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Long-Running AI Agents Are Here - WSJ
Thursday February 5^th, 2026 at 2:19 PM

MARKET-REACTION: Rapid advancements in AI agent technology recently triggered a significant multi-day selloff in technology stocks, erasing approximately $300 billion in market value.
TECHNOLOGY-EVOLUTION: A new class of long-running AI agents, such as Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, has emerged with the ability to maintain context over extended periods to solve complex problems.
DISRUPTION-RISK: Investors express concern that specialized software-as-a-service companies may be rendered obsolete as AI agents begin to intercede in established customer relationships.
AUTONOMOUS-CAPABILITY: Modern AI architectures allow agents to act as planners that dynamically select tools, execute code, and manage workflows without the need for rigid preprogramming.
VERTICAL-IMPACT: The proficiency of these agents threatens research-intensive sectors like legal and financial services by automating tasks such as drafting, synthesizing research, and data extraction.
WORKFLOW-COMPRESSION: Enterprise adoption of long-horizon AI is transforming internal operations by collapsing weeks of traditional analysis and development into minutes of execution.
LABOR-SHIFT: The nature of professional work is transitioning from rote creation to a focus on editing, taste, and high-level judgment as AI handles technical execution.
STRATEGIC-ADAPTATION: Companies are encouraged to identify unique competitive advantages beyond data provision to survive the shift toward shared AI platforms.

By

Illustration of a businesswoman on a laptop being pulled by a team of huskies.

Thomas R. Lechleiter/WSJ

This week’s technology stock selloff, now in its third day, has its roots in a new class of AI agents that emerged a few months ago. These “long-running” agents are still growing in power, too. On Thursday, Anthropic launched an upgraded version of the technology that sparked the selloff.

Companies need to pay attention.

AI agents have the potential to draw value out of almost every sector of the economy, not just software and data. That isn’t inevitable, though. Companies can use AI to create value of their own, provided they keep pace with technological changes and their downstream impact on business. For those that fall behind, the dreaded bubble may not be what lies within the AI sector, but what exists beyond.

Investors have been concerned for months that AI could suck the value out of narrowly focused software-as-a-service companies, rendering them mere databases that feed AI agents. It isn’t difficult to see how this new generation of agents that run for longer periods could end up stepping between the customer relationships that SaaS companies have cultivated. It could be similar to the way that Apple extracted the value in mobile communications from hardware-focused incumbents that didn’t get software.

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Those fears were compounded in November by the growing power of Anthropic’s Claude Code, which builds software with stunning proficiency. On Jan. 12, the company announced Cowork, a research preview feature in Claude’s desktop app that lets users assign multistep tasks to Claude such as organizing files, drafting documents, extracting data from spreadsheets or synthesizing research. Instead of chatting with Claude, users can point it at a folder on their computer and give it an objective.

On Tuesday morning, investors homed in on Anthropic’s Friday announcement that it was adding open-source plug-ins in research preview to Cowork that allow companies to customize and build on Claude. The 11 plug-ins have a range of focus, including the legal profession.

It was sufficient to give them a glimpse into the afterworld of economic life as we know it. To avoid irrelevance in the future, companies will need to think carefully about where their competitive advantage lies in a world of shared AI platforms.

Co-what?

Claude Code and Cowork are products that run on multiple Claude models. On Thursday, Anthropic announced a new model, Opus 4.6, that it says is a major step up in professional skills and reasoning compared with Opus 4.5 released in November.

As a result of the recent breakthroughs, investors who spent last year debating the existence of an AI bubble started to take AI’s potential more seriously. The Cowork plug-ins were like a match on dry tinder. If AI agents like Cowork can disrupt one research-intensive field such as the law, why not another and another? Suddenly this seemed like a near-term threat, not a speculative problem that’s always five years in the future.

I spoke to Scott White, Anthropic’s head of product for enterprise, to get a better understanding of how these agents operate and how they stand to transform work, companies and markets.

Going long

Claude Code and Cowork are pioneers of an emerging class of long-running AI agents with implications far beyond any one particular sector such as software development.

Unlike previous iterations that generated responses immediately, developers can now specify the level of effort they want Claude to use for a given request. This allows them to assess the complexity of a requested task and determine how hard it needs to think to solve it, White told me.

