It’s a drag to feel you’re being held hostage by someone else’s nostalgia. The stage show Wicked is beloved by many; it’s been playing on Broadway for 20 years and counting, which means a lot of little girls, and others, have happily fallen under the poppy-induced spell of Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz’s musical about the complex origins of the not-really-so-bad Wicked Witch of the West. Legions of kids and grownups have hummed and toe-tapped along with numbers like “Popular” and “Defying Gravity,” one a twinkly sendup of what it takes to be the most-liked girl at school, the other a peppy empowerment ballad about charting your own course in life. The film adaptation of Wicked—directed by John M. Chu and starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande—will increase the material’s reach, giving many more people the chance to fall in love with it. Or not.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]It’s the “or nots” who are likely to be the minority. But if you fail to feel the transformative magic of Chu’s Wicked, there are some good reasons: The movie is so aggressively colorful, so manic in its insistence that it’s OK to be different, that it practically mows you down. And this is only part one of the saga—the second installment arrives in November 2025. Wicked pulls off a distinctive but dismal magic trick: it turns other people’s cherished Broadway memories into a protracted form of punishment for the rest of us.
Read more: Breaking Down Wicked’s Iconic Songs With Composer Stephen Schwartz
Wicked the movie is cobbled together from many complex moving parts, and some of them work better than others. Grande plays Glinda, the good witch of Oz—but is she really all that good? The backstory that will consume all two hours and 41 minutes of this movie—roughly the same amount of time as the stage musical, though again, this is only the first half—proves the almost-opposite. This is really the story of Elphaba, played by Erivo, who is, at the movie’s onset, a reticent young woman with dazzling supernatural powers. The problem is that she has green skin, which makes her a target for mockery and derision, an outcast. Elphaba is a reimagining of the character first brought to life by L. Frank Baum in his extraordinary and wonderfully weird turn-of-the-century Oz books, and later portrayed in the revered 1939 Wizard of Oz by Margaret Hamilton. Wicked—whose source material, roughly speaking, is Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West—is built around the idea that Elphaba wasn’t born bad, but was merely forced into making decisions that set her on a path different from that of the insufferable goody-two-shoes Glinda, her enemy turned frenemy turned friend. The story’s subtext—or, rather, its glaring bold type—is that we’re all shaped by our choices, which are at least partly determined by our response to how others treat us.
But you’ve probably come to Wicked not for its leaden life lessons, but for the songs, for the lavish, showy sets, for the chance to watch two formidable performers parry and spar. Grande brings a not-unpleasant powder-room perkiness to the role of Glinda: as the movie opens, she’s entering Oz’s Shiz University, an institution whose radically uncool name will forever tarnish, sadly, the classic and vaguely scatological phrase “It’s the shizz.” Shiz is the place where kids come to learn magic spells and stuff; Glinda arrives with a million pink suitcases, thinking she’s going to be the star pupil.
Not so fast: Elphaba has also arrived at the school, but not as a student. She’s just there to drop off her younger sister, Nessa Rose (Marissa Bode). Their father, Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman), has hated Elphaba since the day she was born— remember, she’s green and thus different—while doting on Nessa Rose who is, admittedly, so kind and lovely that it’s impossible not to love her. Elphaba, in fact, adores her. And the fact that she uses a wheelchair makes their father all the more overprotective of her. But as Elphaba goes about the business of getting her younger sister settled at Shiz, her fantastical powers—they flow from her like electricity, especially when she’s angry or frustrated—catch the attention of the school’s superstar professor, the chilly, elegant Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). Morrible enrolls Elphaba in Shiz University immediately, making her the unwelcome roommate of Glinda (who is at this point named Galinda, for reasons the movie will explain if you’re curious, or even if you’re not).
Glinda has no use for Elphaba, and goes overboard in making her Shiz experience unbearable. She relegates her roommate to a small, dark corner of their shared quarters and literally crowds her out with mountains of frippery and furbelows, mostly in vibrant shades of pink. In a pivotal scene, she tries to humiliate Elphaba at a school dance and then inexplicably softens; the two become almost-friends. But there’s always an undercurrent of competitiveness there—Glinda isn’t half as gifted as Elphaba is, and she’s the opposite of down-to-earth. Grande has some fun with Glinda’s sugary, over-the-top manipulations: she has the fluttery eyelids of a blinking doll and the twirly elegance of a music-box ballerina. But her shtick becomes wearisome. There’s so much winking, twinkling, and nudging in Wicked that I emerged from it feeling grateful—if only momentarily—for the stark ugliness of reality.
There are so many characters, so many plot points, so many metaphors in Wicked—they’re like a traffic pileup of flying monkeys. Jonathan Bailey plays a rich, handsome prince who, upon his heralded arrival at the school, instinctively likes Elphaba but ends up going steady with Glinda, who practically hypnotizes him into compliance. Jeff Goldblum plays the Wizard of Oz, a lanky charmer who might be a jerk at best and a puppet of fascists at worst. Peter Dinklage provides the voice of a beleaguered professor-goat at the school, Dr. Dillamond. Oz is a community where animals can talk; they’re as intelligent as humans, or more so, and they mingle freely in society. But someone in Oz is seeking to stop all that, launching a campaign to silence all animals, and Dr. Dillamond becomes their unfortunate victim.
Meanwhile, the big message of Wicked—No one is all good or all bad—blinks so assaultively that you’re not sure what any of it means. Metaphorical truisms ping around willy-nilly: It’s OK, even good, to be different! Those who know best will always be the first to be silenced! The popular girl doesn’t always win! It’s tempting to interpret Wicked as a wise civics lesson, a fable for our times, but its ideas are so slippery, so readily adaptable to even the most blinkered political views, that they have no real value. Meanwhile, there are as many song and dance numbers as you could wish for, and possibly more. Chu—also the director of Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights, both movies more entertaining than this one—stages them lavishly, to the point where your ears and eyeballs wish he would stop.
And yet—there’s Erivo. She’s the one force in Wicked that didn’t make me feel ground down to a nub. As Elphaba, she channels something like real pain rather than just showtune self-pity. You feel for her in her greenness, in her persistent state of being an outsider, in her frustration at being underestimated and unloved. Erivo nearly rises above the material, and not just on a broomstick. But not even she is strong enough to counteract the cyclone of Entertainment with a capital E swirling around her. For a movie whose chief anthem is an advertisement for the joys of defying gravity, Wicked is surprisingly leaden, with a promise of more of the same to come. The shizz it’s not.
The annual United Nations climate change summits are always a little crazy: tens of thousands of delegates from every corner of the globe descending on a far-flung city for two weeks of heated discussions on the future of global climate policy.
This time around the conference—known this year as COP29—is nothing short of surreal. In the area where countries set up pavilions, you can take a five-minute walk from the luxurious Russian pavilion where delegates sip tea on sofas amid human-size Russian dolls to the Ukrainian pavilion decorated with a solar panel destroyed by Russian armaments. At most COPs, attendees keep their eyes peeled for notable heads of state or even celebrities; in Baku, delegates are on the lookout for members of the Taliban. Midway through the first week of the conference, the Argentinian delegation returned home at the direction of the country’s right-wing president; the French environment minister decided to skip the whole thing because of a dispute with the host country. And the entire event began with a description of fossil fuels as “a gift from God” from Azerbaijan’s president.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]But nothing has made the conference more surreal than its timing. Opening just days after the U.S. election, the topic of President-elect Donald Trump serves as context for every conversation. The U.S. has for decades played a pivotal role in shaping the talks, brokering key agreements and, most recently, helping convince everyone that the world’s largest economy is decarbonizing. In the opening hours of the conference, John Podesta, President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, offered a blunt assessment that felt almost like an apology. “It’s clear that the next administration will try to take a U-turn and erase much of this progress,” he said. “Of course, I’m keenly aware of the disappointment that the United States has at times caused.” (He went on to make the case that the U.S. would continue climate efforts at the city and state level).
