James' World 2

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When Arvid Pardo, a Maltese diplomat, took the floor at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 1967 and began speaking at length on international law, the room was sparsely populated. Pardo was undeterred.

The deep, dark ocean, he said, is the womb of life. “We still bear in our bodies—in our blood, in the salty bitterness of our tears—the marks of this remote past.” With technology fast progressing, “man, the present dominator of the emerged earth, is now returning to the ocean depths. His penetration of the deep could mark the beginning of the end for man, and indeed for life as we know it on this Earth; it could also be a unique opportunity to lay solid foundations for a peaceful and increasingly prosperous future for all peoples.”

Pardo argued that the deep seafloor falls outside the territory of any state. As humanity raced to exploit the “immeasurable wealth” already known to be hiding there, Pardo said that wealth should be viewed as the common heritage of humankind.

At a time when countries around the world were grappling with the Cold War along with the lingering consequences of colonization and exploitative resource extraction, Pardo’s treatise struck a nerve. After all, who should have access to the deep? Who should benefit from its wealth?

His speech—later characterized by historians as a “you should have been there” moment—set the stage for nearly a decade of negotiations. Eventually, those discussions resulted in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) containing this language: that any industrial activity on the international seafloor must “be carried out for the benefit of mankind as a whole.”

Today, with deep-sea mining companies closing in on mineral-rich rocks called polymetallic nodules, policymakers at the International Seabed Authority (ISA)—the intergovernmental body that governs activities on the seafloor in international waters—are still grappling with the challenge passed down by Pardo. If the resources on the international seafloor are the common heritage of humankind, as UNCLOS states they are, then what, exactly, does that mean? With little to no precedent to rely on, and with the reality of deep-sea mining inching ever closer, the ISA and its member states are in the process of figuring out how to make deep-sea mining work for all of humanity.

At a practical level, this huge responsibility is in the hands of just 15 people—the state representatives who make up a working group at the ISA, uninspiringly called the Finance Committee. The Finance Committee meets in private, with limited public reporting of its deliberations. Observers have called for the Finance Committee to have greater transparency.

According to an ISA technical study, the Finance Committee is currently exploring two main options for sharing financial benefits. One involves distributing any leftover proceeds from deep-sea mining to world governments, with countries that have large populations and low incomes getting more money than smaller, wealthier ones.

Crucially, the money being disbursed would be what’s left after the mining company and its sponsoring state have made their profits, after the administrative costs of running the ISA have been accounted for, and after any compensation is paid out to countries negatively affected by mining.

In its own analyses, the ISA uses US $500-million as a benchmark for discussing how to equitably share benefits among nations. But one independent economic forecast estimates that the actual amount available for benefit sharing could fall between $14-million and $228-million each year. That study found that countries like India could receive about $1-million annually, while Pacific Island nations, such as Kiribati, might receive as little as $7,500.

The ISA’s second option to make deep-sea mining benefit all of humanity involves channeling the leftover proceeds into a fund that could be used to pay for scientific research and address the environmental harms caused by seabed mining.

The risk with this approach, says Aline Jaeckel, an expert in deep-sea mining regulations at the University of Wollongong in Australia, is ensuring the money genuinely benefits humanity, rather than being used to clean up the problems created by deep-sea mining itself.

But both approaches, says Jaeckel, miss the bigger picture. The deep sea is home to an incredible amount of life—much of which has yet to be discovered by scientists, let alone fully understood.

Recently, a treatment for brain cancer was sourced from microbes living on the ocean floor, while enzymes found in bacteria near hydrothermal vents were used to develop tests for COVID-19. Even polymetallic nodules—the very objects deep-sea miners covet—may play a role in oxygenating the deep ocean. Narrowly focusing on the financial benefits of deep-sea mining, says Jaeckel, misses what else the deep sea already provides, or could provide in the future.

The ISA’s approaches to interpreting the deep seafloor as the common heritage of humanity also fail to leave room for Indigenous rights to the deep sea. In some countries, terrestrial mining operations are required to financially benefit local Indigenous communities. But the benefit-sharing mechanisms currently under discussion at the ISA do not specifically account for the people who might be most directly affected by seabed mining, such as those from Pacific Island nations. Instead, it’s up to states to compensate people who might be particularly affected by mining.

Neil Craik, an expert in international environmental law at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, says that with so much uncertainty around the environmental consequences of seabed mining, and limited information on the economic benefits, “one of the big questions states must ask themselves is if [seabed mining] is worth it.”

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Polymetallic nodules are small, metal-rich rocks. Mining them involves collecting the nodules from the seafloor. Photo by Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photo

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The political pancake breakfast is one of the longstanding traditions of the Calgary Stampede, Alberta’s annual rodeo and fair. Members of the province’s governing United Conservative Party hosted one on July 2, the day after Canada Day. The far-right premier of the province, Danielle Smith, kitted out in Lone Star cowboy boots, a Stetson hat and a Texas Longhorn bolo tie, popped in. It was hard not to read the outfit as a conscious nod to Canada’s erstwhile friends south of the border, because President Trump, MAGA and the United States are unmistakable strands of the conversation in Alberta these days.

