Amazon’s Prime Day sale runs on October 8 and 9, but we’ve already spotted best-ever prices on products we’ve tested and loved.

Neo-Nazis are joining SimpleX Chat, a relatively unknown app that received funding from Jack Dorsey and promises users there is no way for it or law enforcement to track their identity.

Among the signs that the 2024 presidential contest is reverting to a more “normal” election is a big shift from the country’s youngest voters. After abandoning President Joe Biden in favor of third-party candidates, former President Donald Trump, or simply not voting, they have rallied to support Vice President Kamala Harris since her entrance to the race this summer. That’s true across much of the electorate, though to differing degrees. After all, Harris took over from a candidate in political free fall. But young voters have responded with particular enthusiasm: They organized Zoom calls for her nascent campaign. Their activist groups rushed to endorse the VP. They signed up to volunteer for her campaign and registered to vote for the first time. “A breath of fresh air” was the phrase of the day, and some Gen Z activists wondered if this was what it felt like to be young during Barack Obama’s first presidential run in 2008. And, of course, you can’t forget the memes. The conventional wisdom from pundits and pollsters was that, like any honeymoon, the good vibes could be temporary. It seemed only natural that as young voters who didn’t really know Harris learned more about her, some share of them would be turned off by elements of her political track record or personal history. And surely the usual fusillade of Trump attacks would sour some part of the electorate, including young voters, against her. And yet, about two months later, Harris has managed to sustain that youth enthusiasm and recover much of the support Biden received in 2020. Part of that success, polls suggest, is because her campaign is tackling some deep-seated frustrations young voters have had with American politics in the Trump era: a disconnected feeling, an absence of representation, and a sense that they just aren’t being heard by the political establishment. That appeal may be key to what’s going on with Harris and young voters. While she’s made gains with a number of groups since entering the race — independents, suburban voters, even white non-college-educated voters, to name a few — only Black voters have swung as hard in her favor as young voters have. An analysis of crosstab data from polls conducted before Biden’s dropout and after Harris’s debate performance by the former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson found a Harris gain of nearly 12 points with voters 18–29, compared to a shift of 4.2 points for the electorate at large. “Young voters desire to be seen and heard, particularly in this presidential race that just felt really disconnected from them,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, cofounder of Way to Win, a political strategy group that focuses on mobilizing minority voters, told me. “The opportunity now is to present this campaign as a response to young voters’ desire for younger candidates at the top of the ticket, affirming their collective power and their ability to affect change.” That ability may rest in part on turnout; while millennial and Gen Z voters combined are on track to make up a larger chunk of the electorate this year than they ever have, they regularly participate at lower levels than older generations. Even in 2020, a year of record young voter turnout, only about half of those younger demographic cohorts voted. And yet, turning out and winning less reliable young voters by large margins is a necessary part of any Democratic presidential victory, even if it’s not enough to swing the whole race. Most polls since the Democratic National Convention in August and the first Harris-Trump presidential debate last month present similar accounts of the “youth vote”: After nearly a year of bad polling for Biden, Harris has managed to open and hold a margin of support nearly equal to what Biden got four years ago. In 2020, for context, Biden won voters under the age of 30 by about 24 points, according to post-election surveys. That result itself was a decline from the support Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama received in past cycles, but Biden had long had trouble energizing young people. Harris now has an average polling lead of about 22 points with young voters when you look at aggregated crosstab results from polls in September. Even a return to the 2020 status quo, though, represents a dramatic shift. Before dropping out, Biden was routinely just barely leading Trump with young voters, if not falling slightly behind. Pundits and the public were regularly asking if the polls were just broken or if Biden could really be that unpopular with young people. Harris’s candidacy may have provided an answer: By late July, mere days into her campaign, she had begun to restore the Democratic edge. She was leading Trump by about 20 points in some of the same polls that had spelled doom for Biden. Polling isn’t the only sign of this sudden reversal. Voter registration rates for young people provide another data point. According to tracking from the Democratic strategist Tom Bonier, rates of new registration for the young, particularly young Black and Hispanic women, have surged both in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s dropout and Harris’s ascension, and in the six weeks since. These statistics mirror what independent voter registration trackers, like Vote.org, say. Polls