As the talks, which this year are focused on how to finance the climate transition, continue in their second week, it’s impossible to know where they will land. The organizers could eke out a brokered agreement, as often happens, or they could collapse under the strain of geopolitical pressure. Longtime COP attendees have said that these talks have at times felt closer to a breakdown than any in recent memory.
In a way, this climate moment is very dangerous. We already feel the effects of climate-linked extreme weather today, which is costing lives in communities across the globe. Clearly, a stagnation in multilateral efforts to address that issue doesn’t help. But there are also reasons for reassurance here in Baku. Decarbonization has moved from a theoretical question, delineated in bold but toothless commitments, to a phenomenon occurring in the economy—from the small enterprises adapting to sustainability requirements to multi-billion investments from some of the world’s most influential firms.
Indeed, the questions here in Baku are less about whether the international climate push will go on but about how.
One of the first things that struck me upon stepping out of the airport in Baku is how much the vehicles on the street have changed since I was last here seven years ago. At the time, white Soviet-era Ladas seemed to dominate the roads. This time around, the old-school cars were few and far between. Instead, I noticed the prevalence of Chinese electric vehicles. Nearly every time I called a car, an EV showed up.
Baku’s EVs offered a small reminder, from the outset, that the energy transition is already rapidly changing the world—and not just in major economies. In 2016, when Trump was first elected, delegates gathered at that year’s U.N. climate conference wondered if the Paris Agreement—and the decarbonization push it was meant to catalyze—could survive. That’s not a question in 2024.
To some degree, the confidence comes in part from evidence from Trump’s first term. Many businesses actually accelerated their commitment to climate action in spite of Trump. And cities and states said they would step up their decarbonization policymaking. In Baku, some of those same groups have offered similar commitments. Washington Governor Jay Inslee, citing state actions, put it to me bluntly: “Donald Trump is going to be a speed bump on the march to a clean energy economy.”
But perhaps more important is the massive investment that has begun over the course of the last eight years. Baku’s EVs are just one example. Across the globe, many of the world’s largest companies have spent billions to facilitate the buildout of clean technology infrastructure. Those investments are simply too costly to undo and the momentum too strong to stop. “No one country can stop progress,” says Catherine McKenna, a former Canadian environment minister. “I said that last time [Trump was elected], but it’s even more true because now it’s in the real economy.”
But the bigger question for delegates is how the ongoing transition—not to mention the effects of extreme weather—will play out around the world. Which countries will win and lose? How will the most vulnerable fare? And will the transition happen fast enough—especially in developing countries—to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change?
Indeed, these issues have led to brawls at COP29 over everything from how climate rules play out in trade relationships to how much different countries should pay to help their counterparts to the role of oil and gas in the transition. With tensions high, in the middle of the first week of this year some of the most prominent voices in the international climate world—including former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres and climate scientist Johan Rockström—dropped an open letter calling for a wholesale reform of the process. Host countries should face tougher selection criteria to ensure that they’re committed to phasing out fossil fuels, and the process should be streamlined to allow faster decision making.
The post-election timing was unstated in the letter, but it wasn’t coincidental. Regardless of whether Trump follows through on his promise for the U.S. to leave the Paris Agreement for a second time, the climate world will be left with a giant vacuum. Many negotiators are quick to say that the U.S. international climate posture never amounted to real climate leadership. Even under supportive presidents like Biden and former President Barack Obama, the U.S. shaped agreements with American politics in mind, even if it weakened the deals, and struggled to deliver the climate aid that others demanded. Even so, for many, the U.S. will be missed when it’s gone.
Following Kamala Harris’ defeat and the GOP’s congressional successes in the 2024 elections, many Democrats are expressing not only rage and frustration, but fear. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency will provide him the opportunity to ensure the Supreme Court remains firmly in conservative hands for the foreseeable future. Many Democrats fear the radical and tyrannical policies Trump has promised to enact upon his ascendance to office: the revocation of broadcast licenses of critical media outlets, the punishing of politicians and entire states that did not support him, and perhaps most infamously, a claim that he would be “a dictator on day one.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]While concerning, these threats are far from novel. Indeed, they mirror what conservatives did in the aftermath of the Civil War. Ex-confederates during Reconstruction levied claims of fraud, enacted de-registration campaigns, and even destroyed the physical ballots of their opponents. The most devastating tool conservatives had in 1868, however, was the susceptibility of white Americans to racist rhetoric, a power that remains an animating force in American politics today.
The 1868 election remains the most violent in U.S. history. Black Americans had just received the right to vote thanks to the passage of the Reconstruction Acts and the 14th Amendment, but formal suffrage rights did not guarantee that Black Americans could exercise that right without threat of reprisal. Though federal troops occupied some portions of the South to curb political and racial violence, most regions, like St. Tammany Parish, La., lacked any meaningful federal presence.
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In 1868, conservatives backed Horatio Seymour against Ulysses S. Grant, in a campaign built on the promise of disenfranchising Black Americans, and their rhetoric sparked widespread violence. The Ku Klux Klan launched murderous campaigns across the South terrorizing freedpeople to prevent newly enfranchised Black men from voting. In the months leading up to the 1868 election, the Klan had killed at least 2,000 freedpeople across the state of Louisiana with many more intimidated, assaulted, or tortured. Klan members burned Black Americans’ homes, gunned down entire families, assassinated elected officials, destroyed voter registries, and stole freedpeople’s firearms to ensure they could not fight back. The death toll of what some scholars have termed the “Killing Fields of 1868” is impossible to tabulate, but contemporaries estimated it to be in the tens of thousands with the majority of those victims having been Black women, men, and children. Yet, these horrific efforts failed in their attempt to demoralize Black voters. Despite the violence and vitriol they faced at the ballot box in 1868, Black Americans marched to voting booths by the hundreds of thousands in the years that followed.
On June 10, 1869, formerly enslaved blacksmith Mumford McCoy stepped before a congressional investigation in New Orleans to testify about the devastation of his home parish of St. Tammany during the election. Mumford McCoy had witnessed this violence firsthand. In the preceding year, the Klan had killed the local coroner John Kemp (one of the first Black men to ever hold the position in the United States), brutalized a local Black preacher and his family, and burned to the ground the community’s church that McCoy had built. Hearing McCoy describe these horrors, one of the investigators asked him, “Have you not lost courage, spirit, and faith?”
“No sir,” McCoy replied. “I have not lost any at all. It has only given me better encouragement and ambition.”
And he was not alone.
After 1868, Black Americans across the South re-formed their political organizations, with some mustering into militias to protect themselves against Klan violence. This newly re-formed political front proved incredibly effective. In Shreveport, La., for example, a group of white terrorists had summarily executed a group of Black men and boys in the local brickyard just weeks before the 1868 election, and through their violence and intimidation, ensured the parish did not register a single Republican vote. Yet, after Black suffrage was enshrined in the Constitution by the 15th Amendment two years later, over a thousand Black Americans, both men and women, marched into Shreveport, as one witness put it, “like well-drilled soldiers who had received their orders” to vote in the 1870 congressional election, undaunted by the violence they had witnessed just two years prior. As a result of their bravery, Black voters carried Shreveport and Caddo Parish for the Republican Party, still known then as the party of Lincoln and the formerly enslaved.