After flipping some flapjacks, the premier addressed the crowd, making sure to toss a pancake to her base by saying that immigrants — or “newcomers,” as she put it — had caused government spending to skyrocket. She reminded people that the Stampede is an expression of bedrock Albertan values: grit, determination and getting back in the saddle. The implied contrast was with the hopeless mandarins in Ottawa who can’t be expected to know anything about such matters.

It would have been a typical Stampede breakfast were it not for the sightings of a formerly reclusive political creature: the baldfaced Alberta separatist, a breed apart from the more common species, the alienated Westerner. They came in groups like Albertans4Freedom and United Alberta Flags, which advocate Alberta seceding from Canada to become an independent Judeo-Christian nation. They encouraged Albertans to vote yes on Oct. 19 to a referendum question asking whether Alberta should start down the road to separation, an impulse that the Trump-friendly Ms. Smith — without explicitly endorsing separation — has given new life to by pushing for the referendum question to be on the ballot.

Most Albertans are outraged that their elected leader has given credence to the idea, even if polls show it has little chance of being approved. A couple of weeks after the Stampede, when Ms. Smith was again pancaking at another event, a protester yelled that her pancakes were “fascist.” Hardly fair to the pancakes, but evocative nonetheless. There are plenty of irate separatists, too, who view the wording of the separation question, which asks voters to move forward with a further binding referendum, as too wishy-washy.

Separatism isn’t a new idea in Canada. The provincial government in Quebec has kept the notion of independence simmering on a back burner for the past few decades to use as leverage with the federal government, though polls show that most Quebecers don’t actually want to leave. With Alberta now considering the idea, the normally cozy patchwork quilt that is Canada is really starting to pop a seam or two. It just feels like everybody’s angry, everywhere, all the time.

It is the perfect moment, in other words, for Mr. Trump to tear further at the quilt by insulting our leaders (especially Prime Minister Mark Carney), threatening our sovereignty, attacking our economy — particularly after the highly acrimonious breakdown of trade talks between Canada and the United States in late August — setting provinces against one another with differing tariffs, speculating about erasing the border and just generally butting into our business. In so doing, the American president shows how he is not only damaging the comity of nations dating back to the end of World War II. He is, actively or by example, rending the fabric of nations internally.

The Trump administration has meddled in Argentina in favor of the right-wing president, Javier Milei; interfered in elections in Hungary, Honduras, Colombia and Brazil; given a boost to the ascendant far-right AfD party in Germany; and offered refugee status to white South Africans. “This administration has had zero compunction about interfering in the domestic elections, the domestic politics” of U.S. allies, Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, told me. Mr. Trump “obviously does not like Carney” and “he will do anything he can to belittle or minimize Canada’s autonomy.” His actions could also embolden divisive internal forces — including Alberta’s separatists, Mr. Drezner said.

When it comes to Alberta, the MAGA presence has taken various forms. Ms. Smith says she told Trump administration officials to “pause” on tariffs “so we can get through an election” — meaning, of course, to avoid tariffs on oil and gas, the mainstays of the provincial economy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in an interview, appeared to show sympathy with separatists in Alberta. “They have great resources. The Albertans are very independent people,” he reportedly told Real America’s Voice, a right-wing media outlet. Separatists have met multiple times with administration officials to discuss the logistics of Alberta separating and how the United States might support that process. The Trump administration has acknowledged the meetings, but said no senior officials were present.

The greatest favor Mr. Trump has done for Alberta separatists has not been to promote an independent Alberta, but to undermine a sovereign Canada. Mr. Trump’s casting of Canada as weak, broken and beholden to the United States does nothing but promote the separatist cause. All of it is a complication we could do without. Hoisting ourselves onto a chopping block with Donald Trump standing there holding a cleaver just doesn’t seem all that smart.

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Visuals by Chelsee Ivan

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The death toll from the catastrophic floods that swept through parts of Nepal and Tibet last week has risen beyond 1,000 people, while thousands of people remain missing. Among them are hundreds of workers believed to be stuck inside large underground tunnels connected to hydroelectric power plants. As the rescue mission continues, researchers warn that disasters like this could become more common all over the planet as a result of climate change.

Part of what made this disaster so deadly was its suddenness. Experts believe it was likely caused by a large landslide on the mountain Langtang Lirung that included a chunk of glacier. It sent hundreds of millions of tons of ice, rock and other debris hurtling down the slopes to the villages below. The avalanche traveled nearly 100 kilometers (about 62 miles), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

And while it’s too early to say whether this event was caused by rising global temperatures, the trend is clear: Earth is getting warmer, and that will make disasters like this worse and more common. The rest of the world should be on notice.

Understanding why climate change is making such events more likely is important. Generally, in high-altitude environments such as mountain ranges, permafrost—basically, frozen soil—holds sediment and rocky material together. When it thaws, it can cause cracks in the rocks that make a violent break more likely.

“It’s essentially preconditioning the glacier and the rock for potential collapse or a landslide,” says Regine Hock, a geoscientist at the University of Oslo.

At the same time, the world’s glaciers are shrinking because of the warming planet. This weakens the ice’s “buttressing” effect on the surrounding slopes, which in turn make those rocks more unstable, Hock says. Excess melted water can also create lubrication, more easily triggering a slip, she says.