gauging the enthusiasm of young voters and their interest in the presidential election have also shifted in the last few months. The Harvard Youth Poll, one of the best surveys of young voters out there, found significant movement in young Democrats’ enthusiasm for the election from March to September 2024. In the spring, similar shares of young Democrats (66 percent) and young Republicans (64 percent) told pollsters that they would “definitely” vote in the November election. Last month, young Democrats were much more likely to say they will vote: 74 percent compared to just 60 percent of young Republicans. The Harvard pollsters argue that much of this boost is due specifically to Harris. Back in March, just 44 percent of self-identified Biden voters in the Harvard poll said they were enthusiastic about supporting him. In September, 81 percent of Harris voters said so. And views of Harris specifically have gotten much more positive: Her overall favorability ratings have risen since the spring, and she also holds an advantage over Trump in the kinds of personal attributes they ascribe to her and in who they trust more on most policies. The University of Chicago Institute of Politics Youth Poll found similar shifts from its May 2024 survey to its most recent poll from late July and August, which was taken shortly after Biden exited the race. Both young Republicans and young Democrats are now paying more attention to election news, but the share of young Democrats who say they will “definitely” vote this year has risen, while the share of Republicans has stayed flat. Taken together, these surveys and statistics suggest not only that the rush of early youth enthusiasm for Harris is sticking but that there are clear opportunities for Harris’s campaign to continue to increase these margins of support. Harris’s apparent success with young voters wasn’t a given, but reckoning with just how rotten the vibes had gotten for young voters while Biden was the nominee is key to understanding how it came about. That context also explains why so many young people are projecting a new kind of hope onto Harris — and what she can still come to represent in the little over a month left of the campaign. In addition to national-level polling, researchers and strategists are using focus groups and surveys to zoom in on young voter sentiments and better understand the “why” and “how” of their evolving support for the Democratic ticket. Fernandez Ancona’s Way to Win, for example, identified and surveyed a group of battleground state young voters to examine how young people were feeling about the country, the electoral process, and the candidates before them. The survey was conducted this summer before Biden dropped out of the race. “One of the challenges that we saw early on with Biden’s candidacy,” Fernandez Ancona said, “was [that young people] felt like Biden had abandoned them. They felt like Biden couldn’t fight for them because … he was too old and he could no longer understand them or feel empathy for them. So that disconnect was a huge problem.” The results were grim for Democrats and confirmed what other qualitative research of young voters has found: that young people feel like the American dream is a “fading mirage” that is increasingly “out of reach.” They were still hopeful, dreaming about what could be, but felt especially left out of political discussions, uninspired by Biden or Trump, and pressured by the cost of living, debt, and threats to abortion rights. “I am struggling in every aspect when it comes to the cost of living, the cost of food, everything is barely making it so that I can [stay] just above water … (barely making it),” one 28-year-old Biden-supporting female participant told the researchers. Pluralities of respondents felt the same way. And more than half of them said 2024 was trending in a worse direction than any of the past few years. “You’d see over and over again, just how young people do feel powerless and out of control, regarding their finances, their own ability to provide themselves, health care, and just the state of the world. That is something that [persists] and is still a thing we have speak to,” Fernandez Ancona said. The results offered a clear picture of what Democrats needed to change if they wanted to win in November: Replace Biden, promote younger leadership, and offer a clearer, more positive, and more forward-looking platform that moved beyond Biden or Trump. That’s just what has happened in the following months. “What we see in the data is that Harris is almost kind of the ideal candidate for them, because [she presents] the three things that [young people] said they wanted most: authenticity, actionable policies, and a change from the status quo,” Fernandez Ancona said. “Harris becomes that avatar for everything you are asking for. So she can possibly help solidify them as a voting block by speaking to their agency in [pushing for this change].” Aside from representing the kind of shock to the political system that many young people were hoping for, Harris is also benefitting from a high level of trust from young people, both on the issues they said matter most and on being the “change” candidate. The University of Chicago poll, for example, found that while young people continue to disapprove of Biden, they don’t necessarily apply that same disapproval to Harris. What all these surveys and studies also confirmed was the way these narratives of trust, change, and hope were boosted by viral memes and social media engagement. It was through social media, and TikTok in particular, that many young voters were reintroduced to Harris as a candidate and prompted to tune back into election news and look into her policies. Still, these analyses also point to a central vulnerability for Harris, one that existed even before the summer shakeup. Young voters, and voters writ large, are still concerned about affordability and their economic prospects, and that’s the big issue holding back stronger support from young men, and young men of color, in particular. It’s the biggest issue where Trump continues to hold an advantage over Harris in the Harvard Youth Poll, it’s the most important issue in the University of Chicago poll, and it’s the major sticking point for undecided and marginal young voters in the focus groups that Harvard’s John Della Volpe, the director the youth poll, has been running.  