Today's guests and topics, plus: Russia's darker turn; and your brain on TikTok …
Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. July 14, 2024 |
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On GPS at 10 a.m. ET:
An assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has shocked the nation, recalling sinister moments in American history. Putting this chilling moment in context, Fareed talks with The New Yorker's Evan Osnos, Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer, and CNN presidential historian and author Timothy Naftali about extremity in politics here and around the world and what this moment means for America's future—in November and beyond. After that: political violence in American history. Fareed talks with Yale historian Joanne Freeman about division turning dangerous. |
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Is it possible that Russia is getting even more difficult for the West to deal with? In a Foreign Affairs essay, Mikhail Zygar wrote recently that Russia's political spectrum has acquiesced more fully to the war on Ukraine. Where the war's early days were marked by skepticism among liberal elites, Zygar writes: "As 2023 wound on, elites started endorsing the war. More musicians began traveling to perform in the occupied territories. … And there have been no new recordings of oligarchs grousing about the war. In fact, it is hard to imagine such conversations happening. That is because Russian elites have learned to stop worrying about the conflict. They have concluded that the invasion, even if they do not support it outright, is a tolerable fact of life. … [I]nstead of debating whether to support [President Vladimir[ Putin, Russian elites are now discussing a different question: how the war might end." In addition to these evolutions in Russia's political system, Andrei Kolesnikov writes in another Foreign Affairs essay that Putin has converted Russia to a war economy. "Like some of his Soviet predecessors, Putin seems to be wagering that huge military expenditures, managed by economic number crunchers, can save, rather than bankrupt, the country," Kolesnikov writes. "By embracing such an approach, Putin and [Defense Minister Andrei] Belousov risk eroding what remains of Russia's hard-won liberal economic foundations. … When and if they disappear, it may be very difficult to avoid a larger collapse." Moscow has leaned even further into Putin's historical interpretation of Russia as a great power—and great civilization—that enjoys a sphere of influence beyond its current borders, Mikhail Komin wrote in a paper for the European Council on Foreign Relations last month. "The integration of ideology into Russian school education has been significantly marked by the introduction of a new, unified history textbook in September 2023," currently mandated for senior grades and to be extended from grades five through nine this year. "A significant distinction in the new textbook is the blending of second world war narratives with discussions of Russia's conflict in Ukraine."
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This Is Your Brain on TikTok |
While the US considers banning the popular social-media app TikTok unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells it off, a New York Review of Books essay by Yi-Ling Liu traces the history of TikTok and examines what would be lost if the US blocked it. Liu writes: "[A] TikTok ban would bring an end to the era when Chinese entrepreneurs could take their products global without friction … the American Internet will … become more detached from places where the app remains woven into the fabric of online life, from Southeast Asia to the Middle East. … Other nation-states, emboldened by the US government's actions, may introduce bans of their own."
As for what TikTok is to its users, Liu writes: "Instead of showing users content based on social connections—accounts they follow and accounts that follow them—it is tailored to their individual habits and even instincts. If, for instance, you engage with content related to woodworking or a particular kind of dance, the algorithm will serve you more content on these subjects, regardless of who created it. This allows for a feeling of "surprise," the researcher Marcus Bösch told me. It's 'like falling in love with a stranger very fast.' People describe the experience with a sense of enchantment. The tech blogger Eugene Wei called it a 'rapid, hyper-efficient matchmaker.' He compared it to the Sorting Hat from the Harry Potter books, divvying up users into subcultures. A writer at Mashable praised the app as a 'divine digital oracle' after it identified her as bisexual before she realized she was interested in women. Researchers found that TikTok could send users into a 'flow state' in which they lose track of time." |
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