What that means is that, in principle, a mountain landslide can happen anywhere that those conditions exist, Hock says. That could be in the Himalayas or in South America or in the Cascade Range in the Pacific Northwest or on the slopes of Alaska. “Wherever you have similar conditions, like warming, destabilizing of the rock, thawing of permafrost and steep slopes, you can have these mass movements,” she says.

But pinpointing the exact risk to any specific village, town or city is difficult.

For one, it’s hard to know when a mountain or glacier might crack. Determining that involves having a deep understanding of the land’s features, as well as tracking possible triggers such as earthquakes, says Ben Orlove, an anthropologist who studies climate risks at Columbia University.

The equation also needs to factor in any mitigation efforts—say, early warning systems—to reduce risk and the local conditions where people live. In 2025, for instance, the Tracy Arm landslide in Alaska was so powerful that it produced a tsunami of nearly 500 meters. But because Alaska is so sparsely populated, no one was killed.

There are ways to reduce some of the risks of high-mountain hazards. Local officials can, for instance, work to prevent spills from “glacial lake outburst floods,” lakes formed by melting glaciers. Many of these lakes are not dangerous, says Olivier Gagliardini, a professor at Grenoble Alpes University in France, but if one’s walls are “not strong enough,” they can burst. In France, for example, officials have drained glacial lakes to head off potential flooding, Gagliardini says.

In other cases, evacuation is the only option, Gagliardini adds—that is certainly true for a glacial collapse or landslide on the scale of what happened in the Himalayas.

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Key Takeaways

• Setting limits and boundaries helps kids feel safe and teaches them how to navigate the world.
• Spending quality time with your child builds trust, strengthens your bond, and supports their emotional well-being.
• Being a good role model shows your child how to behave with kindness, honesty, and respect.

 

There are no perfect parents, but there are plenty of things you can do that will make you a fantastic one. Now we’ve gathered our all-time favorite nuggets of advice in one place. Broadly speaking, this is what the experts say about how to be a good parent and improve your parenting skills:

• Set limits
• Spend quality time with your kids
• Be a good role model
• Praise your kids
• Trust yourself
• Teach your kids social skills
• Teach gratitude
• Make meal time family time
• Say “I love you.”
• Encourage physical activity
• Keep up with your kids’ routine health care

Read on to learn more about what this looks like in practice and how to put some of our expert tips to good use.

Set Smart Limits

Take charge. Children crave limits, which help them understand and manage an often confusing world. Show your love by setting boundaries so your kids can explore and discover their passions safely.

Don’t clip your child’s wings. Your toddler’s mission in life is to gain independence. So when they’re developmentally capable of putting their toys away, clearing their plate from the table, and dressing themselves, let them. Giving a child responsibility is good for their self-esteem (and your sanity!).

Don’t try to fix everything. Give young kids a chance to find their own solutions. When you lovingly acknowledge a child’s minor frustrations without immediately rushing in to save them, you teach them self-reliance and resilience.

Remember that discipline is not punishment. Enforcing limits is really about teaching kids how to behave in the world and helping them to become competent, caring, and in control, not about punishing them.

Pick your battles. Kids can’t absorb too many rules without turning off and tuning out. Forget arguing about little stuff like fashion choices and occasional potty language. Focus on the things that really matter, like no hitting, rude talk, or lying.

Create Your Own Quality Time

Play with your children. Let them choose the activity, and don’t worry about rules. Just go with the flow and have fun—you don’t always have to be the fun parent, but play offers plenty of opportunity for bonding. That’s the name of the game.

Read books together every day. Get started when they’re a newborn; babies love listening to the sound of their parents’ voices. Cuddling up with your child and a book is a great bonding experience that will set them up for a lifetime of reading.

Schedule daily special time. Let your child choose an activity where you hang out together for 10 or 15 minutes with no interruptions. There’s no better way for you to show your love.

Encourage family time. The greatest untapped resource available for improving the lives of our children is time with their parents. Kids with engaged parents do better in school, problem-solve more successfully, and generally cope better with whatever life throws at them.

Make warm memories. Your children will probably not remember anything that you say to them, but they will recall the family traditions—like bedtimes and game nights—that you do together.

Be a Good Role Model

Be the role model your children deserve. Kids learn by watching their parents. Modeling appropriate, respectful, good behavior works much better than telling them what to do.

Fess up when you blow it. This is the best way to show your child how and when they should apologize.

Live a little greener. Show your kids how easy it is to care for the environment. Waste less, recycle, reuse, and conserve each day. Spend an afternoon picking up trash around the neighborhood.

Always tell the truth. It’s how you want your child to behave, right? Teach honesty through imitation.

Kiss and hug your partner in front of the kids. Your partnership is one example your child has of what an intimate relationship looks, feels, and sounds like. So it’s important to set a great standard.

Respect parenting differences. Support your co-parent’s basic approach to raising kids—unless it’s way out of line. Criticizing or arguing with your partner will do more harm to your relationship and your child’s sense of security than if you accept standards that are different from your own.

 

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When a storm is coming, there will always be signs. The wind might suddenly drop. The tide goes out farther than usual. Streamers of clouds sail across the sky.