It also swamps the share of young voters who are concerned about the other big vulnerability Biden faced — his handling of the war in Gaza. Anywhere from 1 to 4 percent of respondents in either poll prioritized the Gaza war, though 11 percent of respondents in the UChicago poll said they were Harris voters who felt less likely to support her because of the administration’s handling of the war. Harris, scholars and researchers say, should focus on her economic vision as young voters continue to prioritize issues and “change” in their vote choice. “Having an economic plan and a real plan for the future — yes, she talks about the opportunity economy that she envisions, but really spelling out for people how that’s going to work and play out, and how she may get that through Congress, is going to be critical, especially for that kind of cohort, these different demographic splits of Gen Z,” Alisha Hines, the director of research at the UCLA Center for Scholars and Storytellers, told me. Harris and her team may be getting the message. She rolled out an extensive economic policy vision in late September, followed in quick succession by a major speech and an interview with MSNBC to flesh out her plans — all of which mark a new phase of her campaign, drilling down on the policy specifics she has slowly rolled out since becoming the nominee. Polling and surveys tell us that young people want more of that. Harris has about a month left to do it.

Waymo has its sights set on its next robotaxi: the Hyundai Ioniq 5. The Alphabet company announced that it was entering a “multi-year, strategic” partnership with the Hyundai Motor Group that will result in the Ioniq 5 eventually joining its robotaxi fleet. But first, the Ioniq 5 will need to undergo on-road testing with Waymo’s self-driving technology, which the company says will begin in late 2025. Waymo wouldn’t specify when the Ioniq 5 will be used for passenger trips, except to say it would be “years” later. Vehicles intended for Waymo’s fleet will be manufactured at Hyundai’s $7.6 billion Metaplant factory in Georgia, which is nearing the end of its construction. The companies have agreed to produce a number of Waymo-equipped...

It has been a year since the horrific events of October 7, 2023. What has happened since is best described as a global tragedy. The scale of the immediate suffering is staggering. From the 1,200 Israelis killed by Hamas on October 7 to the over 40,000 Palestinians killed by Israel in the war since, the human toll of the conflict is terrible and growing higher. Though the past year should have discredited the idea that there can be any stability without a solution that satisfies both Israeli and Palestinian national aspirations, a negotiated settlement seems further away than ever. And as the dramatic military escalation of the past few weeks illustrates, the consequences of October 7 are traveling wider and wider. The Middle East is aflame, with Israeli soldiers fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon and direct hostilities between Israel and Iran, Hezbollah’s patron. The risk of a full-scale regional war is growing — if we are not already in one. Zooming even further out, the year since October 7 has seen dire developments for the entire world.  America’s disastrous mishandling of the conflict has not only failed to stop the bloodshed, but also done serious damage to its already-frayed credibility as a guarantor of the rules-based international order — weakening global support for Ukraine’s eminently just defensive war against Russia and strengthening China’s attempts to undermine pillars of global stability. The war has also created new forms of global instability. The Houthi militants in Yemen have wreaked havoc on global shipping, demonstrating how a well-positioned terrorist group can pose a serious threat to the global economy using relatively low-cost weapons. A global surge of Islamophobia and antisemitism has further scarred divided Western democracies, and internal divisions between pro-democracy political factions over Gaza have weakened their capacity to stand united against rising anti-democratic forces. To call the past year a global tragedy is not to distract from the most immediate victims, the Israelis and Palestinians killed and immiserated by bullets and bombs. These are the protagonists of any moral story about the past year of war, the people who should be placed first in any accounting of the past year’s events. Rather, it is to put the full range of consequences into view: to show that events that might seem contained to the Middle East have come to hurt people around the world in ways that we may not yet fully understand or even be capable of predicting. This is not a world war, but it is a global tragedy, one whose horrors are not yet done being revealed. Life for