In the years that followed, Black voters made staggering gains in states that had witnessed some of the nation’s most horrific massacres, including in Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Even McCoy’s home state of Louisiana, a state carried by conservatives through intimidation and violence in 1868, saw every single one of its Congressional districts flip Republican two years later thanks almost exclusively to the unyielding efforts of Black voters.
Read More: The Supreme Court Could Gut the Voting Rights Act Even Further
Similar to their counterparts in the civil rights movement a century later, Black Americans during Reconstruction manifested a stalwart, united front in the face of racist rhetoric and political violence. They used their solidarity to their advantage, strategized on how to resist their disenfranchisement, and most importantly, refused to allow themselves to succumb to defeatism. Rather than allow themselves to be demoralized by the assassination of their leaders, the constant attacks on their communities, and the tepidness of their white allies’ support, America’s first Black voters saw each of these obstacles as yet another reason to stay politically engaged.
Those who had endured enslavement within the United States intimately understood the flaws of American democracy in ways that no person today ever could. Yet, they still voted, protested, and ran for office even in the aftermath of violent attacks on their communities and stunning electoral defeats. Why? Because allowing ex-Confederates and former enslavers to return to positions of unchecked power would herald the end of freedom in the post-emancipation South.
Over the next years, ex-Confederates continued to wield violence and intimidation against Black Americans to expel them from politics through force, and though Black Americans fought valiantly for their political rights, their white allies in the North and South retreated from Reconstruction and allowed many freedpeople to be reduced again to a state of functional slavery in the Jim Crow South.
Yet, even after being abandoned by their allies, Black Americans persisted. Through the grassroots populist movements of the 1880s and 1890s, through labor organizations like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and through simple acts of survival, Black Americans continued to fight because, as hard as it may be to imagine, they still had hope for the American project and an unshakeable understanding that they deserved a place within it.
Instead of allowing the Republicans’ sweeping victories to dishearten them, perhaps Democrats could take a page out of Mumford McCoy’s book and keep up their courage, spirit, and faith. The political obstacles facing Democrats are dire, but it is the very existence of these threats that renders political engagement so important in the first place. Those disappointed by this month’s result should strive to emulate America’s first Black voters and allow the immense challenges ahead to instill in them “better encouragement and ambition.”
J. Jacob Calhoun is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. He researches 19th-century American history including the history of Black politics.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
Wannabe grandparents have always ruffled feathers by inquiring—sometimes aggressively—about the timing of their future progeny. They’re not the only ones to overstep: Casual friends, distant relatives, coworkers, and even complete strangers often feel entitled to ask couples about family planning.
Once two people get married, those in their orbit tend to become overly inquisitive: “When am I going to get some good news?” as Shula Melamed, a senior behavioral health coach at Headspace Health, puts it. “As soon as you hit one milestone, you’re expected to hit another.” And forget about rounding the corner into your 30s. “At a certain age, it becomes, ‘You better get started—your biological clock is ticking. Time is running out,’” she says. “It’s questions about your intimate life, it’s questions about your own body. It’s interesting that it’s still not taboo, because it doesn’t get more personal than that.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Generally, people mean well with these queries. If you take the most generous view, “They love you, and they want more of you in the world,” Melamed says. Yet that doesn’t make it acceptable conversation fodder. Someone might be experiencing infertility, which is painful enough without feedback or questions from others—especially when it’s posed as a demand, like “Why haven’t you given me a grandchild yet?” Plus, it all feeds into outdated expectations that can make people feel inferior. “There’s the social pressure of, ‘You’re not a successful adult, or you’re not fulfilling your biological destiny, or you’re not doing something that is deemed to be a very important thing in this world,’” she says.
With that in mind, we asked experts exactly what to say the next time someone peppers you with questions about when you’re going to start reproducing.
Curiosity has a way of disarming people and opening up dialogue, says Suzanne Mungalez, a perinatal psychologist who works with clients experiencing infertility, pregnancy loss, or ambivalence about conceiving. “We might have all these assumptions about why the person is asking the question, and we might take it personally,” she says. “We might assume that they’re coming at it from a space of trying to pressure us, but we don’t really know where they’re coming from.” It’s possible, for example, that they’re also struggling with their own uncertainty about having kids and are craving a safe space to explore and discuss. “It’s important to understand where they’re coming from before you jump to reacting,” Mungalez says. “It can better inform how we respond if we have a sense of why they’re asking.”
A family unit can’t be pigeonholed into one narrow definition. Mungalez likes reminding people of all the different shapes and forms it can take: a chosen family, an adopted family, a two-person family, a blended family. “There’s so many ways to create a family, and all of those ways are valid,” she says. “They’re just as valid as getting pregnant.” Own that truth, she encourages—regardless of whether or not the person on the other end of the conversation sees “family” the same way you do.
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Presenting a hypothetical invites your prying acquaintance to consider the impact of their question. “It can be a gentle way of reminding them that there are lots of different reasons why people might not want to or might not be able to have a child,” Mungalez says. “It’s not really coming at it from a defensive place, but from a place of wanting to educate, inform, and open up a dialogue.” Most people end up carrying the teaching moment with them, she adds—and will think twice before bringing the topic up again.
The next time someone tells you that you’re not getting any younger, turn their presumptuous comment around on them. “It’s an interesting thing, especially when older people say that to somebody, because it’s like, ‘Well, what about your biological clock, or the next phase of your life?’” Melamed says. If you don’t feel comfortable with such a sassy comeback, consider some of her toned-down but still effective alternatives: “As far as I know, my clock is functioning fine. Are there things you haven’t done yet that you’re anxious to get to?” Or: “All of our clocks are ticking everyday—I’m just grateful for another day! How about you?”
You could also respond to intrusive comments about your allegedly ticking biological clock by pointing out that there are lots of other considerations that go into starting a family. That can spark a broader conversation about priorities, Melamed notes. Start the conversation like this: “I understand that timing might seem like the main factor to you, but there’s a lot else I have to consider,” she suggests. “Then they might respond, ‘What are your concerns, or some of the other things about becoming a parent that are on your mind?’” You could end up having a surprisingly meaningful—and even productive—conversation.
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Letting your well-intentioned but tactless friends and family know that you’ll update them when you have news to share is a smart way to fend off further questioning. “If you’re feeling particularly tender, you could also tell them that you appreciate that they’re so invested in you starting a family,” Melamed says. Their enthusiasm, after all, isn’t the problem—they’d just be better off keeping it to themselves until further notice.
When Dr. Dympna Weil was struggling to get pregnant—before eventually having a daughter—people constantly prodded her about her plans to procreate. With time, she went from feeling upset about these inquiries to empowered enough to own her response. Her favorite mic-drop moment: asking the other person how they knew she and her husband hadn’t been trying—and then spinning on her heel and walking away. The typical reaction? “Mouth open, eyes wide, like, ‘Oh, crap,’ and then kind of a hush,” says Weil, an ob-gyn in Albany, N.Y. “It calms the frenzy of questioning.” While Weil wouldn’t use this comeback with, say, her grandmother, she employed it often during her residency—especially with curious (read: nosy) colleagues.
Weil is fond of this response because “it hints at the absurdity that they should be all up in my reproductive business,” she says. “It’s telling them lovingly and gently, ‘I got this.’ It’s kind of cheeky, without being snarky.” Those on the receiving end were typically dumbfounded, she adds, quickly apologizing and acknowledging that they knew she was busy. Did they ever ask such an intrusive question again? Not a chance.
Regina Lazarovich, a clinical psychologist who is child-free by choice, has received countless questions about when she might start having babies.She likes to respond with this question because it exposes the other person’s shortsighted thinking. “There is definitely a bias that’s communicated in the question of whether you’re going to have a baby,” she says. “It could be a jumping off point for a conversation—if they’re actually open to having a dialogue—and hopefully, it makes them think before asking such assumptive questions again.”