It’s possible to misread or even ignore these signs — to insist that the drops of rain are just a passing shower — until it’s too late. That’s when the real trouble arrives.

What is true of weather is also true of human affairs. Regimes look strong until they don’t. Revolutions at home and upheavals in the international order — the two so often go together — are easy to see in retrospect, but are not always anticipated. Yet if we look closer, we’ll often find the signs were there.

Those of us who live in relatively stable and well-ordered societies would like to believe, like Voltaire’s absurd Dr. Pangloss, who stumbles from one disaster to another, that “all is for the best.” We might grumble about the economy or the prospect of another far-off war, or listen approvingly to radical voices from either end of the political spectrum, but we don’t expect our world to be turned upside down.

We would do better to heed the warning of another French writer. In Albert Camus’s postwar novel “The Plague,” when dead rats appear on the streets of the Algerian city of Oran, and people fall ill with a mysterious disease, the local government and most of the citizens ignore the signs until it is too late. “There have been as many plagues as wars in history,” Camus’s narrator says, “yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

Today, there are dead rats all around. New temperature records have been set and reset this summer; the earth has baked in droughts, and wildfires have raged. Debt across advanced economies is approaching historic highs. Cuts in medical and food aid, most significantly by the United States, have caused unnecessary deaths and helped the spread of diseases, one of which, sooner or later, could become another pandemic. Artificial intelligence continues its rapid, unregulated rise, threatening jobs, security and, in darker projections, human existence.

Revisionist powers flout rules and norms with impunity. Electorates are angry and volatile. Slow, deliberate, necessarily discreet diplomacy, which builds trust and understanding, has given way to a performative, brash style more suited for TikTok-addled attention spans or the playground.

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program recorded 65 state-based conflicts last year — the highest number since 1946. Great powers find themselves bogged down in asymmetric wars with countries that are making the most of new technologies. President Vladimir Putin of Russia’s war in Ukraine, meant to be won in a matter of days, is creaking through its fifth year. Iran, using inexpensive, mass-produced drones to attack American forces and allies, has gained control, perhaps permanently, over a crucial corridor of world trade, drastically reduced U.S. missile stocks and mired President Trump in a war of his own choice.

A world war is not inevitable, but the threat of a catastrophic conflict between big and well-armed powers is closer than it has been for decades.

Like the people of Camus’s Oran, we are understandably reluctant to recognize just how much the world has changed. The problems are thorny, complex, and tedious, and it’s easier to look away. So we holiday on beaches while wildfires rage; we ask A.I. how to train a new puppy, how to write that letter — to do our thinking for us. We hope that the wars will end, that the guardrails, institutions and alliances will be rebuilt, and that the world as we understand it will recover and endure.

But a new reality has arrived with startling speed. The world order that held together for most of our lives started to erode when those within it got too comfortable and complacent, and when there was too much acceptance — even approval — of bad behavior.

We have arrived in a new age of disorder. We must prepare ourselves, which begins with being honest about the seriousness of the moment we’re in, and accepting that our fragile system is faltering. That countries are already adjusting, for better and worse. And that any future of cooperation will have to look different.

What happens to those who refuse to adapt, and insist that a crumbling system can carry on? Consider three revolutions that were, and one that wasn’t.

On the eve of the French Revolution, France, Europe’s greatest land power, was probably bankrupt, in large part because of the enormous amounts it had borrowed to help defeat the British in the American Revolution. Extravagant and corrupt ruling elites had lost their way, and a growing middle class, excluded from political power, was demanding change. At the bottom of society, workers and peasants faced starvation and were increasingly desperate.

Powerful new Enlightenment ideas were circulating — some of which were imported from the American Revolution — about human rights and new forms of government that would give power to at least some of the people.

The French kings and their courtiers misunderstood the depth of the discontent and assumed that nothing could shake them from their privileged position. They were wrong: The monarchy was overthrown, and a chaotic, violent republic was born. Within a decade, Napoleon would be emperor.

There is no single pattern for revolutionary change, but those at the summit of a regime often fail to recognize how brittle it is. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the consequence of defeat abroad, rather than a costly victory. But Czar Nicholas II also insisted, against all evidence, that no reforms were needed because Russians still adored him. In 1930s Germany, Hitler was invited into power by elites who thought, wrongly, that they would be able to use him, and that the existing system was strong enough to box him in.

Each of these revolutions had profound international ramifications. Napoleon led France to dominance over the continent, smashing old institutions and ideas like the divine right of kings to rule. The Bolsheviks, who seized power in Russia, preached and fostered revolutionary internationalism, waging war worldwide on capitalism and democratic nations. Hitler rearmed Germany, conquered most of Europe and murdered millions of Jews and many others in the name of Aryan dominance.

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Photo Illustration by Alma Haser for The New York Times

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The passage of time often seems like the most malleable thing in the world. A minute may feel much longer when you’re asked to hold a plank position in a workout class, and an hour may fly by when you’re chatting with a friend. In these cases, your perception of time is altered. But real, physical time dilation also happens. According to Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, clocks that are closer to Earth’s centre of gravity, say at sea level, tick more slowly than those at the top of a mountain. A similar slowing happens when a clock is physically travelling extremely fast.