That’s how the model can engage in “long-horizon” thinking. The fusion of a reasoning model with a capable “harness” allows the model to connect to real systems, execute code and manage workflows, he said. Users can now assign a broad objective to the AI, which will operate autonomously in the background, maintaining context over long horizons. The agent can work for longer periods, but the turnaround time for projects is much faster.

Researchers Alexi Robbins and Jonas Nelle of Cursor said they use Opus 4.5 in conjunction with OpenAI’s GPT-5.2. “When these models were stacked together, they maintained coherence over extremely long horizons, allowing for high degrees of complexity,” Robbins said.

During the development of Cursor’s browser, Robbins said he observed the company’s agent intentionally drawing bright boxes and borders around elements on the webpage that weren’t part of the design, taking screenshots and debugging on its own. “It invented a tool it wasn’t given,” Nelle said.

Rethinking business models

White said these new capabilities are already changing the way he and his colleagues work.

In the past, he wrote documents to convince engineers to build features. Now he uses Claude to build working prototypes to demonstrate viability. The near-instantaneous merging of internal data, web research and customer feedback compresses weeks of analysis into minutes of execution.

LegalZoom logo on a smartphone screen.

LegalZoom takes an agnostic approach to client technology. Thomas Fuller/ZUMA Press

Anthropic designers now write production code to implement their own interfaces, and product managers are performing complex data-science tasks that previously required specialists, he said.

Work is changing at three levels, White said. Individuals are becoming more capable and productive and companies are tearing down historical workflows from marketing to compliance, reducing turnaround times. “Lastly, businesses are changing how they think about what they’re going to look like, what products they want to build,” White said. “Building new things is so much more approachable for businesses, introducing new revenue lines.”

LegalZoom CEO Jeff Stibel said he approaches AI as an accelerant for his business and so-called Main Street companies. The online legal-services platform has an in-house law firm and an independent network of more than 1,000 attorneys, as well as concierge service agents. It also takes an agnostic approach to client technology.

In Stibel’s view, AI makes it easier to start a business, driving clients to specialized services that support them. LegalZoom is moving from a search-and-answer approach to an emphasis on execution and a broader solution that clients trust.

“AI provides the insight, but LegalZoom provides the trusted solution,” he said.

A new architecture

The arrival of long-running agents marks a sudden advance in the design of AI systems. To grasp their potential implications, it is helpful to understand something about their architecture. I turned to Alex Salazar, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based AI startup Arcade.dev, for insight.

In the old days, before Thanksgiving, he said, a developer might have prompted a chatbot by saying, “You are an accounting agent; here is the enterprise resource planning tool.”

The new architecture allows the user to assign the agent a higher-level goal, such as “check depreciation schedules.” The model, acting as a planner, “dynamically decides which skills and tools it needs to solve the problem, iterates on the plan, and executes it without rigid preprogramming,” Salazar said.

This allows for caching or storing more information in dedicated memory, which makes the agents faster and cheaper because they don’t have to reprocess the same data for every single interaction, according to Salazar.

“This shifts the nature of work from creation to editing,” he said. He maintains that junior employees must pivot from being the “writer” to the “editor” driving the agent. “The skill set of the future is not syntax or rote creation, but taste and judgment,” he said.

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9 hours ago

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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

The EU’s Secret Assault on Your Free Speech - WSJ
Thursday February 5^th, 2026 at 2:17 PM

Regulatory Expansion: The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) grants the European Commission broad authority to enforce speech regulations on a global scale.
Fine Structure: The Commission possesses the power to levy financial penalties of up to 6% of a platform's total global annual revenue for noncompliance.
Judicial Convergence: Under the DSA framework, the European Commission serves as both the investigative prosecutor and the final judge in regulatory disputes.
Enforcement Actions: X (formerly Twitter) was issued the first fine under the DSA following a previously confidential 184-page decision released by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.
Blue Checkmark Dispute: Regulators interpreted X’s verification system as a violation of Article 25, suggesting it impairs the ability of users to reach "free and informed" conclusions.
Burden of Proof: The Commission’s findings against X relied on academic papers with small sample sizes, news articles, and a blog post from a company currently banned in the U.S.
Targeted Calculations: Fines against X were calculated based on the collective revenue of all entities controlled by Elon Musk rather than the platform's independent revenue.
Strategic Mandates: The DSA requires platforms to grant researchers access to internal data, which facilitates external investigations into information manipulation and illegal content.

