Jeff Bezos doesn't believe humans should abandon Earth in favour of another planet, but rather we could use space as a resource.

Vice President Mike Pence is a Christian. So were all those immoral people who, for centuries, used their religion to crucify others. No, this is not a castigation of Christianity, or those who honestly attempt to live up to its foundational ideal of loving their neighbor as they love themselves. This is about that virulent strain perverted by people like Pence, who sharpen dogma into a weapon and love only those who look like them and share the same venomous beliefs as they do.

The cult of Trump has embraced values and beliefs that Jefferson, Washington and Lincoln abhorred.

As leaders and officials gather in Beijing this week for the second Belt and Road summit, they will do so nearly three decades since the key economies of Asia began stitching back together the Silk Roads that linked them before five centuries of colonialism and Cold War. Belt and Road has been dismissed, particularly in the United States, as neocolonial debt-trap diplomacy, destined to collapse under the weight of financially spurious projects. Such hubris has not served America well in the past, nor does it today. Biding time is hardly a viable strategy against the force of history.

We live in a time of loss. Wild places dwindle, the animals and plants that live in them disappear. Climate change is now a certainty, and it will without a doubt lead to the loss of land, species, and ways of life. In the abstract this is disconcerting. Up close it is devastating. I worked on the BBC’s Climate Change: The Facts, presented by David Attenborough, and have felt this pain first-hand.

I know, I know, dunking on the Wall Street Journal editorial board is a bit like smacking your four-year-old nephew’s would-be jumper out of the air before it even leaves his hands. But in an Op-Ed last week it peddled the tired and disingenuous notion that electric cars, by the very virtue of their production, pollute more than fossil fuel cars. This is wrong, and it cannot stand.

Last October, the world’s most renowned climate scientists warned governments that humanity has just 12 years to prevent climate catastrophe. The UK government faces three choices to deal with carbon-heavy fossil fuels: force people to stop using them immediately; facilitate a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy; or hope business-as-usual market forces solve our problem for us. Strip away the rhetoric, and the Tory government is still relying on the latter option.

With a background in artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science, a developer named Xiao Chen from a leading game company in China, knew that one day AI would disrupt industries. But when he was told that his colleagues were laid off because AI could now do their jobs, he was still taken back.

When the Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren put forth a sweeping plan to cancel student debt last week, she also exposed the deep divide between how liberals and conservatives think—and, inadvertently, why liberals often have so much trouble getting their ideas enacted into law. Under the plan that Warren announced, about 42 million Americans would have up to $50,000 in outstanding debts canceled. Philip Klein, the executive editor of the conservative Washington Examiner, quickly chimed in with a tweet and a blog post criticizing the senator’s proposal as unfair.

Promoting homeownership as an investment strategy is a risky proposition. No financial advisor would recommend going into debt in order to put such a massive part of your savings in any other single financial instrument—and one that, as we learned just a few years ago, carries a great deal of risk. Even worse, that risk isn’t random: It falls most heavily on low-income, black, and Hispanic buyers, who are given worse mortgage terms, and whose neighborhoods are systematically more likely to see low or even falling home values, with devastating effects on the racial wealth gap.

Six months ago, I was excited: The OnePlus 6T had just been officially announced bringing in-display fingerprint sensors to the mainstream US market. This was a genuinely new technology, after all, in a field of nearly-identical gadgets. It gave us all something to talk about as we anticipated all the ways it would change The Phone Experience for the better. But, six months later I've come to the conclusion that in-display fingerprint readers, as they stand today, were a mistake.

To make a troll like Jacob Wohl even the indirect subject of this column is to give him exactly what he wants: attention. And yet, I am doing it anyway in order to make an important point: There is a fine line between media manipulation and trolling. One is driven by real financial or ideological motivations; the other by a need for attention — at any cost.

Everyone wants there to be a silver bullet. A single policy solution that will “fix” Facebook, restore our privacy, and clean up the tech industry. There isn’t one. Hefty fines, civil rights audits, antitrust, data privacy legislation, shareholder activism and employee organizing can all play a role. But we don’t just need regulation, we need a revolution – a massive cultural shift in how we think about our personal information and the companies that profit by collecting it.

Among the 21 candidates seeking the Democratic nomination, virtually every ethnic, religious and sexual identity is represented. There’s a gay man, six women, three African Americans, a Chinese American, multiple Catholics and Protestants, even a Hindu. (Hindus are 0.7 percent of the population.) But there is one conspicuous absence: Not a single candidate publicly identifies as an atheist. That’s not to say they are all religious believers. But if they aren’t, they are keeping it to themselves.

I donated my car to charity three years ago and haven’t looked back. I live a few blocks from downtown Honolulu, and I commute by walking. When it’s time for class at the University of Hawaii, I take the No. 4 bus to Manoa. When I want to visit a coffee shop in Kakaako, I ride my bicycle. If I am in a hurry or need to make a longer journey, I take an Uber.