Undeniably, this sounds bizarre, but decades’ worth of experiments haven’t managed to disprove it. Yet in what exact sense time dilation is real – and what it means for a physical effect to be real at all – has inspired philosophical debates ever since Einstein first formulated his theory in 1905.

In fact, in June, at the Foundations of Physics conference in Irvine, California, I heard Marco Giovanelli discuss how time dilation is both real and apparent at once. It sounds paradoxical, but when I called Giovanelli, who is a historian of philosophy and science at the University of Turin in Italy, to talk through it, I started to understand that it reflects the facets of our physical world that Einstein’s work first uncovered.

For Einstein, it was all about rods and clocks, explains Giovanelli. Suppose that you and a friend each had an identical clock and a metre-long rod. You stand still, while your friend gets into an incredibly fast spaceship and sets off on a journey. Compared with yours, their clock will tick less quickly, and their rod will contract in size. If you want to know by how much, Einstein’s got your back: he worked out those calculations more than a century ago. If you happen to have a second friend who has a slightly slower spaceship and their own clock-and-rod set, the same trick will work again, except that their clock will slow and their rod contract a little less than your speedier friend. Finally, if you also acquire a spaceship and catch up with either of your friends, your clocks will start to tick at the same rate again, and your metre-long rods will again look the same length.

To discuss these effects, physicists use the language of “inertial frames”, similar to comparing a room at rest, or a rest frame, with a spaceship travelling at a constant speed, or a moving frame. In your individual frames, you and your friends can each establish a coordinate system, the familiar grid of width, depth and height. Your coordinate systems will match when you are all at rest or when your spaceships move side by side at the same speed.

When one of you moves more quickly, though, special relativity shows that their grid will deform, contracting in the direction of motion. It is this detail that bothered Einstein’s contemporaries. It seemed that the change in the rod length was uncomfortably intertwined with changes in the coordinate system used to situate it. But an effect that is a function of a coordinate system cannot possibly be real, critics argued. Ultimately, coordinate systems themselves are of dubious reality. They seem to simply be tools that we humans made up to help us organise our theories and observations of the physical world.

In 1911, physicist Vladimir Varićak argued that the rod’s length contraction “is only a psychological and not a physical fact, i.e., the body has not really undergone any change”. Giovanelli recounts another anecdote where, in the 1970s, physicist John Stewart Bell surveyed his colleagues at the CERN particle physics laboratory about whether length contraction could break a thread suspended between two spaceships accelerating at exactly the same rate. Most physicists said the thread wouldn’t break, endorsing the idea that nothing physically changes about the atoms in the thread. Could they have possibly been wrong? This made my head spin.

I will admit to having always been a rather terrible student of relativity, only learning it just well enough to pass my preliminary exams in graduate school. However, I’m certain I was previously taught that relativistic time dilation and length contraction are unquestionably real. We know they are, from experience in everyday life. The precise clocks on GPS satellites tick at different rates than those on Earth. This is partly because they move quickly and partly because of the gravitational effects explained by Einstein in his general theory of relativity. For GPS to be accurate, the difference in ticks must be corrected for. Failing to do so would have very real consequences, like ending up in someone’s backyard when I try to use my phone to visit a new café or bookstore. But here’s the crucial thing: the clocks on GPS satellites derive their precision from leveraging quantum control over atoms rather than some macroscopic clock gears, so it feels especially egregious to suggest that time dilation does, well, nothing to an atom.

Einstein himself was thinking about this, too, Giovanelli tells me. In fact, an atomic effect was at the centre of a 1906 debate he had with Johannes Stark, a physicist who was awarded the Nobel prize for discovering how electromagnetic fields can affect the energy states of atoms. Stark was studying fast-moving charged atoms, and Einstein recognised that these experiments may display the transverse Doppler effect – in the same way that a siren changes pitch as it approaches you due to a shift in the frequency of its sound waves, a similar effect can happen due to time dilation. It is a distinct prediction of special relativity, an effect that doesn’t exist in other theories, says Giovanelli.

For the standard Doppler effect, you know that you could cancel it out by driving after the police car and that what is happening isn’t due to something changing inside the car’s speaker. The same question reared its head for the transverse Doppler effect. “Stark really thought, kind of naively but naturally, that something is going on in the atom,” says Giovanelli – in our analogy, the speaker in the car would be physically changing. Einstein rejected this. He posited that all the atoms remain the same and that their inner workings are unaffected by motion. Time dilation was the only explanation. Seemingly apparent, here it was confronted with a real, empirical test.

Ironically, when the transverse Doppler effect was experimentally verified in 1938, one of the two physicists involved was Herbert Ives, who never accepted special relativity. Ives thought that he had found signatures of the “luminiferous aether”, a hypothetical substance that some researchers thought permeated the universe and provided one preferred, true reference frame. A preponderance of other experimental evidence, much of it obtained even prior to Ives’s work, completely ruled out this option, and special relativity became the only game in town. For all the clamouring about the oddity of an effect related to an observer’s perspective, one that many physicists wanted to dismiss, time dilation withstood the test of time. Over the ensuing decades, ever-increasingly precise atomic clocks hav

e never uncovered any evidence that something more “real” could be happening.As far as Giovanelli is concerned, what happened was not so much a dispute over physics, but rather a run-in between physics and philosophy. Underneath the sticky question of whether time dilation is real hides another, even stickier philosophical one: what does it mean to be real?

