1]

1. The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men: The Ezra Klein Show. Klein, Ezra; Galvin, Annie. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jun 5, 2026.

JAV naujienos: Ryklių ir plaukikų susitikimai rytinėje pakrantėje

2026-07-03T16:17:53.735-07:00

“Šį mėnesį Floridos Panhandle ryklių išpuoliai iš eilės bent vieną plaukiką paliko kritinės būklės. Tačiau, nepaisant vaizdo įrašų, užtvindančių jūsų „Instagram“ sklaidos kanalą, jūsų tikimybė būti įkąstam vis dar maža – mažesnė nei viena iš keturių milijonų, teigė Floridos universiteto ryklių tyrimų programos direktorius Gavinas Nayloras.

Ryklių populiacijos nuo 1990 m. atsigavo dėl pastangų išsaugoti tiek ryklius, tiek jų grobį.

Šiandien rytinėje pakrantėje patruliuoja apie 130 rūšių, pridūrė Naylor. Dauguma jų laikosi gylyje, kuriame mažai tikėtina, kad sutiks žmonių, tačiau kai kurios labiau linkusios nuklysti į vandenis su plaukikais ir banglentininkais, ypač karštose pakrantės vietose. Daugiau žmonių bangose ir daugiau ryklių reiškia daugiau susidūrimų.

Ištisus metus rykliai seka grobį ir vandenyno temperatūrą. Pavyzdžiui, dauguma didžiųjų baltųjų ryklių žiemai plaukia į pietus, į šiltesnius vandenis netoli Floridos. Kylanti jūros paviršiaus temperatūra reiškia, kad mokslininkai mato daugiau ryklių ir rūšių tam tikrose vietose, palyginti su prieš porą dešimtmečių, teigė Deanas Grubbsas, ryklių ekspertas ir Floridos valstijos universiteto tyrimų profesorius.

Jauni rykliai linkę likti seklesnių vietų prie kranto prieglobstyje, kur didesni plėšrūnai yra retesni. Rykliams senstant, jie gali persekioti platesnį grobio diapazoną ir išplėsti savo paplitimo arealą. Naylor įtaria, kad jaunesni didieji baltieji rykliai labiau linkę klaidingai įkąsti žmonėms, kai pradeda bręsti ir sutelkti dėmesį į naują grobį, pavyzdžiui, ruonius.

„Riziką galite sumažinti nesimaudydami auštant ar temstant, kai rykliai aktyviausi, o laikydamiesi kranto ir plaukdami grupėmis“, – teigė Atlanto ryklių instituto vykdomasis direktorius Jonas Doddas.“ [1]

1. U.S. News: Where Sharks, Swimmers Meet on East Coast. Churchill, Carl; Woodward, Aylin. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 22 June 2026: A3.

U.S. News: Where Sharks, Swimmers Meet on East Coast

2026-07-03T16:14:09.924-07:00

"Back-to-back shark attacks in the Florida Panhandle have left at least one swimmer in critical condition this month. But despite the clips inundating your Instagram feed, your chance of getting bitten is still small -- less than one in four million, said Gavin Naylor, director of the University of Florida's shark-research program.

Shark populations have rebounded since the 1990s thanks to conservation efforts, for both sharks and their prey.

Today some 130 species patrol the East Coast, Naylor added. Most stay at depths where they're unlikely to encounter people, but some are more likely to stray into waters with swimmers and surfers -- especially at coastal hot spots. More people in the waves plus more sharks means more encounters.

Throughout the year, sharks follow prey and ocean temperatures. Most great whites, for instance, go south for the winter to warmer waters near Florida. Warming sea surface temperatures mean scientists are seeing more sharks and species in places compared with a couple of decades ago, said Dean Grubbs, a shark expert and research professor at Florida State University.

Young sharks tend to remain in the refuge of shallower areas near the shore where larger predators are less common. As sharks age, they can pursue a wider range of prey and expand their range. Naylor suspects that younger great whites are more likely to mistakenly bite humans as they start to mature and focus on new prey like seals.

You can reduce your risk by not swimming at dawn or dusk when sharks are most active, staying close to shore and swimming in groups, said Jon Dodd, executive director of the Atlantic Shark Institute.” [1]

1. U.S. News: Where Sharks, Swimmers Meet on East Coast. Churchill, Carl; Woodward, Aylin. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 22 June 2026: A3.

Taika Europoje taip pat artėja: Rusija teigia užėmusi Kostiantynivką fronto linijoje

2026-07-03T15:10:52.785-07:00

Kremlius oficialiai pareiškė užėmęs strateginį fronto pramonės miestą Kostiantynivką Ukrainos rytinėje Donecko srityje. Kremliaus atstovas spaudai Dmitrijus Peskovas pareiškė, kad tvirtovė „visiškai užimta“. Rusijos prezidentas Vladimiras Putinas susitiko su aukščiausiais kariuomenės vadais, kad gautų pranešimus apie operaciją.

Kostiantynivkos strateginė svarba

Kostiantynivka ilgą laiką buvo pagrindinis Ukrainos gynybinės „tvirtovės juostos“ Donbaso regione inkaras.

• Tikslas: tai didžiulis pramonės centras ir svarbus transporto mazgas.

• Operatyvinė pamaina: Kostiantynivkos perdavimas Rusijos administracijai priartina Maskvą prie jos tikslo kontroliuoti visą Donecko sritį.