There was a time when I believed, almost as an article of faith, that with the passage of time, America would age out of racism. What in the world was I thinking? But that is what I told myself in the fall of 1954 — five months after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision — when I learned that students attending then-all-white Eastern, Anacostia and McKinley Technical high schools, and several white junior high schools in the District, had staged walkouts to protest the assignment of black kids to their schools.

Plenty of people and companies have had a hand in leading the globe down the destructive, possibly irreversible path to climate catastrophe. In his New York Times Best Seller “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?,” Bill McKibben, who has written over a dozen books about the environment and has been called “the world’s best green journalist,” fingers the Koch brothers, the Republican Party and fossil fuel companies worldwide, among countless others.

We seem to be caught between parallel universes. You may have caught a glimpse of the first last week, when GDP was announced to have grown by 3.2% in the first quarter of 2019, a “blockbuster” result that the White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CNBC is “absolutely” sustainable in the coming months and years.

Recreational fishing is a pastime in which people have come to expect the fish they want in the places they happen to want them. That is, they want their fish stocked and ready to catch, even in places those fish never originally lived. This practice can seem harmless, or even beneficial. But the introduction of one “beneficial” species in Yellowstone National Park suggests how rejiggering the natural world for human convenience can cause ecological disaster for almost everything else.

People are getting dumber. That's not a judgment; it's a global fact. In a host of leading nations, IQ scores have started to decline. Though there are legitimate questions about the relationship between IQ and intelligence, and broad recognition that success depends as much on other virtues like grit, IQ tests in use throughout the world today really do seem to capture something meaningful and durable. Decades of research have shown that individual IQ scores predict things such as educational achievement and longevity. More broadly, the average IQ score of a country is linked to economic growth and scientific innovation.

Maybe you’ve read King Lear and remember this famous line: “‘Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.” The words were written more than 400 years ago as a comment on the deadly consequences of greed, delusion and political folly, but they could serve just as well as a Republican party slogan today. They’re a fitting description of the Republican party’s delusional campaign to deny the environmental crises that threaten our planet and our civilization.

Sometimes, it is the very ordinariness of a scene that makes it terrifying. So it was with a clip from last week’s BBC documentary on facial recognition technology. It shows the Metropolitan police trialling a facial recognition system on an east London street. A man tries to avoid the cameras, covering his face by pulling up his fleece. He is stopped by the police and forced to have his photo taken. He is then fined £90 for “disorderly behaviour”.

Under capitalism, the argument goes, it’s every man for himself. Through the relentless pursuit of self-interest, everyone benefits, as if an invisible hand were guiding each of us toward the common good. Everyone should accordingly try to get as much as they can, not only for their goods but also for their labour. Whatever the market price is is, in turn, what the buyer should pay. Just like the idea that there should be a minimum wage, the idea that there should be a maximum wage seems to undermine the very freedom that the free market is supposed to guarantee.

When whites first began immigrating to what is now the U.S. in the early 1600s, they were not the majority. They became the majority later. European immigrants used a variety of means to push Native Americans out of the way. They killed them with disease and genocide to decimate their numbers as whites became the largest group in the U.S., bolstered even further by immigration that lasted for more than three centuries.

Last week, The Times published an article about the long-term results of the Gene Equality Project, the philanthropic effort to bring genetic cognitive enhancements to low-income communities. The results were largely disappointing: While most of the children born of the project have now graduated from a four-year college, few attended elite universities and even fewer have found jobs with good salaries or opportunities for advancement.

Apple has pushed Dark Mode hard in Mojave, and rumors suggest that it will appear in iOS 13 as well. If Apple thinks Dark Mode is such a good idea, should you switch to it? Only if you’re more interested in being trendy than productive, since the science behind human visual perception is resoundingly against Dark Mode.

Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with climate change and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right. They use the term “New Deal” to evoke the massive response by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States government to the Great Depression. An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II.

My friends and I found hidden spaces where we could be teenagers again. We must be allowed to keep them.

Whether the actions at the USDA reflect malice or ignorance, the results are the same.

If you set aside Republicans’ obsession with cow farts, perhaps the most prevalent criticism of the Green New Deal is its emphasis on social justice. Critics contend that the far-reaching climate agenda is far too concerned with extraneous issues such as jobs, infrastructure, housing, healthcare and civil and indigenous rights. Stick to greenhouse gases, they say; reforming the energy system is utopian enough.

The case for action to tackle the climate emergency, on a scale far beyond anything that has yet been attempted, is increasingly widely understood. Almost three decades after the first UN climate treaty was agreed in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and despite the commitments thrashed out among nation states at every summit since, global carbon emissions last year rose to a record 37.1bn tonnes.

A big idea in Minneapolis points the way for other cities desperately in need of housing.

In today's world, brimful as it is with opinion and falsehoods masquerading as facts, you'd think the one place you can depend on for verifiable facts is science.

Chess has had a world champion since 1886, but this one-off, mano-a-mano event is now an anachronism, one that’s more harmful than helpful to the game.

The sci-fi film's self-aware satire went unrecognized by critics when it came out 16 years ago. Now, some are finally getting the joke.