“At a certain point, you cannot avoid it,” says Giovanelli. “And so, Einstein was forced to address the question philosophically. OK, really, let’s define: ‘apparent’ means disappears for the co-moving observer, ‘real’ means empirically testable.” In some sense, the situation ought to never have become that complicated, he says. Scientific theories provide testable hypotheses – it is what they are designed for – and special relativity has passed every test we’ve put it to. What more could you ask from a theory?

Well, it’s hard to understand from an intuitive point of view, says Giovanelli. Einstein even had his own questions, primarily about how certain he could really be that two clocks, or two atoms being used as clocks, could be reliably identical. The advent of quantum physics offered some assurances, but Einstein had his qualms with quantum theory and spent time worrying about it way beyond how it applies to rods and clocks. But he never questioned the empirical reality of time dilation and length contraction, says Giovanelli.

As we talked, I wondered whether for me, like Einstein’s critics, it was my notable lack of relativistic intuition that made time dilation so hard to grasp. It may have been easier to accept that when atoms within a clock or a rod move at a certain speed, some as-yet-unknown mechanism physically changes them, leading to time dilation and length contraction. Instead, I have to grapple with there really being no such thing as absolute time.

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When I’m tired of cooking, there’s truly nothing like going out to a restaurant and letting the professionals take the reins. There’s something about the atmosphere of dining out that makes the day feel special. And let’s face it: I’m almost always getting a tastier meal than I could make myself (unless, of course, I’m following a Delish recipe). The problem is that not every dish is worth your hard-earned cash.

Sometimes a restaurant is overcharging for a menu item. Sometimes the dish lacks flavor. And sometimes, the ingredients may even raise food safety concerns. We tapped chefs across the country to find out what they would never order at a restaurant, so you never have to overpay, leave unsatisfied, or worse, deal with food poisoning. You’re welcome.

This steak-loving gal was shocked to find one of her favorite cuts on the list. But Antimo DiMeo, co-owner and Executive Chef at Bardea Restaurant Group, says he would pass on filet mignon, especially when he isn’t dining at a steakhouse.

“There’s nothing wrong with filet when it’s sourced beautifully and executed with precision, but in a lot of restaurants, it becomes the ‘safe’ luxury order,” he says. “It’s tender, yes, but it’s also one of the least flavorful cuts on the animal because it doesn’t have the same fat, marbling, or character as a ribeye, strip, hanger, bavette, or even a great short rib.”

In other words, filet may sound like the fancy choice, but it’s not always the most exciting one.

“A lot of times, people order filet because it feels like the premium choice, but premium doesn’t always mean most delicious,” he notes. “Unless the restaurant has a serious steak program, I’d rather order a cut with more personality.”

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As the leaders of China, Russia, India, Iran and other nations converged on Central Asia for a two-day summit beginning on Monday, one thing was clear from the outset. Even as President Trump tries to bend the world to revolve around Washington, President Xi Jinping of China has his own powerful orbit.

The Chinese leader’s arrival in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, for a meeting of the 10-nation political and security grouping known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization underscored Mr. Xi’s broad ability to sustain Washington’s foes, both in peacetime and in war.

The talks come against the backdrop of two wars that have pushed the globe into a period of intense geopolitical instability, suppressing economic growth and driving up inflation. Those challenges were at the heart of discussions taking place simultaneously on the other side of the globe in Asheville, N.C., at a gathering of finance ministers from the Group of 20 countries.

The meeting in Bishkek, in contrast, was a showcase for the incredible leverage that the wars have given Mr. Xi.

No nation has been more critical to Russia and Iran in sustaining their economies and war efforts than China. Mr. Xi has undermined efforts by the United States and its allies to pressure Russia and Iran economically, employing Beijing’s vast geopolitical and economic clout as the world’s largest importer of crude oil and exporter of consumer goods.

Mr. Xi’s biggest rival, the United States, has been distracted by the war in Iran and has pulled some of its military forces from Asia and Europe. Last month, the Chinese leader was able to brush off threats by President Trump that the United States would inflict an “economic D-Day” on countries that provided Tehran with a lifeline. Mr. Trump once made similar threats about purchasers of Russian oil, but did not follow through with any actions against Beijing.

“After the past year, Trump has a fundamental credibility problem with Xi,” said Julian Gewirtz, who served as the senior director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration. “Both his threats and his assurances appear to Beijing, as another world leader put it, to be written in pencil.”

In Bishkek, Mr. Xi’s priority is to burnish his image as the leader of non-Western nations and to push back against what he calls U.S. hegemony. Despite that, he will most likely be cautious about how much support he publicly offers Iran.

The Chinese leader cannot afford to provoke Mr. Trump less than a month before he is scheduled to travel to Washington to attempt to extend a fragile economic truce between the United States and China. Before heading to the United States, Mr. Xi will travel to Egypt and India for state visits.

The series of trips leading up to his summit with Mr. Trump is aimed at casting Mr. Xi as a powerful statesman at a time when Mr. Trump has frayed U.S. relations globally, analysts said.