• Likęs diržas: sukompromitavus Kostiantynivką, paskutiniai pagrindiniai įtvirtinti miestai, saugantys likusį Ukrainos kontroliuojamą Donecką, yra Slovjanskas, Kramatorskas ir Družkivka.

„Konstantynivkos užėmimas padidintų Rusijos kontrolę Donecko srityje.

Remiantis oficialiais pranešimais, Kremliaus lyderis Vladimiras Putinas šventė tai, kad jo kariai užėmė rytų Ukrainos Kostiantynivkos miestą Donecko srityje. Putiną citavo jo atstovas spaudai Dmitrijus Peskovas, sakęs, kad pramoninis miestas buvo paimtas didelių nuostolių Ukrainos gynėjams kaina. Pranešama, kad tą patį vakarą Putinas įsakė nedelsiant evakuoti visus civilius, likusius Kostiantynivkoje.

Dėl pranešimų apie pergalę iš Maskvos Ukrainos pusės komentarų nebuvo. Ukrainos kariuomenės pareigūnai anksčiau pripažino, kad padėtis ir taip smarkiai suniokotame mieste yra sudėtinga. Ukrainos generalinis štabas Kijeve vakarinėje situacijos ataskaitoje kalbėjo tik apie stiprias kovas aplink Kostiantynivką.

Taigi Putinas priartėtų prie savo tikslo pavesti visą Donbasą Rusijos administracijai.

Iš didžiųjų Donecko srities miestų tik Slovjanskas, Kramatorskas ir Družkivka liktų Ukrainos kontroliuojami.”

The Peace in Europe Is Also Coming: Russia Claims to Have Captured Kostiantynivka on the Front Line

2026-07-03T15:05:51.021-07:00

The Kremlin has officially claimed the complete capture of the strategic front-line industrial city of Kostiantynivka in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that the stronghold has been "completely taken". Russian President Vladimir Putin met with top military commanders to receive reports on the operation.

The Strategic Importance of Kostiantynivka

Kostiantynivka has long served as a key anchor of Ukraine's defensive "Fortress Belt" in the Donbas region.

• The Target: It is a massive industrial center and critical transportation hub.

• Operational Shift: Bringing Kostiantynivka under Russian administration moves Moscow closer to its goal of controlling the entire Donetsk region.

• The Remaining Belt: With Kostiantynivka compromised, the final major fortified cities protecting the rest of Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk are Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, and Druzhkivka.

“Its capture would expand Russia's control in the Donetsk region.

According to official accounts, Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin has celebrated the capture of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kostiantynivka in the Donetsk region by his troops. Putin was quoted by his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, as saying the industrial city was taken at the cost of heavy losses for the Ukrainian defenders. That same evening, Putin reportedly ordered the immediate evacuation of all civilians remaining in Kostiantynivka.

There was no comment from the Ukrainian side regarding the reports of victory from Moscow. Ukrainian military officials had previously acknowledged a difficult situation in the already heavily destroyed city. In its evening situation report, the Ukrainian General Staff in Kyiv spoke only of heavy fighting around Kostiantynivka.

Putin would thus be moving closer to his goal of bringing the entire Donbas under Russian administration.

Of the major cities in the Donetsk region, only Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, and Druzhkivka would then remain under Ukrainian control.”

Finally, the West Is Catching Up: “The conflict in the Middle East and the events in Ukraine have highlighted the importance of cheap, mass-produced drones, which is why some Western investors have lost enthusiasm for traditional military equipment”

2026-07-03T14:34:32.164-07:00

And the West cannot mass-produce cheap drones because China does not sell them rare-earth-based technologies, the most important of which are magnets, in large quantities for their military needs. It is especially painful for Germany, for which the production of obsolete tanks is a major project that has raised hopes of reviving the industry. The AfD is already waiting for elections, preparing to oust Merz from power. The AfD wants to trade with the Russians again.

1. Mass-Produced Drones & Military Spending

• Drone Pivots: Traditional military equipment is not being entirely abandoned, but Western countries (including the U.S. and Germany) have drastically accelerated their drone production. Germany and Ukraine formalized a €4 billion joint venture to mass-produce medium- and long-range drones, explicitly designed to counter asymmetric threats.

• Investor Sentiment: While some investors are redirecting capital to dual-use and unmanned systems, legacy ground combat systems are still seeing upgrades to integrate AI and drone swarms, such as plans for a joint battletank and attack drone brigade in Lithuania.

2. The Rare Earth and Magnet Bottleneck

• Chinese Controls: China remains the dominant supplier of processing technologies for rare-earth elements, which are vital for manufacturing the permanent magnets used in precision-guided munitions and drone motors.

• Licensing Friction: China maintains strict, case-by-case licensing requirements on specific rare earth exports, including heavy rare earths and extraterritorial enforcement that requires licenses for global products containing even trace amounts of Chinese-origin material.

• Allied Reshoring: To counteract this, allied industrial policy is funding domestic rare-earth mining and processing to insulate defense supply chains from Beijing. This will take many years.

, Merz, and the AfD

• Industrial Policy: Germany's defense-industrial revival relies heavily on the production of heavy armor, including advanced iterations of the Leopard 2 tank.

• Political Dynamics: Chancellor Friedrich Merz has firmly committed Germany to NATO and heavily backed Ukraine's defense and drone manufacturing from Chinese parts industries. However, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party continues to push for a rollback of military aid to Ukraine and advocates for a return to traditional economic and energy trade with Russia.