ordinary Gazans was difficult prior to October 7, thanks to a combination of Israeli restrictions on trade and movement and Hamas’s theocratic governance. But since then, Israel’s military response has made it unbearable. Nearly 42,000 Gazans have been killed since October 7, according to data from the Gaza Ministry of Health. That’s about 2 percent of the Gaza Strip’s entire population, the proportional equivalent of 6.5 million Americans dying in a war. Israeli estimates of Hamas fighters killed — between 17,000 and 18,000 — suggest around 60 percent of the dead are civilians. Some have called the death data into question on the grounds that Hamas controls the health ministry. However, its numbers have proven accurate in previous conflicts and provide at least a rough approximation of the total death count. In fact, it’s likely an understatement. Official data compiled by Al Jazeera shows at least half of all homes in the Strip are damaged or destroyed; so too are 80 percent of “commercial facilities” and 85 percent of school buildings. In May, a UN agency estimated that there were likely 10,000 Palestinian dead trapped under the rubble and that it might take as long as three years to recover all of the bodies. Israel’s bombs and bullets, together with its intentional disruption of humanitarian aid, has made life in Gaza unbearable. Ninety percent of Gazan residents have been displaced from their homes. Food is so scarce that nearly every Gazan has trouble finding it in adequate amounts, per an international expert report released in June. UN data from around the same time found that 50,000 Gazan children were suffering from acute malnutrition. Gaza’s health infrastructure has collapsed, thanks in part to Israeli bombs destroying a majority of Gaza’s hospitals. Rates of disease are skyrocketing; an April report from Doctors Without Borders found that the number of diarrhea cases had increased by 25 times over the pre-war baseline. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israeli extremists both in and outside of government have used the war in Gaza as a pretext to accelerate their colonization campaign.  Since October 7, there have been over 1,000 violent attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers. This is an “all-time high” rate of settler violence, per a report by the International Crisis Group. Yet despite this spiking violence, Israel has arrested a fourth of the number of Jewish suspects in the West Bank as it did in 2022 — the year before the current far-right government took power.  Some leaders in the current government — like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir — are themselves settler radicals, and they have pursued their goals via policy throughout the war. In 2024, the Israeli government officially seized more than nine square miles of land from Palestinians — the most in any year since the 1990s Oslo Accords gave Palestinians a measure of self-determination in the West Bank. The past year, in short, has been hell for Palestinians. And there is no respite in sight. After Hamas fighters slaughtered 1,200 Israelis in cold blood last year, the group was not only expecting an Israeli response, they were counting on it. Any extended Israeli campaign in Gaza would surely come with massive civilian casualties, a level of death that would rally the Palestinian population to Hamas’s side and isolate Israel internationally.  Based on classified evidence “described by more than a dozen current and former intelligence and security officials from four Western and Middle Eastern countries,” the Washington Post concluded that Hamas planners aimed to “strike a blow of historic proportions, in the expectation that the group’s actions would compel an overwhelming Israeli response.” Israel fell right into their trap. Since October 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly declared his war aim to be destroying Hamas. Nearly everyone credible agrees that this is, in the most literal sense, impossible: Israel does not have the capability to wipe the organization off the earth in any kind of reasonable time frame. So no one knows what Netanyahu means by “destroying” Hamas. He has never really explained it.  The result is that, if the war were to end tomorrow, Hamas would still be intact and the dominant power in the Gaza Strip. It will almost certainly be able to reconstitute itself as the governing force in Gaza again, owing in part to rising support among the Palestinian population. Thirty-six percent of Palestinians currently support Hamas, per the authoritative Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) poll — nearly twice as high as the support for their more moderate rival Fatah (21 percent). Prior to the war, Fatah commanded a small plurality in the same poll (26-22 percent). If Israel has bought security through bloodshed in Gaza, it is only a temporary reprieve. The foundations of its security problem — a political status quo in which dispossessed Palestinians turn to terrorist groups as an act of “resistance” — remain intact. Absent a political solution that gives Palestinians hope for peaceful coexistence, Israelis will always have reason to fear an attack. The war has obliterated any hope of such an agreement in the immediate term, with polls displaying record-low levels of support among Israelis for pursuing one. Even if their opinion shifts after the war, as it likely will when the trauma of October 7 fades, wartime settlement growth and land grabs in the West Bank deepen the logistical barriers in the way of any kind of agreement. More broadly, Israelis are generally hopeless