When I and most other historians talk about parallels between the Gilded Age and today, the comparisons are structural. They reflect broad conditions affecting millions of people. It's when pundits pull particular examples from the past to explain the actions of individuals today that trouble arises. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens casts Thompson as a character out of a Horatio Alger novel: a working-class hero who pulled himself up by the bootstraps. Also writing in The New York Times, sociologist Zeynip Tufekci comes close to making Luigi Mangione a reincarnation of Alexander Berkman, the anarchist who tried to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick. Over in The New Yorker, Dhruv Khullar suggests that in its arbitrariness and callousness, the prototype for the U.S. medical system, which Mangione excoriated in his manifesto, originated somewhere in the Gilded Age. Today's historians and journalists obviously think the past has much to teach their fellow citizens. And their motives are sensible: They want to push back against the idea that the past is irrelevant, that everything important has occurred in the past 15 minutes ' a view reflected in a favorite phrase of President-elect Donald Trump to describe whatever crisis du jour is afflicting the United States: 'We've never seen anything like it.'...

With the passage of Amendment 79 in November 2024, Colorado voters enshrined the right to abortion in the state constitution. The amendment solidifies the state's status as one of the most liberal in the country on the issue. Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling, Coloradans have voted on 10 abortion ballot measures ' nearly one-sixth of all of the abortion-related ballot measures across the country. Despite public opinion consistently showing that Coloradans support abortion rights, eight of the 10 measures have sought to restrict access. However, Colorado voters were not the first to have an abortion measure on the ballot. Voters in Washington, Michigan and North Dakota all voted on ballot measures in the 1970s to expand access to abortion. Only Washington passed the measure. As part of my research examining how interest groups influence public policy, I have been tracking the activity of anti-abortion organizations, including the use of ballot measures. To understand the current climate in Colorado, it helps to understand how these ballot measures mirror debates within the larger conversation around abortion rights....

A physicist, a chemist and a mathematician walk into a bar. It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but in my case, it was the start of an idea that could reshape how scientists think about the history of the Moon. The three of us were all interested in the Moon, but from different perspectives: As a geophysicist, I thought about its interior; Thorsten Kleine studied its chemistry; and Alessandro Morbidelli wanted to know what the Moon's formation could tell us about how the planets were assembled 4.5 billion years ago. At a conference in Hawaii in the late 1980s, a group of scientists solved the problem of how the Moon formed. Their research suggested that a Mars-size object crashed into the early Earth, jettisoning molten material into space. That glowing material coalesced into the body now called the Moon. This story explained many things. For one, the Moon has very little material that evaporates easily, such as water, because it began life molten. It has only a tiny iron core, because it was mostly formed from the outer part of the Earth, which has very little iron. And it has a buoyant, white-colored crust made from minerals that floated to the surface as the molten Moon solidified....

Happy Tuesday! Today's issue is incredibly hot as we're looking into Google's quantum computing breakthrough Willow and whether it's a threat to Bitcoin's encryption (holistic view on what it means, what can we expect next + bonus list of top AI companies & their pitch decks), Norwegian FinTech that just made history as first Apple Pay competitor on iPhone (what it's all about, why it matters & what's next + bonus dives into Apple & Co), and cybersecurity giant Gen Digital which just acquired digital bank MoneyLion for $1 billion (what this means & what it tells us about the future of FinTech + bonus deep dive into MoneyLion & their latest financials and some priceless M&A templates that can save you billions). So let's just jump straight into the amazing stuff '' More on this ' First and foremost, we must realize that quantum computers operate fundamentally differently from classical computers, using quantum bits (qubits) that can exist simultaneously in multiple states. Google's Willow chip demonstrated impressive capabilities by performing complex calculations in five minutes that would take traditional supercomputers roughly 10 septillion years to complete. Sure, this sounds alarming, but it's crucial to understand the vast gap between current quantum capabilities and what's needed to crack Bitcoin's encryption....