“The delayed initial public offering (IPO) of Franco-German tank maker KNDS has highlighted growing concerns about the defense industry’s ability to keep up with Europe’s rapid rearmament.

Shares in key players such as Rheinmetall and CSG have fallen this year even as European governments ramp up military spending, Reuters reported.

The maker of Leopard 2 tanks and Caesar howitzers this week postponed plans for an IPO, saying the war with Iran had made markets too volatile. Shares of rivals Germany’s Rheinmetall and CSG, which went public earlier this year, have fallen more than 30% and 57% respectively since the start of the year.

“Now is a very bad time to go IPO given the market sentiment,” said Michael Field, an equity strategist at Morningstar, noting that the war with Iran has dampened investor interest.

The conflict in the Middle East and events in Ukraine have highlighted the importance of cheap, mass-produced drones, which has led some investors to lose enthusiasm for traditional military equipment.

KNDS announced its intention to go public just a week ago, with shares scheduled to start trading on the Frankfurt and Paris stock exchanges in the coming weeks. The company has now said it will return to the IPO plan “when market conditions are more favorable.”

KNDS did not say when it would resume the IPO process. Analysts believe it could be postponed to the end of 2026 or even 2027.

In 2025, KNDS’s revenue grew by 16% to 4.4 billion euros. The company’s order book increased to 33.1 billion euros at the end of last year, compared to 23.5 billion euros a year earlier.”

Pagaliau Vakarai pribunda: “konfliktas Viduriniuose Rytuose ir įvykiai Ukrainoje išryškino pigių, masiškai gaminamų, dronų svarbą, todėl dalis Vakarų investuotojų prarado entuziazmą tradicinei karinei technikai”

2026-07-03T14:11:12.139-07:00

O pigių dronų Vakarai masiškai pagaminti negali, nes Kinija jiems karo poreikiams masiškai neparduoda, retosiomis žemėmis paremtų, technologijų, iš kurių svarbiausi yra magnetai. Ypač skauda Vokietijai, kuriai pasenusių tankų gamyba yra pagrindinis projektas, sukėlęs viltis atgaivinti pramonę. AfD jau laukia rinkimų, ruošiasi versti iš valdžios Merzą. AfD nori vėl prekiauti su rusais.

1. Masinės gamybos dronai ir karinės išlaidos

• Dronų problema: Tradicinės karinės įrangos nėra visiškai atsisakoma, tačiau Vakarų šalys (įskaitant JAV ir Vokietiją) smarkiai paspartino dronų gamybą. Vokietija ir Ukraina įsteigė 4 mlrd. eurų vertės bendrą įmonę, skirtą masiškai gaminti vidutinio ir ilgo nuotolio dronus, specialiai skirtus kovoti su asimetrinėmis grėsmėmis.

• Investuotojų nuotaikos: Nors kai kurie investuotojai nukreipia kapitalą į dvejopo naudojimo ir nepilotuojamas sistemas, senosios antžeminės kovos sistemos vis dar atnaujinamos, siekiant integruoti dirbtinį intelektą ir dronų spiečius, pavyzdžiui, planuojama Lietuvoje dislokuoti bendrą kovinių tankų ir atakos dronų brigadą.

2. Retųjų žemių ir magnetų kliūtis

• Kinijos kontrolė: Kinija išlieka dominuojančia retųjų žemių elementų, kurie yra gyvybiškai svarbūs, gaminant nuolatinius magnetus, naudojamus tiksliai valdomuose šaudmenyse ir dronų varikliuose, perdirbimo technologijų tiekėja.

• Licencijų trintis: Kinija taiko griežtus, kiekvienu atveju individualius licencijavimo reikalavimus konkretiems retųjų žemių eksportams, įskaitant sunkiuosius retuosius žemes elementus, ir ekstrateritorinį vykdymą, pagal kurį reikalaujama licencijų pasauliniams produktams, kuriuose yra net ir pėdsakų kiekių kiniškos kilmės medžiagų.

• Sąjungininkų bandymai: Siekdama tai neutralizuoti, sąjungininkų pramonės politika finansuoja vietinę retųjų žemių kasybą ir perdirbimą, kad gynybos tiekimo grandinės būtų izoliuotos nuo Pekino. Tai užims daug metų.

, Merzas ir AfD

• Pramonės politika: Vokietijos gynybos pramonės atgimimas labai priklauso nuo sunkiųjų šarvų, įskaitant pažangias „Leopard 2“ tanko versijas, gamybos.

• Politinė dinamika: Kancleris Friedrichas Merzas tvirtai Vokietiją įpareigojo NATO grupei ir aktyviai rėmė Ukrainos gynybos ir kiniškų dronų surinkinėjimo pramonę. Tačiau partija „Alternatyva Vokietijai“ (AfD) toliau ragina sumažinti karinę pagalbą Ukrainai ir pasisako už grįžimą prie tradicinės ekonominės ir energetikos prekybos su Rusija.

“Atidėtas Prancūzijos ir Vokietijos tankų gamintojos KNDS pirminis viešas akcijų siūlymas (IPO) išryškino augantį nerimą dėl gynybos pramonės galimybių pasivyti spartų Europos persiginklavimą.

Tuo metu pagrindinių sektoriaus bendrovių, tokių kaip „Rheinmetall“ ir CSG, akcijos šiemet smuko, nors Europos vyriausybės spartina karinių išlaidų didinimą, skelbia „Reuters“.

