The survey was, at least on the surface, designed to deduce what kind of country Americans would like future generations to inherit.
Each person was presented with 55 separate goal statements for the nation "People have individual rights" was one; "People have high-quality health care" was another-and asked to rank them in order of importance. Each person was also asked how each goal would be ranked by "other people." When the results were tallied, the surprise was not that "People have individual rights" came in first, or that "People have high-quality health care" finished second. The surprise was the third highest priority: "Successfully address climate change." We know that's a surprise because, on the list of what "other people" considered important, climate came in 33rd. In other words, no one thought their fellow Americans saw climate as the highpriority item nearly everyone actually considered it to be.
That gap between what we ourselves think and what we reckon others must be thinking-may hold the power to upend a great deal of what we believe we know about American civic life.
"People are lousy at figuring out what the group thinks," Rose says. This collective blind spot is a quirk he would underline to students when he was teaching the neuroscience of learning at Harvard. At Populace, the think tank he co-founded to put such knowledge to practical use, the foible plays a prominent role in efforts to undo what Rose calls the "shared illusion" that Americans are hopelessly divided.
And divided we certainly think we are. The only thing Americans seem to agree on is that Americans cannot agree on anything. It's hardly worth summarizing the headlines about doom and radicalization. In the prelude to a November ballot featuring the candidate synonymous with polarization, all the dapple and nuance of life is once again being reduced to a binary. Choose a side: red or blue.
Denne historien er fra July 15, 2024-utgaven av Time.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent ? Logg på
Denne historien er fra July 15, 2024-utgaven av Time.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Kate Winslet Puts Lee Miller in the Frame - Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them.
Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them. There is nothing fancy about these antiques, but they enchant her. "It's the knots and the whorls, the shape and feel," she says. "They can feel like old friends, and there is something emotionally charging about an old table that comes with a history-I find imagining what that might be enormous fun."
Alfonso Cuarón Goes Long - The Oscar-winning filmmaker finds pathos in our lonely present in his first TV miniseries
A perceptive, generous-spirited child draws on her imagination when she's subjected to the cruelty of a boarding-school headmistress. A lone astronaut, cradled in a damaged space capsule and having lost any hope of returning to Earth, experiences a hallucination that saves her life. A young household servant, abandoned by the man who's gotten her pregnant, miscarries-though his betrayal helps her define what family truly means to her. Loneliness, so universal it has virtually become trademarked the Human Condition, is everywhere in art, and in life: we tend to fetishize it, or at least dab it with a perfume of sentimentality. But Alfonso Cuarón, now more than 30 years into a wide-ranging career that spans pictures like the Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess, the space reverie Gravity, and the memoir-as-film drama Roma, is more interested in subtle emotional textures, in gradations of feeling that are always specific to the character at hand yet also joltingly recognizable. And now he brings his big-screen, big-story gifts to a limited series, an adaptation of Renée Knight's 2015 psychological thriller Disclaimer.
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Innovators
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Leaders
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Advocates
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Phenoms
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Artists
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
THE NEW APPRENTICE
J.D. Vance's juggling act
Fear in Lebanon, and a new front
FIRST, ON SEPT. 17, THERE WERE exploding pagers.
The hunt for life on a moon of Jupiter begins
NEARLY HALF A BILLION MILES FROM EARTH, A WORLD may be stirring.