By

Megan K. Jacobson

8

Zuma Press

The psychological concepts of projection and reaction formation explain a lot about today’s politics. People loudly insist they’re determined to protect liberal democracy while advocating policies that would trample it. So it is with the European Union’s Digital Services Act.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee last week released the EU’s previously secret full decision to issue the first fine under the DSA to X (formerly Twitter) in December. It confirms what critics have warned: This law threatens everyone’s basic liberties.

Yes, everyone’s—even those far from Europe. The sprawling 2022 law pushes social-media platforms to enforce European speech laws worldwide. Its supporters portray it as a technocratic, “content neutral” measure to ensure democratically enacted EU member states’ laws are applied justly. The European Commission asserts that the DSA’s “main goal” is to “create a digital space that respects citizens and consumers’ fundamental rights” by “establishing a clear set of rules across the EU.”

One of the most dangerous parts of the DSA is the massive power it hands to the commission, the EU’s international regulatory arm. While much of EU regulatory enforcement occurs at the national level, which is more accountable to voters, the DSA empowers the commission to investigate platforms and levy fines of up to 6% of their global annual revenue for each violation. In these investigations, the commission acts as both prosecutor and judge—accusing companies of noncompliance under a broad, ambiguous law, then deciding if companies’ answers are enough to disprove the allegations. An American court would strike down such a law as both unconstitutionally vague and a travesty of due process.

The EU portrays the commission as a neutral administrator. Its 12-paragraph public explanation of its decision to fine X in December seemed consistent with that. The three violations sounded technical: X’s current practice of minimally verifying blue-checkmark “verified” users’ identities is deceptive; X hasn’t adequately provided a public, searchable repository of all its advertising content as the DSA requires; and X isn’t giving qualified researchers the access to its data that the law also mandates.

But the 184-page decision that American lawmakers made public shows the commission acting like a petty despot, with little if any regard for due process.

The decision relies on some stunning interpretations of law. It claims that X’s blue checkmarks violate the DSA’s Article 25, which says “online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their online interfaces” in a way that “impairs” users’ abilities to “make free and informed decisions.” The commission’s definition of “decisions” turns out to include mere thoughts: whether users believe an account is authentic on a platform “advertising itself as a source for information and news.” As X protests in its response, the commission’s broad interpretation of Article 25 puts “at risk virtually every online interface implemented by every platform.”

Perhaps the commission has access to reliable psychics it doesn’t disclose, but the evidence it does cite as its main basis for finding X’s blue checkmarks noncompliant is laughable: a paper by a professor and three graduate students with tiny sample sizes, a dozen or so news articles critical of X, interviews with a former Twitter employee, and a blog post by a Russian cybersecurity company that the Biden administration banned from the U.S. market over national-security concerns.

The decision overall gives a sense that the investigators’ conclusion was preordained. It asserts that because all of X’s “alleged infringements were self-explanatory,” the commission “primarily relied on gathering its own evidence.” To ascertain whether X screened researchers’ applications for its data too strictly, the commission reviewed 12 applications, four of them “in depth”—tiny numbers given that X received 151 research requests in a single two-month period.

All this gives the decision a “Get Hoffa” tone. Elon Musk has been a thorn in the side of the commission with his forthright commitment to free speech. Though the commission’s decision doesn’t order X to perform any censorship, it does arm the commission with deadly force against X over speech restrictions in the future. It is still assessing whether X fails to combat “information manipulation” and to take down “illegal content.”

Thanks to the December decision, the commission can now bring—alongside any allegations of “hate speech” or “misinformation”—the threat of financial ruin. Though the fines in this case came to a mere €120 million, the commission based that figure not on X’s revenue but on that of Mr. Musk and “all legal entities directly or indirectly controlled by” him. That means a single future fine could be north of $6 billion—or more than 200% of X’s reported annual revenue.

The commission further raised the pressure for X to give in on censorship by ordering it to give researchers easier access to its data, particularly for those investigating general “misinformation”—though the legal basis for this is questionable. This will make it much easier for pro-censorship figures—such as those the U.S. State Department banned from the country in December—to find fodder to support demands for the removal of content.

Unless Washington or sensible European voices push back against the commission, platforms and those of us who enjoy free online expression are largely at its whim. Let’s hope someone on either side of the Atlantic cares about preserving actual liberal democracy.

Ms. Jacobson is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.

