27: Kamala Harris

The Amiable Attack Dog From Kentucky Who Could Join the Harris Ticket Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of a deep-red state, is an intriguing Southern contender to become Kamala Harris’s running mate. He’s already straining to go after JD Vance.

Trump Ignores the Ruinous History of Tariffs Donald Trump’s economic panacea is to impose over-the-top tariffs on all imports, potentially generating enough revenue to eliminate the federal income tax. ........ It is hardly an innovative idea. On the contrary, if enacted, it would return our postmodern economy to that of the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, to economic policies favoring the wealthy over the poor and middle class, when tariffs were the main source of government revenue. ......... That tariff-dominant era ended with the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1913, which facilitated the adoption of a graduated federal income tax. The income tax, not tariffs, has been the main source of federal revenue ever since, and for good reason. ........ In 1889, Thomas Shearman, a prominent lawyer, wrote a widely disseminated essay titled “The Owners of the United States” that listed families including the Astors, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Morgans who presided over untaxed fortunes from railroads, factories, oil refineries, mines and banks. ........... Overreliance on tariffs helped foment an era of economic shocks. The Panic of 1893, at the time the worst depression in American history, was set off by business and bank failures but aggravated by foreign creditors demanding payment in gold, which only encouraged the U.S. Treasury to push for even higher tariffs to curb imports. ....... The income tax was enacted in 1913 in Wilson’s first year in office. ....... To fund the mobilization for World War I, Wilson raised the top marginal income tax rate to 77 percent. (Since then, the top rate has fluctuated up and down, rising above 90 percent in World War II and now at 37 percent.) ......... the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which was enacted in the misplaced belief that tariffs could protect American industries and farmers after the 1929 stock market crash. Instead, they fueled a catastrophic global trade war, strangled commerce, unleashed competitive currency devaluations and intensified a worldwide depression that contributed to the rise of Nazism and worldwide war. .......... Mr. Trump is the first major Republican of the modern era to enact sweeping higher tariff barriers to protect American industries and farmers. In his first term, he instituted several disparate tariffs. They failed to reduce trade deficits and instead incited Europe, Canada and China to retaliate, forcing his administration to pay $23 billion to bail out farmers when China hit back with tariffs on U.S. agriculture products. .............. Tariffs on solar panels and electric vehicles from China, pushed also by President Biden, may help domestic interests, but they are making it more expensive to adapt to the energy transition. ......... An across-the-board tariff policy would take us not to a prosperous future but to a reactionary past that stopped working in the 19th century, when it nearly bankrupted the government, aggravated class conflict, provoked instability and favored the wealthy over everyone else.

Why America Is Getting Tough on Trade Trump may have huffed and puffed, but Biden is quietly shifting the basic foundations of the world economic order. ..........

Pete Buttigieg Thinks the Trump Fever Could Break Buttigieg is one of the most popular figures in the Democratic Party. Nicknamed Mayor Pete, he went from mostly unknown to national star when he ran for president in 2020 as the mayor of South Bend, Ind. He then joined the Biden administration as secretary of transportation, and he’s also frequently on TV as one of the Democrats’ top messengers. There are reports that he’s under consideration to become Harris’s running mate. If that happens and they win, he will be the first openly gay vice president.

A Mysterious Plot Prompts a Rare Call From Russia to the Pentagon Russia’s defense minister said he needed to talk to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin about an alleged Ukrainian operation. What happened next remains murky.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Elon? Linda Yaccarino, the C.E.O. of X, has worked hard to bring back advertisers and fix the platform’s business. But its owner, Elon Musk, is always one whim away from undoing her work.

Justice Dept. Defends TikTok Law That Forces App’s Sale or Ban In its first detailed response to a legal challenge, the agency said TikTok’s proposed changes wouldn’t prevent China from using it to collect U.S. users’ data or spread propaganda........... “Given TikTok’s broad reach within the United States, the capacity for China to use TikTok’s features to achieve its overarching objective to undermine American interests creates a national-security threat of immense depth and scale,” the government said in its filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Under the law, any challenges must begin in that court. .......... If ByteDance doesn’t sell TikTok’s American operations to a non-Chinese owner by mid-January, app stores and web hosting services will be required to stop working with TikTok, a one-two punch devised to cut off the service domestically. .......... Laws in China allow the government to secretly demand data from companies and citizens and force their compliance, the agency said. The Justice Department said in its filing that TikTok did not “even attempt to suggest that China would not find those data valuable” in its own legal filings. ....... The company collects detailed information, including users’ locations, what they look at and their private messages, as well as their phone contacts, according to the filing. The agency said the company’s proprietary algorithm — its secret sauce to success — lets it deliver content however it wants. ...... a tool inside Lark “allowed ByteDance and TikTok employees in the United States and China to collect bulk user information based on the user’s content or expressions, including views on gun control, abortion, and religion.” ......... “These arguments only underscore the concerns that motivated Congress: TikTok’s U.S. operations are ultimately subject to the direction of a Chinese company subject to Chinese laws; those operations require TikTok to share enormous amounts of U.S. users’ sensitive data with their Chinese-based counterparts; and China has specifically acted to maintain its ability to exercise control over TikTok” ......... the Chinese government has said it will restrict the export of “technology based on data analysis for personalized information recommendation services,” which could mean that the app’s recommendation algorithm can’t be sold.