„Leopard 2“ tankus ir „Caesar“ haubicas gaminanti bendrovė šią savaitę atidėjo IPO planus, motyvuodama tuo, kad dėl karo su Iranu rinkos tapo pernelyg nepastovios. Konkurentų – Vokietijos „Rheinmetall“ ir šių metų pradžioje į biržą išėjusios CSG – akcijos nuo metų pradžios atpigo atitinkamai daugiau kaip 30% ir 57%.

„Vertinant rinkos nuotaikas, dabar yra labai netinkamas metas IPO“, – sakė Michaelas Fieldas, „Morningstar“ akcijų strategas, pažymėdamas, kad dėl karo su Iranu susilpnėjo investuotojų susidomėjimas.

Konfliktas Viduriniuose Rytuose ir įvykiai Ukrainoje taip pat išryškino pigių, masiškai gaminamų, dronų svarbą, todėl dalis investuotojų prarado entuziazmą tradicinei karinei technikai.

Vos prieš savaitę KNDS buvo paskelbusi apie ketinimą žengti į biržą, o prekybą akcijomis Frankfurto ir Paryžiaus biržose planuota pradėti artimiausiomis savaitėmis. Dabar bendrovė nurodė, kad prie IPO plano grįš „susiklosčius palankesnėms rinkos sąlygoms“.

KNDS nenurodė, kada atnaujins IPO procesą. Analitikai mano, kad jis gali būti nukeltas į 2026 m. pabaigą arba net į 2027 metus.

2025 m. KNDS pajamos išaugo 16% ir pasiekė 4,4 mlrd. Eur. Bendrovės užsakymų portfelis praėjusių metų pabaigoje padidėjo iki 33,1 mlrd. Eur, palyginti su 23,5 mlrd. Eur metais anksčiau.”

„Microsoft“ atskleidimas suteikia retą galimybę pažvelgti į mokesčių rojaus taktiką

2026-07-03T12:16:25.161-07:00

„Kitos JAV įmonės netrukus turės teikti panašias ataskaitas, įsigaliojus naujai Europos direktyvai.

Šią savaitę „Microsoft“ paskelbta atitikties ataskaita suteikė retą galimybę pažvelgti į tai, kaip technologijų gigantai perkelia pelną iš šalių, kuriose dirba daug darbuotojų ir dideli pardavimai, į mažų mokesčių rojus, kurie padeda joms sumažinti mokesčių sąskaitas milijardais dolerių.

„Microsoft“ greičiausiai buvo pirmoji didelė JAV technologijų įmonė, parengusi vadinamąją savo finansų ataskaitą pagal šalis, kad atitiktų naują Europos Sąjungos direktyvą. Kaip ir kitos didelės įmonės, „Microsoft“ naudoja sandorius tarp dukterinių įmonių, kad perkeltų pelną ir sumažintų savo mokesčių sąskaitą. Ataskaitoje atskleista nuosekli tendencija: didelė grąža mažų mokesčių jurisdikcijose ir mažos maržos didesnių mokesčių jurisdikcijose.

„Microsoft“ ataskaitoje išsamiai aprašyti įmonės pardavimai, mokesčių sąskaitos ir darbuotojai dešimtyse šalių, daugiausia Europoje, už finansinius metus, pasibaigusius 2025 m. birželį. Ataskaitoje pateikti kartais absurdiški rezultatai.

„Microsoft“ teigė, kad beveik 40 procentų savo ikimokestinių pajamų ji gavo palankioje mokesčių lengvatoje Airijoje, kur dirbo apie 3 procentus savo pasaulinės darbo jėgos. Vokietijoje, kurioje taikomi didesni mokesčiai, didžiausioje Europos ekonomikoje, „Microsoft“ uždirbo vos pusę 1 procento savo pasaulinio pelno, teigė bendrovė. Bendrovė teigė, kad, išskyrus Airiją, Europoje ji uždirbo mažiau nei 2 procentus savo pasaulinių pajamų iki mokesčių.

Prie ataskaitos pridėtame tinklaraščio įraše „Microsoft“ teigė, kad laikėsi visų įstatymų kiekvienoje jurisdikcijoje, kurioje veikė, ir kad ataskaitų teikimo standartai sukėlė tam tikrų neatitikimų tarp šalių.

„Microsoft yra įsipareigojusi taikyti mokesčių struktūrą, kuri atspindi, kur dirba mūsų žmonės, kur investuojame ir kur atsiranda funkcijos, turtas ir rizika“, – rašė Jeffas Bullwinkelis, geriausias „Microsoft“ teisininkas Europoje.

Vidaus pajamų tarnyba (IRS) ginčija „Microsoft“ naudojamas pelno perkėlimo operacijas ir siekia beveik 29 milijardų dolerių mokesčių. Bendrovė pareiškė nesutinkanti su IRS ir vertybinių popierių pareiškime teigė, kad „griežtai ginčys“ siūlomus mokesčių įstatymų projektus.

Po pasaulinės finansų krizės prieš daugiau nei dešimtmetį Europos šalys, mažindamos pagrindines paslaugas, nukreipė dėmesį į didelių įmonių, tokių kaip „Google“, „Apple“, naudojamus mokesčių vengimo būdus. „Starbucks“, „Amazon“ ir „Facebook“.