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This is Lazarovich’s most truthful response. Plus, it’s clear and to the point, without “giving in to the bait,” she says. “You’re shutting the question down, and you’re not providing any extra justifying information. You don’t have to break any personal privacy boundaries you might have.” She’s found that “unabashedly” telling people that kids simply aren’t part of her life plan helps reduce shame around not following traditional family expectations. “It’s not going to happen, period,” she says, and no one has the power to make her feel bad about that.
Think of this approach as responding to an invasive question with an equally invasive question. “It’s for the sassier among us,” Lazarovich says. Recipients have no right to get offended:
“We’re asking a question back that actually points out the issue—that this is an intrusive question that is not appropriate to ask.” And yet, it’s not aggressive and won’t escalate the situation, she’s found. If you say it in a lighthearted way, you could even inject some humor into the conversation.
This witty retort is a play on a viral joke—but it also happens to be an effective way to shut down unwanted conversations. The economy is a major factor in why some people are opting to be child-free, with 17% of participants in a Pew Research Center reporting they wouldn’t have children for financial reasons. “It’s expensive to have a kid, it’s expensive to get pregnant and go to all these medical appointments,” Mungalez says. “And sometimes it’s having to weigh that out—do I want to spend the money I have on a child, or do I want to use it to maybe put a down payment on something?” It’s unfortunate that we have to make these kinds of decisions, she adds, but money is also a perfectly reasonable consideration—and perhaps the person you’re talking to can relate.
You’re always within your rights to set a boundary—and you absolutely don’t have to talk about your reproductive plans if you don’t want to. It’s important to specify what the consequence will be if someone doesn’t respect your boundary, Lazarovich adds, and to make sure you enforce it. “It could be as simple as, ‘If you continue to push me on this, I’m going to hang up the phone,’ or ‘I’m going to walk out of the room,’” she says. “It depends on the power dynamics, and your boundary might differ in a work setting or family setting.” If it’s been a while since you initially set the boundary, you might even remind someone: “Hey, remember I told you I didn’t want to discuss this?” If they back off, great. But if they keep pushing, it’s time to reinforce it—because no one gets to make you talk about something you’ve said is off-limits.
This article discusses, in detail, Episodes 1 and 2 of Bad Sisters Season 2.
If you’ve just finished watching the first two episodes of Bad Sisters Season 2, please accept my condolences. (And if you haven’t, here’s a second warning to stop reading this until you’ve watched—preferably with a box of tissues handy.) The gentlest and most fragile, but also the most lethal, of the five Garvey girls is dead. Two years after she strangled her psychopathic husband JP “The Prick” Williams, and just days into her second marriage, to a man who doesn’t rape her sisters or call her “mammy,” poor Grace has been crushed under the weight of the smoking, overturned car she used to flee a desperate situation. It’s a devastating end to the series’ two-part season premiere. In killing off such a sympathetic character, showrunner and star Sharon Horgan chose violence—and it was the smartest decision she could’ve made.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Conceived as a limited series, then renewed by Apple TV+ after an enthusiastically received debut, Bad Sisters felt pretty decisively wrapped up by the end of what turned out to be its first season. The big mystery was solved: Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) was revealed as JP’s (Claes Bang) killer, despite her sisters’ many failed schemes to do him in. And when she withdrew her life insurance claim, the amateur sleuth at the financially strapped company that issued it—Matt (Daryl McCormack), who was also dating the youngest Garvey, Becka (Eve Hewson)—burned his file on JP’s suspicious death. The sisters were finally free to frolic together in frigid water, and viewers were left with the sense that everyone, except The Prick, lived happily ever after.
Unless she was content to coast on the characters’ charm, chemistry, and enviable knitwear, Horgan would have to introduce novel sources of suspense in Season 2. A lesser series might’ve relied on loose ends from Season 1, as Big Little Lies did in its disappointing second season, or just set up the Garveys to take down another JP-esque villain. In advance of Grace’s death, Bad Sisters does feint in both directions. From the guilt Grace’s admirer turned accomplice Roger (Michael Smiley) feels about helping cover up the murder (and his unconcealed jealousy of her new man) to the discovery of a waterlogged suitcase containing the body of JP’s father George (Paul Bentall), the show effectively mines a few residual storylines.
It also gives the Garveys a new nemesis in Roger’s sister Angelica, played by the great Fiona Shaw in a performance perfectly calibrated to make your skin crawl. (To further the BLL comparison: Adding Shaw to your female-driven cast for a pivotal second season is essentially the Irish equivalent of hiring Meryl Streep.) Nicknamed “The Wagon” (Irish slang for bitch), she’s a lonely, uptight, conniving church lady who palpably envies the sisters’ bond and is desperate to insinuate herself into Grace’s life. The first thing we see her do is embarrass Roger by bringing up his crush on Grace in front of all five Garveys. Then, after crashing Grace’s wedding, she shoves Eva (Horgan) to the ground to catch the bouquet—deranged behavior. But while both villains use religion as an excuse to act like monsters, JP was pure evil, whereas Angelica reads more as dangerously pathetic. And so far, we know barely any of her backstory.
If I’d had to place a bet on who would die at the top of this season, I would’ve gone all-in on Angelica. Which is, in part, why Grace’s accident makes such an inspired twist. The original Bad Sisters thrived on a combination of murder mystery and black comedy, with the warmth, care, and humor that the Garvey girls show each other counterbalancing horrific revelations about JP. The idea that Horgan would break up her beloved sister act, much less consign the most sympathetic sibling to death just two episodes and a richly deserved wedding into Season 2, was all but unthinkable. It reminds me of The White Lotus creator Mike White’s decision to bump off Jennifer Coolidge’s fan-favorite character at the end of that show’s second season—another twist that was well supported by the plot but that no one saw coming because Coolidge seemed so integral to the series. A provocative series that wants to maintain its edge, rather than devolve into toothless sweater porn as the seasons progress, has to swerve away from fan service sometimes.
Besides, Grace’s death creates some really compelling suspense. We don’t know for sure where she’s going when she crashes or why she has a stack of cash with her, although there are certainly clues. While he seems like a stand-up guy, we know roughly as little about her new husband, Ian (Owen McDonnell), as we do about Angelica. And we never see how Grace’s fight with him in the series premiere actually ends, after she confesses that she killed JP; we just know he’s disappeared by the next morning and she is prostrate with despair. The phone Becka finds hidden in Grace’s bathroom and the bloody garment Ursula (Eva Birthistle) pulls out of her laundry raise the possibility that he didn’t simply storm off. Grace’s daughter Blanaid (Saise Quinn) doesn’t know the whole story, either. Of the two people who do know what happened, one is missing and the other is dead.
At the same time, keeping Angelica around and her aims mysterious makes sense given the structure of the season. Whereas Season 1 toggled between the aftermath of JP’s murder and the events leading up to it—anchored by an incandescently diabolical turn from Bang—Season 2 is rooted in the present. For the show to work, though, the Garveys need a fully repugnant nemesis to band together against. Getting rid of Angelica early on would leave them with just one pair of mostly sympathetic antagonists: the detectives, Loftus (Barry Ward) and his awkward yet tenacious young partner, Houlihan (Thaddea Graham). Relying on the cat-and-mouse game between them and the Garveys would’ve made for pretty low emotional stakes.
So, yes, pour out a capacious glass of wine for Grace, prematurely eulogized by her surliest sister, Bibi (Sarah Greene), as “the best person any of us will ever know.” But when it comes to storytelling, comfort yourself with the knowledge that she died so Bad Sisters could live.