Love, Hate or Fear It, TikTok Has Changed America Buyers would have to clear regulatory approval. And after all that, Beijing could simply block a deal. ......... imagining what a United States without TikTok would look like throws into sharp relief just how much the app has worked its way into American culture. .......... Roughly 170 million Americans use TikTok. That’s half the population of the United States. ........... Unlike Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat, TikTok didn’t build itself around social connections. Its goal is pure, uncut entertainment. The algorithm ingested every data point it could from what users skipped, liked or shared — and spat it directly into the maddeningly habit-forming For You Page. Fans whispered reverently that it knew them better than they knew themselves. ............. The music America listens to, the movies it sees, what conspiracies it believes, how it can make or break a product’s success, who it defines as a celebrity — all of it has been influenced by TikTok, for good and bad.

Even if you’ve never opened the app, you’ve lived in a culture that exists downstream of what happens there.

......... “Now that studios have figured out how to harness TikTok, the last thing they want is for it to go dark,” said Sue Fleishman, a former Universal and Warner Bros. executive who is now a consultant. “That would actually be a big problem.” ........... about one-third of 18- to 29-year-olds say they get news regularly on the platform, far outpacing people in other age groups. ............. Roughly 16 percent of all American adults get their news from Instagram, and a similar amount from X. Far more people consume news on Facebook and YouTube. ............ The Wall Street Journal has more than 340,000 followers on TikTok, while The New York Times has nearly 630,000 — numbers that pale in comparison with the followings of individual commentators like Mx. Spehar. ........... TikTok allows users to earn money from their videos through tools such as its creator rewards program and livestream subscriptions. Conspiracy theories, which draw high engagement, are one of the most profitable categories .......... “It’s like candy for your brain — it tells a story that simplifies the world in a way that feels good to you” ........... A quarter of American adults who use the app create 98% of its videos. ........ For the music industry, TikTok has become a potent but unpredictable promotional outlet, and a vital one in the race to mint a new hit. Young artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Lil Nas X saw their popularity explode on the platform, and acts like Fleetwood Mac have seen decades-old songs get a boost from memes on the app. .......... The Chinese government .... has issued regulations that require Beijing’s regulators to grant permission before any ByteDance algorithms can be licensed to outsiders. They are unlikely to do so. .............. we have seen waves of new influence campaigns flowing out of China — much of it aimed at nations other than the United States. While TikTok has not been at the center of those campaigns, clearly, the Chinese have learned a lot in the past few years, including from the Russians. (Researchers have also found that topics commonly suppressed in China, including about the Tibetan and Uyghur populations, appear to be unusually underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.) ................. the bill that went through the House bans a new, Western-owned TikTok from having any “operational relationship” with ByteDance, “including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm.” Good luck with that — TikTok would no longer be TikTok. ........ a technology that became popular because it generated memes and celebrates self-expression does not become a conduit for a foreign government interested in subtly influencing how we vote. .......... The problem: Educators there noticed a spike in the number of students asking to leave class — sometimes as frequently as nine times per day — to go to the bathroom, where they made TikTok videos. ........... My favorite Instagram account is a collection of TikToks. ........... Instagram and Twitter were distracting enough. But now those platforms lie downstream of TikTok’s creative wellspring, waiting for bits of its most popular content to drift into the open internet. TikToks float into my friends’ Instagram stories, percolate into our group chats, swirl into my Twitter feed. ............. I rarely open TikTok, but I watch TikToks all the time. ............ TikToks let loose a chaotic element into Instagram’s internet mall, and they break the monotony of Twitter’s boosted tech-bro threads. They stock YouTube compilations and spark Facebook debates and fuel trend pieces. .......... If TikTok were to disappear, it would feel, at least for a while, like the internet’s big content spigot had been turned to a trickle. Rival platforms have tried to remake themselves in TikTok’s image — building in short-form videos, algorithmic timelines and searchable sound clips — but have failed to reproduce the hypnotic energy of its perpetual discovery machine. We’d be left with a diluted version of its secret sauce. ............. Even as other social media platforms try to become TikTok, TikTok is trying to become them, lengthening its videos to compete with YouTube and introducing an e-commerce platform to “drive meaningful shopping experiences” and rival Instagram. Eventually some new, inexplicably addictive platform will rise in its place. ............ it can send users into a “flow state”: the experience of being so absorbed in a task that the person loses track of time. Backing this up, one study found that TikTok users reported experiencing higher levels of flow than Instagram users. ............ the app is able to induce the feelings of enjoyment, concentration and time distortion that are characteristic of flow — possibly because of the algorithm’s immersive quality. ........... That placement would put TikTok firmly in the tradition of previous gala sponsors like Amazon, Instagram and Apple — tech companies bedazzled by the Old Establishment, which in turn is bedazzled by their blush of upstart cool. .......... “They say we can diagnose you really quick, just take this five-question quiz and we can send you a prescription in a nice little box,” said Holly Avella, a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University who has researched mental health and social media. .......... some users credit the app with breaking open the national conversation around mental illness. ............. President Biden turned down an opportunity to appear on CBS and reach tens of millions of potential voters tuning in for this year’s Super Bowl. Instead, he released his first TikTok. ........... There’s now a small studio in the Biden campaign office in Wilmington, Del., where staff members can film “candid” videos with the candidate. .......... 62% of Americans between 18- and 29-years-old use the platform, greater than the share of that age group that voted in the last presidential election. .......... TikTok is now a multibillion-dollar shopping experience — and companies have glommed on. The internet might have killed malls, but now it is one big mall. ........... Brands say that their videos populated with everyday people can more easily go viral than on, say, Instagram, where they often need to pay expensive influencers. And people who notice shopping-related content spend more time on TikTok ........ Now recipes unfold over time. In a 30-second video, there are obvious visual cues that viewers can absorb, techniques they can sink their teeth into. The videos depict process, not just stages, and allow you to jump-cut your way through a recipe in a few blinks. .............. Every social media app is, essentially, a spy in your pocket. When it comes to data collection, TikTok is no worse than the others. The main difference, and the one that’s driving the current conversation in Washington, is that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company. .............. When people access a social network from the same I.P. address, it reveals that they may know one another offline. ByteDance, which owns TikTok, used I.P. address data collected from journalists using the app to try to identify company employees who were speaking to them. ............... Giving TikTok access to the hundreds (or thousands) of numbers and email addresses on your phone — an opt-in feature — lets them draw unexpected insights into your life, such as who your doctors are, your present and former colleagues, your one-night stands, and on and on. .......... 57% of Gen Z users like or leave a comment after watching a video on the platform. .......... TikTok didn’t invent vertically oriented videos. But it has been very influential in getting people to watch their screens upright instead of sideways. It’s a phenomenon that is sticking elsewhere, with Apple, a professional Spanish soccer league and major news publishers all producing vertical videos. Even The New York Times is on board.