Europos Parlamentas pasiūlė ataskaitas pagal šalis, kad padidintų „skaidrumą dėl to, kur jos moka mokesčius“, – teigė vienas iš pagrindinių direktyvos derybininkų iš Ispanijos Ibanas García del Blanco. Ataskaitos suteiktų visuomenei įžvalgų apie įmonių ekonominę veiklą, kuri gali gerokai skirtis nuo tos, kur jos teigia gaunančios pajamas mokesčių tikslais. Europos Parlamentas priėmė direktyvą 2021 m., ir ji dabar įsigalioja.

„Microsoft“ ataskaita parodė, kad nepaisant pastangų kovoti su mokesčių rojaus zonomis, įmonės gali „perkelti savo pelną į mažų mokesčių jurisdikcijas, o reali veikla atitinkamai nepasikeičia“, – teigė Mičigano universiteto mokesčių teisės profesorius Reuvenas Avi-Yonahas.

Jau daugelį metų „Microsoft“ atskleidžia, kad neproporcingai didelę pajamų dalį apskaitė Airijoje, kurios nesaugūs mokesčių įstatymai leido didelėms įmonėms, įskaitant „Google“, „Facebook“ ir „PepsiCo“, išvengti milijardų dolerių mokesčių, perkeliant pajamas į salų rojus, tokius kaip Bermudai ir Didieji Kaimanai.

2025 finansiniais metais „Microsoft“ pranešė, kad pelno marža siekė 24 proc. Airijoje, kur ji mokėjo kiek daugiau nei 14 procentų mokesčius. Liuksemburge „Microsoft“ deklaravo 142 procentų pelno maržą ir vos 3 procentų mokesčių tarifą. Bendrovė teigė, kad jos pajamos iki mokesčių buvo 283 mln. USD, o šioje mažytėje šalyje dirbo tik 34 darbuotojai.

Tačiau keliose didžiausiose „Microsoft“ rinkose, kur mokesčių tarifai viršija 25 procentus, ji pranešė apie labai mažas pelno maržas. Vokietijoje, Prancūzijoje ir Italijoje bendrovė deklaravo vienženklį pelno dydį, kartais vos 5 procentus.

Ataskaitoje vis tiek pateiktas tik dalinis vaizdas, nes Jungtinės Valstijos buvo sugrupuotos su kitomis šalimis.

„Microsoft“ teigė, kad per daugiau nei keturis dešimtmečius Airijoje įsitvirtino ir tapo pagrindiniu bendrovės centru regione. Ten dirba apie 6600 žmonių – daugiau nei bet kur kitur Europoje.

13 metų tarptautinės reguliavimo institucijos bandė užgniaužti, kaip didelės įmonės perkelia pajamas į mokesčių rojus, ir daugiau nei 100 šalių priėmė įstatymus, sukuriančius minimalų pelno mokestį. Tačiau šiais metais Trumpo administracija susitarė su Ekonomikos ir socialinių reikalų organizacija. Bendradarbiavimo ir plėtros sutartis, kuri faktiškai atleidžia JAV įmones nuo daugelio šių griežtų priemonių.

Dėl to JAV įmonės praėjusiais metais išvengė mažiausiai 40 milijardų dolerių mokesčių, laikydamos pelną rojuose, nustatė „The New York Times“.

Ponas Bullwinkel teigė, kad „Microsoft“ kapitalo išlaidos duomenų centrams, įmonės darbo jėgai ir darbui su vietos partneriais taip pat buvo svarbios investicijos į vietos ekonomiką. „Mokesčiai yra vienas svarbus indėlio matas, bet ne vienintelis“, – rašė jis.“ [1]

1. Microsoft Disclosure Provides Rare Glimpse of Tax Haven Tactics. Drucker, Jesse; Weise, Karen. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jul 3, 2026

Microsoft Disclosure Provides Rare Glimpse of Tax Haven Tactics

2026-07-03T12:13:12.099-07:00

“Other U.S. companies will soon need to provide similar reports as a new European directive takes effect.

A compliance report released by Microsoft this week provided a rare look into how tech giants shift profits out of the countries where they have many employees and significant sales and into low-tax havens that help them cut their tax bills by billions of dollars.

Microsoft was most likely the first major U.S. technology company to make a so-called country by country report of its finances to comply with a new European Union directive. Like other big companies, Microsoft uses transactions between subsidiaries to shift profits around to reduce its tax bill. The report revealed a consistent pattern: high returns in low-tax jurisdictions and slim margins in higher-tax ones.

Microsoft’s report detailed the company’s sales, tax bills and employees in dozens of countries, mostly in Europe, for its fiscal year that ended in June 2025. The report showed the sometimes absurd results.

Microsoft said it had generated almost 40 percent of its pretax income in tax-friendly Ireland, where it employed about 3 percent of its global work force. In higher-tax Germany, the largest economy in Europe, Microsoft earned barely half of 1 percent of its global profits, it said. Excluding Ireland, the company said, it generated less than 2 percent of its worldwide pretax earnings in Europe.

Microsoft said in a blog post accompanying the report that it followed all the laws in every jurisdiction where it operated, and that the reporting standards created some inconsistencies among countries.

“Microsoft is committed to a tax structure that reflects where our people work, where we invest, and where functions, assets, and risks occur,” wrote Jeff Bullwinkel, Microsoft’s top lawyer in Europe.

The Internal Revenue Service is challenging profit-shifting transactions used by Microsoft, and is seeking back taxes of nearly $29 billion. The company has said it disagrees with the I.R.S. and said in a securities filing that it “will vigorously contest” the proposed tax bills.