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As far as scripted set pieces of American politics go, the first photo-op in the hand-off of power between one White House and the next is up there.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]There are moments of cringe, as was the case in 1980 when Ronald Reagan peppered Jimmy Carter with seemingly ancillary questions to the job they were trading, even as the incumbent rightly suspected someone in Reagan’s camp had worked to extend the Iranian hostage crisis so it would end as soon as Reagan took power. During the 1992 iteration that saw George H.W. Bush welcome Bill Clinton to his future office and home after a particularly rowdy race, the incumbent’s staff grew persnickety when incoming spokesman Dee Dee Myers spoke to reporters in the walkway between the office complex and the residence: “We don’t do press conferences in the Colonnade,” a Bush aide sniped. And then eight years later, an attempt at an amiable transition was infamously marred when Clinton’s team took the Ws off government keyboards being passed to the incoming George W. Bush administration—at a cost of almost $5,000 in damages.
But none of those moments was as norm-breakingly flagrant as four years ago when Donald Trump simply refused to invite his successor, Joe Biden, to the White House. The typical niceties mask the inevitable first steps toward accepting that the incumbent party’s window in power is racing to a close and it is time to concede the race—something that Trump never did. Biden, who had spent eight years as Vice President and knew his way around the West Wing well enough, didn’t exactly need a tour from Trump, but a briefing on the ongoing Covid-19 situation and the covert efforts to keep Russia to heel, China at bay, and the Korean Peninsula relatively stable would have been welcome. It was similar silence on Inauguration Day 2021, when the Trumps fled Washington and became the first absentee outgoing First Family since Andrew Johnson skipped Ulysses S. Grant’s 1869 swearing-in ceremony.
So against this backdrop, Trump will head back to the White House Wednesday as a returning victor, once again forcing polar opposites to sit and debrief in the name of national stability.
Biden phoned Trump right after Election Day and invited him for a meeting that was never offered to Biden. The outgoing President, who is the only politician to defeat Trump in a campaign, has hardly hidden his contempt of his predecessor and soon-to-be successor, but friends say he’s also an institutionalist who is determined not to have Sore Loser on his epitaph.
What’s unknown to this point: Will Kamala Harris join for any of that awkward session? She, too, phoned Trump and congratulated him on his win last Wednesday. Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Harris’ top aide, vowed Harris “would work with President Biden to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, unlike what we saw in 2020.”
The last time a sitting Vice President lost out on a promotion was the 2000 election, and then-VP Al Gore joined the Clinton-Bush 43 conversation. By all contemporary accounts, it was unpleasant for both parties’ reps wandering the West Wing.
Harris aides did not respond to questions about Harris’ plans for Wednesday.
To be sure, transitions are usually fairly routine affairs, especially once the balloting ends. Generally speaking, folks at this level of the game can wall-off the conflicts. During their last weekend at the presidential retreat of Camp David, the elder Bushes invited Clinton’s transition chiefs Warren Christopher and Vernon Jordan to join them in the Maryland mountains. The younger Bush insisted that his team cooperate with the incoming Obama staffers. And, through sneers and tears, Obama’s aides followed the boss’ orders, too. After all, switching out party labels is, actually, the norm.
Only twice in the last century has a party held the White House into another presidency without a mid-term death of an incumbent, and those winners are Herbert Hoover, who followed Calvin Coolidge, and George H.W. Bush, who followed Ronald Reagan. The rest were the likes of Harry Truman (elected in his own right after FDR’s death) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (elected, too, following JFK’s assassination). Basically, for the last hundred years, the White House tends to switch parties when it switches Presidents—requiring the most awkward of meetings between the newcomer and the man he likely spent the last months viciously savaging as a failed incumbent.
But, for the most part, the outgoing and the incoming tend to play nice for the cameras and often find themselves discussing serious matters outside the glare of political gamesmanship. Trump himself has said his 90-minute session with Obama in 2016 was incredibly enlightening and helped him understand the fuller map beyond campaign rhetoric—especially putting into plain language that North Korea was the biggest under-appreciated threat to the incoming administration. (Obama also told Trump not to hire Mike Flynn, whom Obama dismissed from a top intelligence gig; Trump did not heed that but did can Flynn as National Security Adviser after just 22 days.)
Most Presidents with an eye toward history understand the needs of this final act, both for responsible governing and for their personal legacies. Most modern presidencies don’t hit this final stride exactly riding a wave. Truman set the low bar at 32% job approval when he left office. (Nixon would be lower, at 24%, but his resignation in the wake of Watergate has to be treated with a bold-faced asterisk.) Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush all were given the boot by the electorate given a choice. Reagan was far from atop his game by the end, Clinton had emerged a survivor—albeit a bruised one benched by Gore—yet still left office with a 66% job approval rating. George W. Bush spent the 2008 GOP convention touring Africa, far away from delegates and parked at a Trumanesque 34% job approval. Trump raged his way out of office, refusing to accept he had, in fact, lost to Biden. And Biden is currently parked at 41% in Gallup’s decades-long tracking of that office.
All of which is to say this: by this point in their presidencies, the men who run the White House are generally eager to start the legacy-building projects in earnest. Most often than not, they hate their successors. But a photograph—even a group one, as happened with Obama’s transition, for the first such confab in 27 years—goes a long way toward showing unity, normalcy, and even legitimacy.
As much as Biden is going to grit his teeth through Wednesday’s session, he knows the alternative is not an option. While Trump availed himself of that easier route in 2020’s defeat, that’s not how Biden sees the job. And at a time when he’s drawing a fair share of blame for Trump’s return, Biden understands that the best thing for his legacy, and the country, is handling this uncomfortable moment with the composure and grace that the man he is preparing to greet never offered to him.
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Late in the 2024 election, Elon Musk made a tantalizing and outlandish offer: a sweepstakes offering $1 million daily to voters who pledged to sign on to his petition proclaiming support for the First and Second Amendments. The stunt raised questions about money in politics, but also about the use of what appeared to be a lottery to sway voters’ choices. Later the political action committee admitted that it would select the “winners” ahead of time, not pluck them out by chance. So, not a lottery after all.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]But it was a fitting ploy for our times, where elections are big business and the rules of the game are subject to plenty of manipulations: duplicitous texts, hours-long lines to vote in some neighborhoods, and of course, the arcane Electoral College that shapes how campaigns are run and whose votes are considered valuable. Musk’s purported lottery made sense in America’s betting-obsessed culture, where it isn’t enough to see stock markets rise and fall around election time; instead dedicated prediction markets now allow speculators to bet on electoral outcomes.
The widespread embrace of gambling, betting, and lotteries is a regressive method of shoring up revenues for public goods in an age of austerity and tax cuts. Lotteries, then, reflect and increase inequality, while holding out the promise of a big windfall for individual winners. Indeed, the same political and economic conditions that gave rise to the popularity of lotteries, games of chance, and speculation have also ushered in a new political era, shaped by Donald Trump—who, after all, built a career in casinos. Uncertainty and insecurity have made us into a nation of gamblers, betting that fortune’s wheel, rather than shared investment in our democracy, brings prosperity
Lotteries have a long history in the U.S., stretching back to the colonial era. Then, legislatures used lotteries to raise funds for colonial governments, relief for the poor, and universities, among other public goods. During the 1820s and 1830s, though, many states took steps to ban state and private lotteries after scandals emerged about rigged and unfair games. Reformers criticized lotteries as regressive and harmful to working people, and state constitutions soon prohibited them.