“Xi appears to see an opportunity to show that China has friends and options around the world at precisely the moment Washington is alienating many of its allies,” Mr. Gewirtz said.

This week’s summit in Bishkek is a reminder of the limits of U.S.-led economic warfare. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran, both critically reliant on China, arrived in the Kyrgyz capital on Monday as they work to defy Western efforts to isolate them and persevere with their own wartime goals.

Beijing has largely obliged, extending economic lifelines to both Moscow and Tehran and leveraging its economic clout to the frustration of Washington.

While Mr. Xi’s power is on the rise, there are limits to it. Though the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is partly a security grouping, Beijing has been unwilling to deploy its military to defend members such as Iran, which joined the organization in 2023, or Russia, instead formally calling for dialogue and an end to the conflicts.

Mr. Xi does not want to be entangled in foreign wars, analysts have said, viewing them as one of the primary reasons the United States has seen its power wane over the decades. But Beijing is willing to increase trade and provide technologies that can be used on the battlefield.

The Chinese leader met with Mr. Putin for bilateral talks in Bishkek on Monday, praising what he called ever-brighter prospects for relations between China and Russia.

Mr. Putin, in turn, highlighted the success of visa-free travel between the two nations and said he was ready to make the arrangement permanent. The Russian leader noted that the first scheduled voyage of a Chinese container ship passed through what is known as the Northern Sea Route in mid-August, presaging broader cooperation in the Arctic.

Whether Mr. Xi meets with the Iranian leader separately from the summit will indicate how much the Chinese leader is willing to push the line ahead of the scheduled visit to the United States.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, and Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, left, during a welcoming ceremony in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on Monday. Credit…Pavel Mikheyev/Reuters

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For an experienced reader, recognising the words on this page feels effortless. Yet, evolutionarily speaking, your brain shouldn’t be able to read. Reading has existed for too short a time to have shaped a dedicated centre in the brain.

Therefore, the brain has to learn to read using systems that evolved for other purposes. But it has long been unclear exactly which systems it recruits to do so and how.

This is important, as differences in these pre-existing systems could shed light on why some of us find reading easier than others. It could also explain how people who are deaf, blind or have dyslexia learn to read in remarkably different ways. In my new paper, published in Cerebral Cortex, I have come up with some answers.

In my study, I investigated the relationship between individuals’ reading skills and their fine-grained brain structure. I also compared twins with different degrees of genetic overlap to see whether shared genetic factors contribute to the links between brain structure and reading skill.

These patterns offer clues about which parts of the distributed “reading network” might provide the initial conditions for reading, and which might respond more to experience.

Basic, neural hardware

I used high-resolution brain scans from the Human Connectome Project, a large study of healthy young adults. The participants did not read while their brains were being scanned. Instead, they completed a range of language tests separately. The most important of these tests for my study was an adaptive reading test in which participants pronounced written words aloud. I used their scores on this test as a measure of reading ability.

I discovered that several brain areas contribute to the skills needed for reading, and that some show heritable links with it. To be clear, heritability does not mean that we are born a certain way and cannot change. The brain is, in fact, constantly changing. Rather, we begin with a partly inherited lump of clay that we continuously shape and refine throughout our lives.

Let’s begin with auditory abilities. When we learn how to read in school, we typically begin with identifying sounds and putting them together in our minds. In fact, problems with perceiving the sound structure of language are commonly cited as an underlying factor in developmental dyslexia.

To read, children learn to map each letter to a sound and join strings of letters into words: the letter s to the “sss” sound, i to the short “i”, and t to the “t” sound, so that s-i-t is pronounced “sit”. Breaking spoken words into individual speech sounds starts at the syllable level, dividing sitting into sit|ting. This requires the skill to identify slowly developing changes in loudness. Most syllables start quiet with a consonant like s-, then grow louder at the vowel (-i-), with its singing character, before going down in intensity again (-t).

Before we’ve learnt how to read properly, the brain can use auditory cues like these to detect syllables and their internal structure in spoken language and begin its road to literacy.

Particularly suited for this task is a region next to the primary auditory cortex at the top of the left temporal lobe, which sits underneath the temple and upper ear. It is called the medial belt area and is tuned to slow, coarse changes in sound. Strikingly, I found that a well-organized structure of its nerve cells is linked with reading ability.

The relationship had a genetic component, suggesting that the organization of this perceptual system might affect how easy we find it to learn to read. Such differences could contribute to variation in literacy that does not simply separate people with and without dyslexia, but span the whole population.

We also need to understand what we read, however. A skilled reader can usually see words and directly connect them to meaning, in parallel with the activation of their sound. Recognizing the visual aspect of a word is thought to build on our capacity to distinguish faces through their defining features. We identify letters and words by their smaller parts—bows, dots and lines—just like we recognise faces by the eyes, noses and chins.

Face identification seems to depend on a brain area in the right anterior temporal lobe called the dorsal temporal pole. Interestingly, I found that the size of this area is linked with reading ability—and this combination is also passed down. A possible explanation is that it helps us identify written words in a way similar way to how we recognise a face.

Finally, another region in the left anterior temporal lobe (the anterior middle temporal gyrus) is thought to connect word form and meaning. The bigger it is, the better we are at deciphering meaning. And it makes sense that having an advantage in accessing the meaning of words might make it easier to learn to read. Indeed, its size was also genetically related to reading ability.