In the wake of the global financial crisis more than a decade ago, European countries slashing basic services trained their sights on tax dodges employed by big companies, such as Google, Apple, Starbucks, Amazon and Facebook.

The European Parliament proposed the country by country reports to increase “the transparency on where they pay their taxes,” said Iban García del Blanco of Spain, one of the directive’s lead negotiators. The reports would give the public insight into companies’ economic activity — which can be quite different from where they claim to earn their income for tax purposes. The European Parliament passed the directive in 2021, and it is now taking effect.

Microsoft’s report showed that, despite the efforts to crack down on tax havens, companies are able to “shift their profits to low-tax jurisdictions with no corresponding shift in real activity,” said Reuven Avi-Yonah, a tax law professor at the University of Michigan.

For years, Microsoft has disclosed that it booked a disproportionate amount of earnings in Ireland, whose porous tax laws have permitted big companies — including Google, Facebook and PepsiCo — to avoid billions of dollars of taxes by transferring income into island havens like Bermuda and Grand Cayman.

For its 2025 fiscal year, Microsoft reported profit margins of 24 percent in Ireland, where it paid taxes at a rate of just over 14 percent. In Luxembourg, Microsoft claimed profit margins of 142 percent and a tax rate of just 3 percent. The company said it had $283 million in pretax income and only 34 employees in the tiny country.

But in several of Microsoft’s biggest markets — where tax rates exceed 25 percent — it reported tiny profit margins. In Germany, France and Italy, the company claimed single-digit profit margins, sometimes barely 5 percent.

The report still gave only a partial picture, because it lumped in the United States with other countries.

Microsoft said it had built its presence in Ireland over more than four decades, and it has grown into the company’s primary hub in the region. It employs roughly 6,600 people there, more than anywhere else in Europe.

For 13 years, international regulators have tried to crack down on how big companies shift earnings into tax havens, and more than 100 countries have passed laws creating a minimum corporate income tax. But the Trump administration struck an agreement this year with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that effectively exempts U.S. companies from much of that crackdown.

As a result, U.S. companies last year avoided at least $40 billion in taxes from parking profits in havens, The New York Times found.

Mr. Bullwinkel said Microsoft’s capital expenditures in data centers, its corporate work forces and its work through local partners were also key investments in local economies. “Tax is one important measure of contribution, but it is not the only one,” he wrote.” [1]

1. Microsoft Disclosure Provides Rare Glimpse of Tax Haven Tactics. Drucker, Jesse; Weise, Karen. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jul 3, 2026.

Didelio tikslumo dronų ir raketų spiečiai veikia: JAV siūlo atlygius už sąsiaurio atidarymą, tačiau Iranas nepasiduoda

2026-07-03T11:16:46.990-07:00

JAV ir Omanas pasiūlė atlaisvinti dalį Irano 100 mlrd. dolerių vertės užsienio turto, kad apeitų Irano reikalavimus sumokėti mokestį už Hormūzo sąsiaurį, tačiau Teheranas ir toliau atmeta šias nuolaidas ir reikalauja imti tranzito mokesčius. Irano vandens kelio kontrolė, paremta daugybe didelio tikslumo dronų ir raketų, išlieka didžiausia jo derybų priemone.

Aklavietė išlieka, nes diplomatinės derybos ir JAV atsakomieji smūgiai iki šiol neprivertė Irano atsisakyti faktinės sąsiaurio kontrolės. Nors JAV siekia laisvos ir netrukdomos navigacijos, Iranas tvirtina, kad joks laivas negali tranzituoti gyvybiškai svarbiu energetikos koridoriumi be jo leidimo arba nemokėdamas jūrų valdymo mokesčių. Dėl tebesitęsiančios aklavietės komercinis eismas vandens keliu gerokai sumažėjo.

„JAV ir Omanas ieško būdų, kaip palaužti Irano reikalavimą imti mokesčius už laivų plaukimą per Hormūzo sąsiaurį. Jų pagrindinis svertas netiesioginėse derybose buvo pažadas atšaldyti dalį 100 milijardų dolerių Irano lėšų, laikomų užsienyje.

Iki šiol Teherano kariniai lyderiai reaguoja naujais grasinimais laivams, plaukiantiems vienu iš labiausiai pasaulyje prekiautų vandens kelių.

JAV pasiuntiniai Steve'as Witkoffas ir Jaredas Kushneris šią savaitę vyko į Dohą pasikalbėti su Kataro tarpininkais apie tai, kaip išeiti iš aklavietės ir susitarti dėl praėjusio mėnesio pradinio susitarimo dėl sąsiaurio atidarymo įgyvendinimo. Tiek JAV, tiek Irano komandos su Kataro tarpininkais aptarė neseniai vykusius mūšius Libane – konfliktą, kuris dar labiau paaštrino procesą, teigė su diskusijomis susipažinę šaltiniai.

Žmonės teigė, kad JAV diplomatai pasiūlė Iranui kompromisą: atsisakyti savo pretenzijų kontroliuoti sąsiaurį ir atsisakyti rinkliavų mainais į milijardus dolerių neįšaldytų paties Irano lėšų.

Pagal praėjusio mėnesio paktą su JAV, Iranas turėjo gauti prieigą prie dalies iš 100 milijardų dolerių savo lėšų, įšaldytų užsienyje.