about their government’s ability to manage both the conflict with the Palestinians and their own basic needs. A series of failures, ranging from an inability to support Israelis displaced on October 7 to the failure to return the hostages, has made Israelis question whether their government is up to the most basic tasks of governing. One recent poll found that only 17 percent of Israelis expressed a high degree of trust in their government. At the same time, the long-evident authoritarian tendencies of the Netanyahu government have asserted themselves during the war. In the weeks and months immediately following October 7, there was a crackdown on dissent from the government’s line on the war. Arab Israelis and left-wingers were harassed and even arrested. Ben Gvir’s ministry approved permits for pro-war protests but not anti-war ones as the minister himself called for a full ban on pro-peace demonstrations. This climate has changed as the war went on. Israelis recently staged a massive ceasefire protest, which organizers say was the largest single-day demonstration in the country’s history. But other problems have arisen. After Israeli authorities arrested soldiers accused of torturing Palestinian detainees at the Sde Teiman military base, far-right demonstrators stormed the base to try and free them by force. Sitting members of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, actually joined the group who breached the fence. The event, widely described as Israel’s January 6, illustrates just how deep the rot in the country’s democracy runs and how war, as it so often does, is damaging the principles that free government depends on. Israel’s recent blitz assault on Hezbollah, including the killing of its longtime chief Hassan Nasrallah and much of its senior leadership, has done serious damage to a group that has been firing rockets at Israel since October 8. It also displaced about 60,000 Israeli citizens from their homes along the northern border. Targeting Hezbollah, which is deeply integrated into the Lebanese population, comes at a high cost in civilian lives. And we’ve seen in many recent wars that tactical victories do not amount to strategic success. Israel’s ultimate goal — breaking the Iran-led “axis of resistance” that includes Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraqi militias, and the Houthis in Yemen — has not yet been accomplished. It’s possible that, in pursuit of this goal, Israel begins a process of escalation that evolves into a region-wide conflagration. The most obvious catalyst is the current Israeli ground operations inside Lebanon.  Were Israel to escalate and send in larger numbers of troops for a Gaza-style invasion, the immediate result would be a very bloody conflict in which large numbers of civilians are sure to die. In the longer term, Israel might get trapped into another long-term occupation of Lebanon. The last one, which stretched from 1982 to 2000, ended in Israeli defeat and the rise of Hezbollah to power inside Lebanon. A more recent war in Lebanon, in 2006, was less bloody but still widely seen as a failure — prompting an official inquiry into why Israel’s military performed so poorly against Hezbollah. Were the current Israeli operation in Lebanon to look too successful, Iran would treat it as a major threat. Hezbollah is Iran’s most important regional proxy, the group’s large rocket arsenal a powerful deterrent against any Israeli attack on Iranian interests. Were Hezbollah to look like it was on the brink of a military rout, Iran might unleash both other proxies and its own military to try and turn the tide. This would mean a full-scale open war between Israel and the Iranian alliance — far greater in scope than this week’s missile barrage on Israel.  Such a conflict could lead to any number of disasters. One of the scariest scenarios involves an Iranian dash for a nuclear bomb. The more military success Israel has against Iran’s proxies, the more likely Iran is to believe that its homeland is at risk from an Israeli strike. It is already close to building a nuclear weapon — able to create enough fissile material for one in “one or two weeks,” per Secretary of State Antony Blinken — but seemingly preferred to remain on the nuclear brink rather than crossing it. A wider war with Israel might change that, leading to a development many have feared for decades: a Middle East with two hostile armed nuclear powers. These dire outcomes are not inevitable. It’s possible that Israel steps back from the brink of full war in Lebanon or that Iran has been so cowed by Israel’s extraordinary success in penetrating Hezbollah that it doesn’t respond aggressively. But betting on the best-case scenarios in war is dangerous. The only thing we can say with confidence is that the new Middle East is extraordinarily insecure, brought to the precipice of region-wide catastrophe by post-October 7 developments. Whether it tips over the brink remains to be seen. The Biden administration has taken a strange and confusing approach to the Gaza war. After initially expressing unconditional support for Israel, the administration has criticized Netanyahu’s approach, becoming suspicious that the prime minister lacks a credible strategy for ending the war. Yet as it has worked for a ceasefire, the US has steadfastly refused to put major pressure on Israel to get it to back down — declining to use its biggest stick, cutting off military assistance, to pressure Jerusalem to end the war. The result is an American policy that is seen by much of the world as doubly hypocritical. The US claims to support peace while