A Test for Harris: How to Talk About the Green New Deal In the Senate, Kamala Harris backed an expansive climate plan. Young activists want her to embrace it again, but so do Republicans........ The last time Vice President Kamala Harris tried to win the White House, she staked out aggressive positions on climate change, calling for a ban on fracking, a tax on carbon pollution and $10 trillion in spending to fight global warming. ............ It called for converting the electric grid to 100 percent clean energy this decade, declared clean air, clean water and healthy food to be basic human rights. But it also endorsed free health care and affordable housing for all Americans. .......... “Climate change is real, and it poses an existential threat to us as human beings, and it is within our power to do something about it,” Ms. Harris told a New Hampshire crowd in 2019 when she was seeking the Democratic nomination for president. “I am supporting the Green New Deal,” she said to thunderous applause. ............ Republicans framed the Green New Deal as a socialist takeover that would bankrupt the nation. They held a procedural vote in the Senate in March 2019, where it failed 0 to 57, with all Republicans voting against allowing a full vote and 43 Democrats voting “present.” ............. The Biden administration sometimes frustrated environmentalists by allowing major fossil fuel projects to be developed, even as it took the most aggressive actions in history to cut greenhouse gases. The United States produced the most amount of crude oil last year than any nation in history and is the leading exporter of natural gas. ........... the Inflation Reduction Act. In 2022 Ms. Harris cast the tiebreaking vote in an evenly-divided Senate to pass the sweeping climate and tax law........... The Inflation Reduction Act is injecting more than $370 billion in tax incentives and subsidies into clean energy production. So far it has spurred about $488 billion in private investment in solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries and charging stations. It also has led to the creation of more than 100,000 jobs ............. clean energy now accounts for more than 3 percent of all new jobs added every year in the United States, and creates more jobs across more occupations than almost any other sector. ............ “Republican leaders, Donald Trump, Fox News, their goal is to take away all the tax breaks, to take away all the grant programs for the solar sector in Georgia, for the construction of battery plants in red and purple states all across the country,” said Senator Markey. “From my perspective, this is a good debate to have,” he said. ............ But Republican support plummeted after Fox News commentators repeatedly and falsely claimed the plan aimed to take away cheeseburgers, confiscate cars and ban airplane travel. The study called the phenomenon the “Fox News Effect.” .............. On the stump, Mr. Trump now labels all climate policy as the “Green New Scam.” ......... Ike Irby, a senior adviser to Ms. Harris, has indicated her campaign focus will be on implementing the Inflation Reduction Act. ......... Meat and dairy production account for about 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions

The Fascinating Story of Math in a Book You Can Actually Understand “The Secret Lives of Numbers,” by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell, highlights overlooked contributions to the field by ancient thinkers, non-Westerners and women. ........... Mathematics has been described as the longest continuous human thought. ......... non-Western thinkers often practiced math that was more advanced than what Europeans knew. .......... Toward the end of the book, the authors discuss the glorious, god-soaked and essentially self-taught early-20th-century Indian mathematician Srinavasa Ramanujan, whose suppositions were so profound and wide-ranging that their implications are still being considered. ................ “it is wrong to claim that the origins of calculus lie with either Leibniz or Newton, as one thing is certain: Neither of them got there first.” Instead, they say, calculus was brought into being in India in the 14th century by a mathematician named Madhava. Madhava taught at a school in Kerala and made use of procedures that are subordinate elements of calculus. ............ there was a pathway for knowledge from India to the West,” which suggests that “Leibniz and Newton could have been influenced by the school in Kerala.” .............. European sailors used Madhava’s work in navigation. It might then have been absorbed into European practices without anyone knowing, centuries later ............ complex mathematics belongs to all people and all cultures in all periods, and that to dismiss historical work as ethnomathematics is to express a prejudice.

An Undocumented Immigrant Admitted to the Elite World of Harvard Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s fiction debut, “Catalina,” brings readers into the life and struggles of a blue-collar brainiac from Ecuador....... Unlike this nation’s ailing body politic, our caste system is alive and robust, as the journalist Isabel Wilkerson argues. Nowhere is that more apparent than amid the couture quadrangles and clock towers of elite universities. .............. Catalina is a blue-collar brainiac raised in a cramped Queens apartment. ........ When she was an infant in Cotopaxi, Ecuador, Catalina survived a car wreck that killed both of her parents; an uncle and aunt looked after her until the age of 5, when she settled with her paternal grandparents — also undocumented, and staunch Jehovah’s Witnesses — in New York. The family maintains a low profile, flying beneath the radar of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). ............. “Being an immigrant has always been a game of chance, and here I was before them, a lottery ticket.” ............ she also recognizes Signet and other snobbish clubs as training grounds for the overly privileged. Her job is to mingle, learning their codes of self-regard. ............. Who’s the real meritocrat at Harvard, where corporate scions and children of celebrities rule? Students like Catalina don’t sit at the table, Cornejo Villavicencio suggests, until they do. The author’s voice is strong but the social critique is stronger. ........... small slights and epic challenges mold an immigrant’s life.

China Demonstrates the First Entirely Meltdown-Proof Nuclear Reactor a test in which they cut power to a live nuclear plant—and the plant was able to passively cool itself. ....... The plant’s novel design replaces the fuel rods found in conventional reactor designs with a large number of “pebbles.” Each of these is a couple of inches across and made up of graphite with a small amount of uranium fuel inside. ......... Both modules cooled down naturally without any intervention in roughly 35 hours. The researchers claim this is proof the design is “inherently safe” and should significantly reduce requirements for safety systems in future reactors. ...... by proving it’s possible to build a meltdown-proof reactor, the researchers have disarmed one of the major arguments against using nuclear power to tackle the climate crisis.