Read More: The Problem With Mega Jackpots Like the $2 Billion Powerball Drawing
After the Civil War, lotteries became popular again. Southern states saw them as an easy way to raise revenues without imposing new taxes. Soon, people were purchasing tickets for the Louisiana State Lottery by mail, not just within the state but across the nation. Concerned about the corruption of public morality, and as President Benjamin Harrison put it, “the robbery of the poor,” Congress used its power to regulate interstate commerce to crack down on state lotteries by the end of the 19th century.
But legal gambling emerged again in the 20th century. Nevada legalized casino gambling during the Great Depression. State lotteries followed, beginning with New Hampshire, in 1964. The Granite State was one of few states without income or sales taxes, and the lottery’s proceeds were to go to the public school system. Entering cost $3 and people dreamt about taking home the winnings, which were pegged to a horse race. People might walk away with a prize ranging from anywhere between few hundred dollars and $150,000.
People played enthusiastically, and other states soon followed in the 1970s and 1980s as cities and states became more fiscally strained, thanks to inflation, low corporate taxes, and veneration of the free market. Politicians hesitated to raise direct taxes on citizens, lest they lose reelection, and so lotteries became a popular method of raising funds.
Some states turned to casino gambling as another source of revenue. In 1976, New Jersey voters opted to legalize gambling in Atlantic City, a decision that drew casino operators to the storied boardwalk in droves over the next decade. The city was once a premiere destination for visitors hoping to catch sun and sea down the shore, but the city had fallen on hard times. Casino gambling was understood as a good bet for reviving tourism and raising revenues.
In 1984, Trump made his first foray into Atlantic City’s casino business, and he would expand his empire to three casinos over the following decade. He did well, but his casinos didn’t—the projects took on excessive debts, or failed to register a profit, and each underwent bankruptcies (Trump Taj Mahal in 1991, Trump Plaza and Trump Castle, 1992) before eventually shuttering or changing hands. Neither did the city’s residents; people’s homes had been cleared to make way for casinos that choked the city off from the beachfront. And yet, tourists flocked to the growing opportunities to hit it big. In 1986 Atlantic City welcomed 30 million visitors, making it the number one tourist destination in the country.
In the 1980s, the culture—like the administration of President Ronald Reagan—venerated wealth acquisition, and the expansion of the financial industry was accompanied by Hollywood films like Wall Street and Working Girl. Even when reckless speculation and deregulation led to crashes like the Savings and Loan Crisis and “Black Monday,” on Oct. 19, 1987, Americans doubled down on risk-taking and markets. Instead of creating a system that aimed to serve everybody’s needs, the logics of markets and competition triumphed and became applied to every part of life.
Such logic extended even to the immigration system. Since 1965, the system had largely limited visas to immigrants with a close family member or employer to sponsor them. Yet many more people want to immigrate to the U.S., drawn by better opportunities. In 1990, policymakers decided to create a way for them to get visas. Perhaps reflecting the glorification of risk-taking dominating the culture, they made it into a game of chance. The new Diversity Visa lottery gave people from around the world a chance to win an immigrant visa.
Read More: An Explosion in Sports Betting Is Driving Gambling Addiction Among College Students
Allocating valued but scarce goods via lottery made sense to policymakers for practical reasons; it was cheaper to administer this way than to sift through and assess detailed applications, weighing the pros and cons of each aspiring entrant. But it was a fortuitous choice: Making luck the animating premise of the program also appealed to aspiring immigrants who felt that chance offered better odds than restriction-minded bureaucrats.
This lottery, like others, acknowledges the randomness that shapes our lives, particularly in the 21st century as countries like the U.S. have reduced social safety nets and embraced deregulation, allowing inequality to shape our society and making rights dependent on things largely outside our control: where we are born, our gender, the state in which we reside. The resulting precarity only deepens our sense of insecurity and distrust.
Luck shapes our lives more than we are comfortable admitting, and the explosion of lotteries and gambling in our society in recent years both recognizes and reinforces this fact. When hard work and dedication don’t reliably bring us stability, it makes a kind of sense to turn to lottery tickets and betting in the hope of a big win—even when the odds are stacked against us.
Yet, while lotteries may be popular, and they may generate needed revenues, they are a poor substitute for robust investment in the public goods that we all depend upon, like schools, health care, infrastructure, and housing. Such insecurity and uncertainty may undermine our trust in each other, in the government, and in democracy itself to deliver what we need to survive and to thrive. After all, almost everyone who enters a lottery loses; the winner’s luck depends on everybody else’s lack of it.
Access to a good life seems more than ever to depend on luck. Now, by sending Trump back to the White House, the electorate appears to have spun the wheel on democracy itself, leaving us to hope that whatever luck we have had in building our fragile democracy thus far in our history doesn’t run out.
Carly Goodman is assistant professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, senior editor at Made by History at TIME, and author of Dreamland: America’s Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction (UNC Press, 2023).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
(NEW YORK) — A judge postponed a decision on whether to undo President-elect Donald Trump’s conviction in his hush money case, after his lawyers called for freezing and ultimately dismissing the case so he can run the country.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]New York Judge Juan M. Merchan had been set to rule Tuesday on their earlier request to throw out his conviction because of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this summer on presidential immunity. Instead, he told Trump’s lawyers Tuesday he’d delay the ruling until Nov. 19.
According to emails filed in court, Trump lawyer Emil Bove asked for the delay over the weekend, arguing that putting the case on hold — and then ending it altogether — is “necessary to avoid unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern.”
Prosecutors agreed to the delay.
Trump won back the White House a week ago but the legal question concerns the Republican’s status as a past president, not an impending one.
A jury convicted Trump in May of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels in 2016. The payout was to buy her silence about claims that she had sex with Trump.
Read More: What Trump’s Win Means for His Legal Cases
He says they didn’t, denies any wrongdoing and maintains the prosecution was a political tactic meant to harm his latest campaign.
Just over a month after the verdict, the Supreme Court ruled that ex-presidents can’t be prosecuted for actions they took in the course of running the country, and prosecutors can’t cite those actions even to bolster a case centered on purely personal conduct.
Trump’s lawyers cited the ruling to argue that the hush money jury got some evidence it shouldn’t have, such as Trump’s presidential financial disclosure form and testimony from some White House aides.
Prosecutors disagreed and said the evidence in question was only “a sliver” of their case.
Trump’s criminal conviction was a first for any ex-president. It left the 78-year-old facing the possibility of punishment ranging from a fine or probation to up to four years in prison.
The case centered on how Trump accounted for reimbursing his personal attorney for the Daniels payment.
The lawyer, Michael Cohen, fronted the money. He later recouped it through a series of payments that Trump’s company logged as legal expenses. Trump, by then in the White House, signed most of the checks himself.
Prosecutors said the designation was meant to cloak the true purpose of the payments and help cover up a broader effort to keep voters from hearing unflattering claims about the Republican during his first campaign.
Trump said that Cohen was legitimately paid for legal services, and that Daniels’ story was suppressed to avoid embarrassing Trump’s family, not to influence the electorate.
Trump was a private citizen — campaigning for president, but neither elected nor sworn in — when Cohen paid Daniels in October 2016. He was president when Cohen was reimbursed, and Cohen testified that they discussed the repayment arrangement in the Oval Office.
Trump has been fighting for months to overturn the verdict and could now seek to leverage his status as president-elect. Although he was tried as a private citizen, his forthcoming return to the White House could propel a court to step in and avoid the unprecedented spectacle of sentencing a former and future president.
While urging Merchan to nix the conviction, Trump also has been trying to move the case to federal court. Before the election, a federal judge repeatedly said no to the move, but Trump has appealed.
Did you know that the expansion of AI will require as much new energy as some countries? TIME Chief Climate Officer Shyla Raghav explores artificial intelligence and how it impacts energy use.