providing the weapons to wage war, and it seems to treat war crimes differently based on whether an ally or an enemy is perpetrating them. Whatever sympathy Israel garnered from much of the world after the horrors of October 7 has been erased by the horrors it has perpetrated in Gaza. Polls as well as votes at the UN show an overwhelming global consensus that the war needs to end immediately, with only the United States and a handful of aligned countries supporting the Israeli line. When South Africa filed an International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, many in the West scoffed. Yet the South African litigators enjoyed widespread support among residents of the global South, where elites and mass public alike overwhelmingly see Israel as a violent aggressor and America as its superpower enabler. For years now, global South countries have chafed at what they see as Western hypocrisy when it comes to war and peace. America and its allies trumpet a “rules-based international order,” yet go ahead and invade Iraq without UN authorization because they’ve decided that they want to.  In a 2023 speech, former NSC official Fiona Hill warned that this sentiment had become a major problem for American policy in Ukraine: that however correct America might be about Russia’s unjustified war, it had lost the credibility to claim to be standing on behalf of sovereignty and international law. This made many countries wary of joining America’s pro-Ukraine efforts, seeing it less as a defense of a vulnerable country than a means of advancing Western geopolitical interests relative to Russia’s. The US approach to the Gaza war has supercharged this sentiment. How can the US claim to be standing for international law in the Donbas, many ask, when it is enabling its client in Jerusalem to commit atrocities? Research suggests that these allegations of hypocrisy can, in fact, matter, undercutting both domestic and international support for American policies. And as America’s global standing weakens, its competitors — not only Russia, but also China — are trying to take advantage. “With every civilian casualty from an Israeli airstrike, the West’s arguments in defense of a rules-based order ring hollower in the global South,” writes Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Affairs. “If, at some point in the future, Xi [Jinping] makes the fateful decision to invade Taiwan, he will surely hope that his stance on the Gaza war has made it more likely that the global South will line up behind Beijing rather than Washington.” The Gaza war has not only thrown the Middle East into chaos and weakened America’s position relative to authoritarians. It has also given rise to new sources of global chaos, ones that could further destabilize a world order already facing major challenges. The first of these threats is the Houthi campaign on shipping in the Red Sea and Mediterranean. The Yemeni rebel group, part of Iran’s “axis of resistance,” has been launching cheap rockets and drones at ships passing through since last fall — actions it claims are designed to target Israeli shipping and put pressure on Israel to end the war. In actuality, the target selection has been fairly loose. The Houthis’ objective appears to be less opening a new front in the Gaza war than in using it as a pretext to demonstrate their power and capabilities. Their strikes have done comparatively minor damage to shipping, but the threat that they might sink a ship has wreaked havoc on a cornerstone of the global economy.  Moreover, there’s a real fear that the Houthis have set a precedent that other militant groups could potentially mimic. “The peril posed by the Houthis is not just that shipping in the Red Sea will continue to be dangerous. Their campaign also sends the message that the global maritime order is crumbling and those violating its rules can do so with impunity,” writes Elisabeth Braw, an expert on maritime security at the Atlantic Council think tank. “If these forms of aggression are not deterred, they will continue to grow in quantity and will be joined by new forms.” But aggression in the sea lanes is not the only demon unleashed by the Gaza war globally. It has also led to a rise in hatred and division inside countries across the world.  One the most dire manifestations of these internal divisions is rising Islamophobia and antisemitism. In the United States and elsewhere, there has been a spike in hate crimes directed at both Jews and Muslims — including even deadly violence. This is sadly common during times of heightened Israel-Palestine conflict: The passions raised by the issue push unstable, violent people toward action. But given how intense this round of fighting has been, qualitatively different from anything that has come before it, the surge has been more intense. Separately, major divisions have emerged inside global political factions. In the United States, for example, anger over Biden’s war policy has alienated Muslim and Arab American voters — a critical bloc in the swing state of Michigan. This could possibly play a material role in the November election, that tensions over Gaza might lead to the return of Donald Trump, a man who personifies global disorder, to the presidency of what remains the world’s most powerful country. We are, in short, already living in a world fundamentally reshaped by Hamas’s October 7 murder spree and Israel’s bloody reprisal, with no sense on the horizon that what’s broken will be repaired.

New vaccines could help stem the spread of respiratory syncytial virus, but there are already huge inequities in access and uptake.