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While Lucky Peach’s culture was casual and frequently profane, former staffers say that Meehan revelled in his propensity for over-the-top insults and descriptions of violence, which struck a dissonant chord coming from their boss. Of a contributor who wouldn’t translate a piece he reported for the magazine, Meehan wrote in an email in 2016, “I’m gonna mouthbarf seeing that half-bald sweater-wearing pussy’s name printed in my magazine if he’s unwilling to do the basic legwork of the relatively simple fucking task at hand.” Multiple staffers describe Meehan recounting a time he threatened another employee by saying he would shove a “golf umbrella” up his ass and open it. (This former employee says Meehan never said this to him).

When Charlie Chaplin watched “Triumph of the Will,” his immediate impulse, according to Luis Buñuel, was to burst into laughter. The orator onscreen seemed to be an insane variation on Chaplin’s Little Tramp persona, down to the toothbrush mustache. The experience unnerved him, though, as it did many leftist filmmakers who witnessed the technical virtuosity of German cinema being applied to sinister ends. In 1940, Chaplin released “The Great Dictator,” a lavish satire of Hitler’s histrionics. Inevitably, Wagner is on the soundtrack, yet Chaplin makes the surprising choice to detach the music from the Nazi context. The ethereal prelude to “Lohengrin,” suggesting the sacred power of the Holy Grail, is heard twice in the film, serving first to puncture Nazi iconography and then to amplify a message of peace.

Every day Google and Facebook and other tech companies become more powerful and sophisticated by analyzing you and your choices—what you click on, how long you pause to watch an ad or a YouTube video—and the stories you write and the songs you record, and they charge advertisers money to access this information, and grow their own companies with it, but they don’t pay you for your contribution. They don’t even really acknowledge that you are contributing, as if artificial intelligence came from nowhere, instead of from data derived from you and me. “In the information age,” Lanier said, “we’re all workers and consumers and entrepreneurs at the same time.” What if, Lanier suggested, we got paid for our labor in this system? By recognizing the roles we play in building the future, Lanier said, we might give ourselves a chance to be meaningful participants in it. “When a person is empowered to make a difference, they become more of a full person,” he said. “They awaken spiritually.”

In the Stauffers’ case, most of the vitriol was aimed at Myka. One Instagram account, Cancel Myka Stauffer, which goes by the handle @mykastauffer.liar, has more than 11,000 followers. An online petition with more than 154,000 supporters demanded that Myka’s monetized videos with Huxley be removed from YouTube. Followers appeared angry not only on behalf of Huxley but also because Myka had committed the ultimate influencer sin: ghosting on those who’d become invested in her story right when the plot twisted.

As Trump seeks reëlection, some of the toughest criticism on his foreign policy is from other Republicans, including a scathing joint condemnation last week by seventy-five senior Republican officials from four Administrations. “Without question, Trump has denigrated our standing with friends and with foes. They all think less of us,” Richard Armitage, one of the signatories, and the Deputy Secretary of State during the George W. Bush Administration and Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan Administration, told me. “Our standing globally has not been this low since the end of the Cold War and probably not since before World War Two. . . . People don’t really care about us. They’re so over us because of this guy.”

The great irony, and outrage, of Pence’s speech is that, as the head of the White House’s coronavirus task force since February, he’s had a unique and closeup view of Trump’s actual response to the pandemic. The constant belittling of the virus’s threat; the claims that it would go away of its own accord; the quack remedies, including injecting disinfectant into stricken patients; the squabbling with governors, even Republican ones, who called out the inadequacy of his actions; the urging states to reopen their economies even as they failed to meet the guidelines that Pence’s task force had laid down; the months of defiant refusal to wear a mask; and, in the end, the decision to effectively give up on the whole thing and move on.

Once they had logged where and when the spoofing incidents occurred, researchers cross-referenced this information with the travel schedule of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. On a fall afternoon in 2017, six minutes before Putin gave a speech in the coastal town of Bolshoy Kamen, a nearby ship’s G.P.S. coordinates showed it jumping to the airport in Vladivostok. In 2018, when Putin attended the official opening of a bridge across the Kerch Strait, at least twenty-four ships in the area reported their location as Anapa Airport, sixty-five kilometres away. What was going on? It seemed increasingly likely that the President’s security detail was travelling with a portable software-defined spoofer, in the hope of protecting Putin from drone attacks.

Schulman describes this episode in a book she wrote some years later, Conflict Is Not Abuse. The book’s central insight is that people experiencing the inevitable discomfort of human misunderstanding often overstate the harm that has been done to them — they describe themselves as victims rather than as participants in a shared situation. And overstating harm itself can cause harm, whether it leads to social shunning or physical violence.