The role of nurture

Now that we have identified some possible initial conditions for the brain’s reading ability—the lump of clay—we can turn to how the clay might be shaped.

After detecting syllables, the speech-sound distinctions need to be refined. This requires the primary auditory cortex to perform fine-grained sound analysis. Here, a thicker cortex (the outermost layer of the brain) is associated with better reading skills.

But, as I discovered, this combination of reading skill and a thick cortex was not genetically driven. In fact, it might be that experience—including exposure to speech sounds, other forms of auditory analysis (such as picking up different individual sounds from a soundscape) and reading practice—contributes to greater cortical thickness.

The structure of the nerve fibre bundles connecting sound to meaning and visual form also correlates with reading ability. But these relationships do not appear to be heritable either. These bundles might develop when sound, meaning and visual word form are connected during literacy training and general language exposure. So the more we read, the better the brain gets at doing it.

What can we learn from all this? Some brains might have an easier time learning to sound out letters, identify written words or access the meaning of words. In the end, though, our reading and language activities substantially mould the brain’s reading network. In other words, devoted parents, teachers and speech therapists can actually help children develop their inner worlds.

Alternative ways of learning to read

But there is not only one way to learn to read or even only one way to read. I once talked to a physics professor with dyslexia. He was incapable of sounding out words readily and didn’t hear them in his head while reading. He did, however, understand text, describing it as if written words silently built up systems of meaning in his head. He even felt that his reading style was advantageous in his line of work. While listening, I couldn’t keep from wondering what his anterior temporal lobes (involved in identifying familiar forms and accessing meaning) might look like.

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AI has been expected to remove some of the bottom rungs on the corporate ladder. As software absorbs routine analysis, research, drafting, and administrative work, companies have had fewer reasons to hire large classes of junior employees. Recent evidence suggests that assumption may be changing. Some major employers are hiring again, and companies using AI extensively are reporting greater demand for entry-level workers.

KPMG (Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler) offers an especially interesting example. The professional services company recently brought nearly 1,000 interns to its Lakehouse training center in Orlando for intensive development in critical thinking, judgment, communication, and interpersonal skills. KPMG’s own research found that interns ranked critical thinking and problem solving as the most important capabilities they wanted to demonstrate while working alongside AI.

KPMG may be responding to a problem that extends far beyond accounting and consulting. Entry-level jobs have always produced more than inexpensive labor. They provide the experiences through which organizations create their next generation of experts, managers, and decision makers.

AI can remove the work that teaches people how to work

Consider what traditionally happens during the first few years of a career. Junior employees research unfamiliar problems, prepare first drafts, make mistakes, receive corrections, observe customers, and explain their reasoning to people with greater expertise. Much of that work can look inefficient because learning itself is inefficient.

Generative AI changes the calculation. A senior employee who once delegated research or preliminary analysis to a junior colleague can now ask an AI system to produce it in seconds. The immediate productivity gain is obvious. The developmental cost is much harder to see.

A recent study of software engineers identified precisely this risk. Researchers interviewed junior and senior software engineers and found evidence that generative AI was absorbing some of the work through which novices traditionally developed expertise. They described the loss of “productive struggle,” the difficult process of working through problems that helps beginners construct the knowledge they later need to solve more complicated ones.

The study is small, involving 14 interviews in South Korea, so its findings should not be treated as proof of what is happening across every profession. It raises an important organizational question, however. If AI continually transfers entry-level work from beginners to experienced employees working with machines, where will future experienced employees come from?

Productivity today can create a capability problem tomorrow

Organizations naturally measure AI by what it saves. A task takes 20 minutes instead of two hours. One employee produces what previously required three. Projects move faster and staffing requirements decline.

Those measures capture current output. They rarely capture the expertise the organization would have developed while producing that output. A junior analyst struggling through an assignment may be slower than AI, but that assignment is simultaneously producing an analysis and a more capable analyst.

KPMG appears to recognize that distinction. Its Lakehouse is explicitly designed as a learning and development environment, and the company says it is expanding immersive, in-person experiences as AI increases the importance of human judgment and other skills. KPMG has also emphasized mentorship, hands-on work, feedback, and real-world application as part of preparing employees to work alongside AI.

Redesign entry-level work around learning

Companies do not need to preserve routine work simply because generations of employees learned from doing it. They do need to identify what developmental function that work performed before automating it away.

That means designing early-career roles around experiences AI cannot easily provide by itself. Junior employees can frame problems before prompting an AI system, verify its work, explain why they accepted or rejected its recommendations, interact directly with customers, observe experienced colleagues making consequential decisions, and assume progressively greater responsibility for outcomes.

This also changes what leaders should measure. The fastest junior employee may be the person who delegates the most thinking to AI. A more useful question is whether that employee is becoming capable of handling increasingly difficult work with less supervision.

AI can make an organization more productive while simultaneously weakening its ability to reproduce expertise. Those outcomes will not appear on the same dashboard or on the same timetable. KPMG’s investment in interns offers a useful reminder that organizations still need beginners, because somewhere inside today’s entry-level workforce are the seasoned experts they will depend on tomorrow.

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