Irano ekonomikai reikia užsienio valiutos dėl infliacijos, kurią skatina daugelį metų taikomos sankcijos.

Iš pradžių buvo vedamos derybos dėl 6 milijardų dolerių, laikomų Katare, išlaisvinimo, tačiau Irano sprendimas blokuoti sąsiaurį sustabdė išlaisvinimą, teigė žmonės.

Ketvirtadienį Iranas davė suprasti, kad atlygio nepakanka, kad pakeistų jo poziciją. Grįžęs iš Dohos, Irano derybininkas, užsienio reikalų viceministras Kazemas Gharibabadi, tvirtino, kad Hormuzas yra „pavaldus Iranui“, o ne JAV.

Vėliau tą pačią dieną Teherano kariuomenė pareiškė, kad bet kuris laivas, neplaukiantis Irano patvirtintu maršrutu, susidurs su „nedelsiama ir ryžtinga“ reakcija.

Galiausiai Iranas nori imti mokesčius už kiekvieną sąsiaurį kertantį laivą mainais už tokias paslaugas kaip apsauga ir tikisi gauti didžiąją dalį iš 40 milijardų dolerių per metus, kuriuos jos galėtų generuoti. JAV ir jos Persijos įlankos kaimynės šį reikalavimą atmetė.

Vietoj to derybininkai svarsto alternatyvų Omano, kuris turi teises į pietinę sąsiaurio dalį, pasiūlymą. Pagal šį planą jūrų paslaugos būtų apmokamos iš fondo, finansuojamo savanoriškomis aukomis, teigė su derybomis susipažinę pareigūnai.

Omanas vedė diskusijas su naftos ir laivybos bendrovėmis, kad išsiaiškintų, ar jos būtų pasirengusios prisidėti prie fondo, teigė jie. Tačiau Iranas prieštaravo šiai formulei, nes, jų teigimu, nebūtų mokami jokie mokesčiai. Persijos įlankos šalys abejoja, ar ji veiks, nes Iranui trūksta pakankamai įrangos tinkamai valdyti sąsiaurį, teigė pareigūnai.

JAV derybininkai gavo pasiūlymą, tačiau turėjo dėl jo abejonių, sakė asmuo, susipažinęs su Vašingtono požiūriu. Kitas asmuo teigė, kad planas vis dar gali būti laikomas Iranui naudingu rinkliavų punktu.“ [1]

1. World News: U.S. Dangles Rewards to Open Strait, but Iran Hasn't Budged. Faucon, Benoit; Said, Summer; Ward, Alexander. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 July 2026: A8.

Swarms of High Precision Drones and Missiles Work: U.S. Dangles Rewards to Open Strait, but Iran Hasn't Budged

2026-07-03T11:12:20.720-07:00

The U.S. and Oman have offered to unfreeze a portion of Iran's $100 billion in overseas assets to bypass Iranian Hormuz toll demands, but Tehran continues to reject the concessions, insisting instead on charging transit fees. Iran's control of the waterway—backed by swarms of high-precision drones and missiles—remains its greatest bargaining chip.

The deadlock persists as diplomatic talks and U.S. counterstrikes have so far failed to force Iran to relinquish its de facto command of the Strait. While the U.S. pushes for free, unhindered navigation, Iran maintains that no ships can transit the vital energy corridor without its permission or without paying maritime management fees. Commercial traffic in the waterway has significantly decreased as a result of the ongoing standoff.

“The U.S. and Oman are looking for ways to break Iran's insistence on charging tolls for ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Their chief lever in indirect talks was a promise to unfreeze some of the $100 billion in Iranian funds held overseas.

So far, Tehran's military leaders are responding with a fresh round of threats against ships passing through one of the world's most trafficked waterways.

U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner traveled to Doha this week to talk with Qatari mediators about how to break the impasse and settle the implementation of last month's initial agreement to open the strait. Both the U.S. and Iranian teams discussed with Qatari mediators recent fighting in Lebanon, a conflict that has added another wrinkle to the process, people familiar with the discussions said.

The U.S. diplomats offered a trade-off to Iran, the people said: Relinquish its claim to control the strait and renounce toll payments in exchange for billions of dollars of unfrozen funds.

Under last month's pact with the U.S., Iran was set to get access to part of the $100 billion of its funds frozen abroad.

Iran's economy needs foreign currency amid inflation driven by years of sanctions.

Talks had initially been progressing toward the release of $6 billion held in Qatar but Iran's decision to block the strait has set back the release, the people said.

On Thursday, Iran signaled the reward wasn't enough to change its position. Upon returning from Doha, Iran's negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi, insisted Hormuz is "under Iran's command," not the U.S.'s.

Tehran's military later in the day said any ship not passing through an Iran-approved route would face an "immediate and powerful" response.

Ultimately, Iran wants to charge fees for every vessel crossing the strait in exchange for services such as security, and hopes to get the bulk of the annual $40 billion a year they could generate. The demand has been rejected by the U.S. and its Gulf neighbors.

Instead, negotiators are looking at an alternative proposal from Oman -- which has rights to the southern part of the strait. Under that plan, maritime services would be paid through a fund financed by voluntary donations, officials familiar with the talks said.

Oman has held discussions with oil and shipping companies to see if they would be ready to contribute to the fund, they said. But Iran has objected to the formula because no fees would be paid, they said. Gulf nations doubt it would work because Iran lacks sufficient equipment to properly manage the strait, the officials said.