I’ve seen technology reshape our world repeatedly. Previous technology platforms amplified human capabilities but didn’t fundamentally alter the essence of human intellect. They extended our reach but didn’t multiply our minds.
Artificial intelligence is different. It’s past the point where a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. AI amplifies and multiplies the human brain, much like steam engines once amplified muscle power. Before engines, the main source of energy was the food we consumed to fuel human physical labor. Engines allowed us to tap into external energy sources like coal and oil, revolutionizing productivity and transforming society. AI stands poised to be the intellectual parallel, offering a near-infinite expansion of brainpower to serve humanity.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]AI promises a future of unparalleled abundance. However, as we transition to a post-scarcity society, the journey may be complex, and the short term may be painful for those displaced. Mitigating these challenges requires well-reasoned policy. The next decade, 10 to 25 years, and 25 to 50 years will each be radically different. The pace of change will be hard to predict or anticipate, especially as technology capabilities far exceed human intelligence and penetrate society at varying rates.
Pessimists paint a dystopian future in two parts—economic and social. They fear widespread job loss, economic inequality, social manipulation, erosion of human agency, loss of creativity, and even existential threats from AI. I believe these fears are largely unfounded, myopic, and harmful. They are addressable through societal choices. Moreover, the real risk isn’t “sentient AI” but losing the AI race to nefarious “nation states,” or other bad actors, making AI dangerous for the West. Ironically, those who fear AI and its capacity to erode democracy and manipulate societies should be most fearful of this risk.
In an economic dystopia, wealth concentrates at the top while intellectual and physical work are devalued. Widespread job loss and deflation destroy the economy and purchasing power, exacerbating inequalities. AI could create a world where a small elite thrives while the rest face instability.
But with smart interventions—like income redistribution or universal basic income (UBI), and strategic legislation—we can prevent this. Capitalism operates by the permission of democracy, and we have the collective power to shape economic outcomes if we handle this transition wisely.
Factor in an aging global population and a shrinking pool of young workers, and AI becomes essential. With the right policies, we could smooth the transition and even usher in a three-day workweek. If GDP growth jumps from 2% to 5% or more, we’ll have the abundance to create “transition funds,” much like the oil funds that have fueled prosperity in countries like Norway.
Naysayers envision AI undermining humanity through pervasive surveillance and manipulation. They fear AI being used to control information, influence elections, and erode democracy via targeted propaganda or deepfakes, making truth difficult to discern.
But these outcomes aren’t inevitable. Legislation will shape how AI integrates into our lives. In democratic societies, these are collective choices. With AI’s abundance, the reasons for crime might even diminish. A balance can be achieved where we benefit from AI’s advancements without succumbing to dystopian visions.
Fears of manipulation rely on the assumption of a single, despotic AI overlord, which is far-fetched. More likely, we’ll see diverse AIs serving different interests, preventing the consolidation of power.
Concerns about AI making critical decisions in healthcare, justice, and governance are valid, given hidden biases in current systems. But these biases originate from humans, and AI offers a chance to recognize and correct them. For example, human physicians perform more surgeries if they’re paid by the surgery—hardly unbiased. AI can surface and correct such biases, providing more equitable outcomes.
Humans will retain the power to revoke AI’s decision-making privileges, ensuring AI remains guided by human consensus. The specter of a sentient, malevolent AI is a risk, but one we can mitigate through vigilance and proper safeguards.
Critics fear over-reliance on AI could diminish human creativity and critical thinking, as people depend on machines for decisions. They worry about cultural homogenization due to AI algorithms creating echo chambers.
But I see AI expanding our creativity. Someone like me—endowed with zero musical talent—can create a personalized song. AI enables new forms of expression, expanding our abilities rather than replacing them.
Doomers warn that AI could become uncontrollable and render humans extinct. While we must invest heavily in AI safety research, it’s important to balance this concern against AI’s immense benefits.
The larger and more immediate risk is losing the AI race to nations like China, making AI dangerous for the West. China’s five-year plan explicitly aims to win in AI. If authoritarian regimes develop advanced AI before democratic societies, they could manipulate societies, erode democracy, and consolidate power.
Ironically, those who fear AI eroding democracy should be most concerned about this risk. We must step up and use AI for humanity’s benefit, ensuring democratic values prevail.
Further, it is likely that we’ll have multiple AIs, making it unlikely that all would turn against humanity simultaneously, even in a worst-case scenario. Most likely, the growing emphasis on AI explainability will enhance safety by aligning AI’s goals with human values. Within the next decade, I believe we’ll move beyond the scare-mongering around “black box systems” with no controllability.
However, solving this problem requires a laser focus on AI safety and ethics. Investing heavily in AI safety is crucial, and a substantial portion of university research should focus on this area. The federal government should invest more in safety research and detection of AI. Features like “off switches” should be required after appropriate research and testing. It’s also important to remember that humanity faces many existential risks—pandemics, asteroid impacts, nuclear war, to name a few. AI is just one risk in a broader context, and we need to consider the trade-offs between these risks and the potential benefits AI can bring.
Concerns about tech CEOs wielding unprecedented sway over global structures are valid. But we must consider whether we’re more comfortable with unelected leaders like Xi Jinping’s global influence or that of tech CEOs. While both wield power without direct democratic accountability, tech CEOs rely on market forces and public opinion.
Moreover, democratization of AI development and multiple AI’s makes power concentration unlikely.
Part of my motivation to pen this piece is to dispel the dystopian vision of an AI-first world. First and foremost, it is a cognitively lazy vision – easy to fall into and lacking all imagination: large-scale job losses, the rich getting richer, the devaluation of intellectual expertise as well as physical work, and the loss of human creativity all in service of our AI overlords. On the contrary, AI can provide near free AI tutors to every child on the planet and near free AI physician expertise to everyone on the planet. Virtually every kind of expertise will be near free from oncologists to structural engineers, software engineers to product designers and chip designers and scientists all fall into this camp. It will also help control plasma in fusion reactors and self flying aircraft, self-driving cars and public transit making all substantially more affordable and accessible by all. AI promises to democratize even how we build enterprises. But more than anything it will be an equalizing force as all humans will be able to harness the same expertise.
I estimate that over the next 25 years, AI can perform 80% of the work in 80% of all jobs—whether doctors, salespeople, engineers, or farm workers. Mostly, AI will do the job better and more consistently. Anywhere that expertise is tied to human outcomes, AI can and will outperform humans, and at near-free prices. AI will transform how we discover and utilize natural resources such as lithium, cobalt, steel and copper, such that our resource discovery capabilities outpace consumption. The current challenge is not a lack of resources, but a limitation in our capacity to find them – a barrier AI is poised to help break. Further, AI could help optimize the use of resources and it will help discover new materials.
For the next five to 10 years, humans will oversee AI “interns,” doubling or tripling productivity. Eventually, we’ll decide which jobs to assign to AI and which to keep. AI will make expertise nearly free, making goods and services more accessible to everyone.
Our physical lives will transform. Bipedal robots could revolutionize sectors from housekeeping to manufacturing, freeing people from undesirable jobs. In 25 years, there could be a billion bipedal robots performing the wide range of tasks that humans do. We could free humans from the slavery of the bottom 50% of really undesirable jobs like assembly line & farm work.
It is not just our physical lives that will be transformed. Soon, most consumer access to the internet could be agents acting on behalf of consumers and empowering them to efficiently manage daily tasks and fend off marketers and bots. This could be a great equalizer for consumers against the well-oiled marketing machines that attempt to co-opt the human psyche to increase consumerism and sell them stuff or bias their thinking.