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9 hours ago

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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

AI Threatens a Wall Street Cash Cow: Financial and Legal Data - WSJ
Wednesday February 4^th, 2026 at 9:48 AM

MARKET_VOLATILITY: Significant stock price declines occurred for financial data providers like S&P Global, MSCI, and London Stock Exchange Group following new AI product announcements.
ANTHROPIC_INNOVATION: The introduction of a legal plug-in and coding tools for the Claude-powered Cowork assistant triggered concerns over automated professional services.
SECTOR_DISRUPTION: Traditional business models relying on proprietary financial data sales are facing increased competition from generative AI capabilities.
GLOBAL_IMPACT: The selloff extended beyond Western firms to affect major international outsourcing and consulting companies such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services.
INVESTOR_SENTIMENT: A broader downturn in the software sector has intensified as capital managers like Apollo Asset Management increasingly avoid the industry due to AI risks.
DATA_DEFENSE: Executives from established data firms maintain that proprietary, real-time information feeds remain essential and cannot be fully replicated by AI models.
CONTRARIAN_PERSPECTIVE: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang characterized the belief that AI will entirely replace existing software infrastructure as illogical and unlikely.
CAPITAL_EROSION: Expanding artificial intelligence capabilities contributed to a market value loss of approximately $300 billion across the software and data sectors in a single week.

By

Alexander Osipovich

and

Ben Dummett

Feb. 4, 2026 8:14 am ET

62

Watch: WSJ Interviews Anthropic’s CEO in Davos

A man works intently at the New York Stock Exchange.

Fears about new developments in artificial intelligence swept through the stock market on Tuesday. Richard Drew/AP

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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

From Greenland to Mauritius, ‘Decolonization’ Is Over | Compact
Tuesday February 3^rd, 2026 at 4:39 PM

Compact

Geopolitical Intervention: Donald Trump has characterized the British plan to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius as a strategic error, citing concerns over the security of the joint US-UK military base on Diego Garcia.
Territorial Dispute: Britain maintained control of the Chagos Archipelago after Mauritius gained independence in 1968, leading to a long-standing sovereignty claim supported by a non-binding 2019 International Court of Justice ruling.
Diplomatic Agreement: Prime Minister Keir Starmer has negotiated a settlement to transfer sovereignty to Mauritius while securing a long-term lease for the Diego Garcia military base at an annual cost of $137 million.
Post-War Decolonization: The historical transition of territories like Greenland and Mauritius was shaped by United Nations mandates for self-determination through independence, free association, or full incorporation into existing states.
Ideological Drivers: Contemporary efforts to relinquish overseas territories are frequently motivated by a sense of Western imperial guilt and a desire to rectify perceived historical injustices.
Population Displacement: The original Chagossian inhabitants were forcibly removed to facilitate the military base's construction, yet many now oppose Mauritian rule, preferring British jurisdiction or independent return.
Economic Dependence: Territories currently undergoing "decolonization" debates, such as Greenland, remain significantly reliant on financial support and administrative structures provided by their current governing nations.
Strategic Risks: Prioritizing moral posturing over national interest in territorial negotiations may undermine security domestic sovereignty and fail to address the actual preferences of the affected populations.

Donald Trump had a busy January. Just as he withdrew his threat to invade Greenland, he threw a spanner in the works of Keir Starmer’s plan to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Calling Starmer’s deal “an act of great stupidity” on Truth Social, the president inserted Washington into the debate over the future of the little archipelago, a British overseas territory home to an important US military base. But like the obsession with Greenland, what is driving the newfound concern is America’s intensifying geopolitical competition with China.

The Chagos negotiations began in November of 2022 just after the chaotic rise and fall of Liz Truss. When serving as foreign minister, Truss had been cornered by her Mauritian counterpart at the UN General Assembly, who initiated a discussion that Britain had until then wisely avoided. The Chagos Archipelago was a dependency—an administrative colonial designation—of Mauritius when that nation gained independence in 1968, but Britain made an agreement to retain the Chagos. The Mauritians have been claiming the territory on and off since 1982, when the Mauritian Militant Movement first came to power. In 2019, the International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion, ruled in Mauritius’s favor. Although the ruling was not legally binding, Starmer has now negotiated a deal to hand over the islands, and then lease the largest of them, Diego Garcia, home to an Anglo-American military base, for the hefty sum of $137 million a year.