U.S. negotiators received the proposal but had concerns with it, said a person familiar with Washington's view. Another person said the plan could still be seen as a form of toll booth benefiting Iran.” [1]

1. World News: U.S. Dangles Rewards to Open Strait, but Iran Hasn't Budged. Faucon, Benoit; Said, Summer; Ward, Alexander. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 July 2026: A8.

„Memento mori“: Vokietija pristato žingsnius merdinčios ekonomikos pertvarkai

2026-07-03T08:10:12.630-07:00

„BERLYNAS. Ketvirtadienį Vokietija pristatė plataus masto ekonomikos pertvarką, kuria siekiama atgaivinti savo ekonomiką ir padidinti vyriausybės reitingus prieš rudenį vyksiančius rinkimus.

34 priemonės, įskaitant mokesčių ir socialinių išmokų mažinimą, darbo rinkos taisyklių sušvelninimą, biurokratinės naštos panaikinimą ir žingsnius, skirtus skatinti investicijas į sparčiai augančius sektorius, padės „įveikti struktūriškai silpną Vokietijos augimą“, – sakė kancleris Friedrichas Merzas.

„Suprantu ilgesį seno, praeities, bet negalime slėptis praeityje“, – sakė Merzas. „Turime pradėti ilgėtis ateities.“ Šios reformos turi vieną tikslą: mes žengiame į ateitį.“

Vokietijos eksportu priklausomą ekonomiką smarkiai paveikė Kinijos, kaip gamybos supervalstybės, iškilimas, kuris atėmė rinkos dalį iš Vokietijos pagrindinių automobilių ir inžinerijos sektorių. Prezidento Trumpo baudžiamieji tarifai Europos prekėms išstūmė daugelį Vokietijos įmonių iš kitos sparčiai augančios ir pelningos rinkos.

Tačiau ekonomistai teigia, kad Vokietijos nesėkmės iš dalies yra ir pačios kaltės. Berlynas leido reglamentams, darbo sąnaudoms, energijos kainoms ir mokesčiams didėti, o jo infrastruktūra nyko dėl investicijų trūkumo per pastaruosius 20 metų, mažindamas ekonomikos konkurencingumą.

Vyriausybė sumažins pajamų mokesčio tarifus tiems, kurie priskiriami mažoms arba vidutinėms pajamoms, todėl šie mokesčių mokėtojai sutaupys 10 milijardų eurų arba 11,38 milijardo dolerių per metus. Tai iš dalies bus finansuojama didinant mokesčius tiems, kurie uždirba daugiau nei 250 000 eurų per metus, ir mažinant įvairias mokesčių lengvatas.

Pensinis amžius palaipsniui didės nuo 67 iki 70 metų, o paskatos anksti išeiti į pensiją bus mažinamos. atšaukta.

Įmonėms bus lengviau atleisti daugiausiai uždirbančius darbuotojus ir laikinai įdarbinti darbuotojus – tai jau seniai reikalinga startuolių pasaulyje. Naujos mokesčių lengvatos paskatins atleistus darbuotojus greitai susirasti naują darbą. Vyriausybė apribos nedarbingumo atostogas. Technologijų įmonėms ir sektoriams, patiriantiems spaudimą – automobilių, plieno, chemijos ir inžinerijos – gali būti netaikomos daugiau darbo rinkos taisyklių.“ [1]

1. World News: Germany Unveils Steps to Overhaul Moribund Economy. Bertrand, Benoit. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 July 2026: A8.

Memento mori: Germany Unveils Steps to Overhaul Moribund Economy

2026-07-03T08:08:19.534-07:00

“BERLIN -- Germany unveiled a broad economic overhaul on Thursday in an attempt to jolt its economy back to life and boost the government's approval ratings ahead of elections in the fall.

The 34 measures, including tax and welfare-benefit cuts, a relaxation of labor-market rules, the lifting of bureaucratic burdens, and steps to encourage investment in fast-growing sectors, will help "overcome Germany's structurally weak growth," Chancellor Friedrich Merz said.

"I understand the longing for the old, for the past, but we cannot hide in the past," Merz said. "We must start longing for the future. These reforms have one goal: We are setting off into the future."

Germany's export-reliant economy was hit hard by the rise of China as a manufacturing superpower, which has gobbled up market share from Germany's flagship automotive and engineering sectors. President Trump's punitive tariffs on European goods have squeezed many German companies out of another fast-growing and lucrative market.

But Germany's misfortunes are also partly homemade, economists said. Berlin has let regulations, labor costs, energy prices and taxes creep up and its infrastructure decay due to underinvestment over the past 20 years, eroding the economy's competitiveness.

The government will cut income-tax rates for those classified as low or average earners, resulting in 10 billion euros, or $11.38 billion, a year in savings for those taxpayers. This will be partly funded by tax rises for those earning more than 250,000 euros a year and cuts to various tax breaks.

Retirement age will rise gradually to 70 from 67 and incentives to retire early will be scrapped.

It will become easier for companies to fire top earners and hire workers on a temporary basis -- a longstanding demand in the startup scene. New tax incentives will encourage workers who have been laid off to find a new job quickly. The government will limit sick leave. Tech companies and sectors under pressure -- cars, steel, chemicals and engineering -- may be exempted from more labor-market rules.” [1]

1. World News: Germany Unveils Steps to Overhaul Moribund Economy. Bertrand, Benoit. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 July 2026: A8.