AI could revolutionize healthcare with personalized medicine, tailoring treatments to individual genetics, lifestyle, and environment. AI could be used to detect diseases at an early stage, often before symptoms appear, allowing for more effective and less invasive treatments. AI will augment biotechnology to create effective, scalable precision medicines. An AI oncologist could access terabytes of research, more than any human could, making better-informed decisions.
Near-free AI physicians could offer high-quality healthcare globally. Expanding basic primary care, chronic care, and specialized care (i.e., cardiology, oncology, musculoskeletal, etc) is essential to improving the health of those living in emerging markets and preventing disease. Near-free 24×7 doctors, accessible by every child in the world would be impossible if we were to continue relying on humans for healthcare. Indeed, the current debate has painfully failed to focus on the most salient consequence of AI: those who stand to be most impacted by this AI revolution are the bottom half of the planet – 4 billion people – who struggle everyday to survive.
AI could create personalized learning experiences adapting to each student’s needs and interests. AI tutors, available 24/7, could make high-quality education accessible worldwide, unlocking opportunity and fostering self-efficacy and AI researchers could expand human knowledge and rate of discovery.
AI could address climate change by optimizing energy use, reducing emissions, but more than anything, help in developing low carbon technologies. It could aid in environmental monitoring and conservation, leading to a sustainable economy.
Of course, powering this AI-utopia will be energy intensive and will require complementary technologies such as fusion for limitless, clean and cheap power generation. My bet is on fusion boilers to retrofit and replace coal and natural gas boilers rather than building whole new fusion or nuclear plants. There are additionally promising efforts using geothermal, solar and advanced battery systems for clean, dispatchable electric power. Multiple vectors are driving down the environmental cost of compute.
AI could augment human capabilities, allowing us to tackle complex problems. It could be a creative partner, assisting in art, design, and innovation, pushing boundaries in various fields.
New “jobs” will emerge, and creativity will flourish.
AI could help create just societies by ensuring fair decision-making, reducing biases, and promoting transparency in governance, well beyond what humans have been able to do. It could assist in developing evidence-based policies through vast data analysis.
We could have 24/7 lawyers for every citizen, amplifying professional capacity and expanding access to justice. Education, legal, and financial advice would no longer be reserved for society’s upper crust.
In a utopian vision, AI could shift societal focus from economic growth to well-being and fulfillment. Imagine a world where passions emerge naturally, as people pursue what excites them without the pressure to secure a job or develop a career.
Professions not typically associated with financial security—like arts, competitions and sports—could become achievable for anyone, unconstrained by the need to make a living. Life would become more meaningful as the 40-hour workweek disappears.
Obstacles stand in the way—incumbent resistance, political exploitation of fears, technical failures, financial risks, anti-tech sentiment, and negative public perception. But I believe an AI-driven utopia is achievable with the right societal choices and technological advancements.
In the next five years, life may not feel dramatically different. But between 10 and 20 years from now, we’ll witness dramatic transformations reshaping society. While still on the horizon, this era of unprecedented prosperity is visible today.
Capitalism may need to evolve. The diminishing need for traditional economic efficiency allows us to prioritize empathetic capitalism and economic equality. Disparity beyond a point leads to unrest, so policy must address this.
Human labor may be devalued, putting downward pressure on wages. Labor will be devalued relative to capital and even more so relative to ideas and AI technology.
AI’s leveling of skill differences could compress wages. Value creation may shift to creativity, innovation, or AI ownership, potentially leading to new inequalities. We can’t simply extrapolate past economic history; AI may surpass human capabilities altogether, making education and upskilling less effective.
The AI cycle will be faster than previous technological shifts, making adjustment harder. Changes could hit some more seriously than others, especially in the next decade or two, even if society as a whole improves.
Let’s continue this thought experiment around wage compression and job disruption using the aggregate cost of physician salaries in the U.S. healthcare system as a starting point. It is north of $300 billion dollars, likely closer to $400 billion (take 1 million doctors each making $300,000 to $400,000). Predicting the fate of the $300 billion to $400 billion spent annually on U.S. physician salaries hinges on supply and demand elasticities in healthcare, consider demand elasticity. If medical costs drop by 90% due to AI automation, will consumption increase tenfold to keep the roughly $350 billion spent on U.S. physician salaries constant? Unlikely. People won’t break more bones because orthopedic care is cheaper. But they might increase preventive care, mental healthcare, and elective procedures as access barriers fall. AI will hyper personalize and possibly commodify high quality entertainment and media, and any art form will vie for the same 24 hours of user attention each day. Diversity and quality of media will likely expand dramatically; will consumer spending also increase? In other areas like accounting even if services become cheaper through automation, a company won’t require ten times more audits. The demand is bounded by regulatory needs, not cost.
Even if per-service costs decline, total spending may stay the same if increased volumes balance lower prices. Each sector will find its equilibrium between supply, demand, and elasticity, making precise predictions difficult without a nuanced, sector-specific analysis for which, today, we have insufficient data. In the fullness of time, the new AI economy will find an equilibrium once demand hits the asymptote of total consumption and time in each sector.
AI’s surge in productivity could lead to deflation—a decrease in general price levels. Increased efficiency with fewer inputs (like lower labor costs due to AI and robotics) and heightened competition can trigger deflation and job loss.
But this deflationary economy challenges traditional measures like GDP. If we consume more but spend less due to lower prices, GDP may not reflect well-being. GDP won’t mean much if it doesn’t capture increased living standards and abundance.
We need new economic measures accounting for these changes. Deflation here isn’t negative; it’s increased efficiency, production of goods and services and abundance. Our current lexicon equates GDP growth with prosperity—a flaw. Monetary policy may not be as effective in this new age.
We face choices: accelerate, slow down, or moderate disruptive technologies, and decide whether to compensate those displaced. Change can be painful for the disrupted, and embracing AI’s positives requires keeping those affected at the center of policy. These changes pose significant challenges, but they also offer an opportunity to create in the 25-plus year windows of a more empathetic society and a post-resource-constrained world. This is a luxury that has been unaffordable in the past but may now be ours to use.
Given the massive productivity gains on the horizon, and a potential for annual GDP growth to increase from 2% to potentially 5% or more over the next 50 years, per capita GDP could hit around $1 million (assuming 5% annual growth for 50 years if GDP is still a good measure). A deflationary enough economy makes current nominal dollars go much further and I suspect current measures of GDP will be poor measures of economic well being. Of course, this vision is only possible with a UBI-like mechanism that provides a minimum standard – that on the whole – far exceeds today’s, given accessibility of goods and services that enrich our lives.
I can imagine a consumer utopia in 25-plus years, where we’re not supply constrained in most areas and deflation is actually a positive tailwind for access and more equal consumption. Imagine a world in which housing, energy, healthcare, food, and transportation is all delivered or at your door, for near-free, by machines; few jobs in those fields remain. What would be the key characteristics of that world, and what would it be like to live in it? Humans will finally be “free”.
An interesting parallel is China whose entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 indeed created deflationary pressures on the United States in the years that followed. This was largely due to several factors related to trade liberalization and increased competition from Chinese exports. The movement of labor overseas has resulted in a loss of tens of millions of stateside manufacturing jobs, yet little policy was centered around upskilling or taking care of those whose livelihoods were upended. With AI, we have the opportunity to free ourselves from this low-cost labor.
Ultimately, the future will be what we decide to guide this powerful tool toward. It will be a series of policy choices, not technological inevitability. Choices will vary by country. We must harness AI responsibly, ensuring its benefits are distributed equitably.
I’m a technology possibilist, a techno-optimist—for technology used with care. Reflecting on my words from 2000, we’ll need to redefine what it means to be human. This new definition should focus not on the need for work or productivity but on passions, imagination, and relationships, allowing individual interpretations of humanity.