Greenland and Mauritius took two different paths open to colonial possessions and their colonizers after the Second World War. The newly founded United Nations, driven by the stated anticolonialism shared by Washington and Moscow, resolved to put an end to European empires; the Europeans, exhausted by war, could hardly object. There were three available paths to self-determination: full independence, free association, or full incorporation. Under UN Secretary General Dag Hammerskjöld, the goal was two-fold: self-determination and development. Mauritius became fully independent from Britain, while Greenland was incorporated into the Kingdom of Denmark in 1953. Since then, Greenland has gradually gained more autonomy, and is now a self-governing territory.

The Cold War determined the fates of many former colonies. The Soviet Union and the United States, each uneasy about the prospect of Greenland falling into the other’s hands, supported continued Danish possession. For its part, Britain bought the Chagos Islands for the purposes of hosting the American military base in Diego Garcia. The Chagossians who had lived there for generations, most as workers on coconut oil plantations, were displaced to Mauritius; later, many moved to Britain, where most have settled in Crawley, in Sussex.

Alongside the formal processes that accompanied it, decolonization began to acquire a broader meaning, whereby a former colonial metropole, a curriculum, or even a countryside could be in need of “decolonization.” Decolonization, by this logic, became a continuous moral imperative, and its driving force is Western imperial guilt. It was also widely accepted that the official end of colonial rule had led not to true independence but to neo-colonialism. Waning European power had given way to increasing American influence. UN efforts towards global development were also sometimes treated as covertly imperialist, since they suggested there was something superior about Western capitalism and liberal democracy.

The new postcolonial logic made little distinction between the different processes and constitutional agreements that had bookended the imperial era, so it is unsurprising that many of these arrangements are being reconsidered. This was the background of Britain’s talks with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands as well as Denmark’s recent reckoning over Greenland. For instance, in 2025 the Danish prime minister issued an apology for a birth control campaign in which—as a part of Danish modernization efforts—the coil was widely encouraged as contraception in Greenland. Greenlandic women who had coils inserted without their knowledge or proper consultation were offered compensation.

But in the domain of geopolitics, decolonization is a more complicated proposition. Mauritius and the Chagos are entirely the product of colonization: Both were uninhabited when the French first settled in the eighteenth century. As one academic put it, Mauritius is “a flotsam left behind by the wreck of the colonial world.” Greenland is a Scandinavian welfare state on a block of ice which still has no roads connecting major towns. Greenlanders hope to develop more self-sufficiency through tourism and increased access to natural resources, but are for now reliant on Danish financial support for about half of national income.

It is worth noting that Mauritius is not challenging those parts of the 1968 agreement that were beneficial to the Mauritians, which included, among other things, mineral and fishing rights. The Mauritians and their supporters point to the displacement of the Chagossians by the British to bolster their claims, but this has been severely complicated by the fact that the Chagossians themselves oppose returning the islands to Mauritius.

In fact, in Greenland and the Chagos Islands, the “colonized” are on the side of their supposed colonizers. Within Britain, Chagossians are campaigning for their own return to the Chagos Islands, a prospect they consider less likely under Mauritian control. The Trump administration similarly tried to take up the plight of the Greenlanders, and the story about the coil campaign was picked up in the conservative New York Post. But when JD Vance visited Greenland last year, his flight was diverted to the American Pituffik space base at the news of protests, and a whopping 85 percent of Greenlanders oppose an American takeover, with a majority preferring continued Danish rule to that alternative. Applied postcolonial history seems to be little more than an exercise in selective counterfactuals.

In Britain, too, there is much confusion over the exact implications of former imperial wrongs. A report from the think tank Policy Exchange notes that parliamentarians consistently failed to understand that recognizing a “legal obligation” to cede the Chagos to Mauritius would make it impossible for Britain to “negotiate assurances about defense interests, the rights of Chagossians, and the environment.” A “legal obligation” had become just another form of moral posturing, rather than a binding imperative. The opposition, which also supported the deal, was no better than the Tory government. Jeremy Corbyn, when leader of the Labour party, seemed unable to understand that the Mauritian claim to the territory and the ability of the Chagossians to return to their homeland might be in conflict. Starmer’s deal—a negotiated settlement with no clear upsides for Britain, which involves handing territory and cash over to a foreign government—is the ultimate expression of British imperial self-flagellation.

“Imperial guilt is a shallow, self-sabotaging basis for geopolitical strategy.”

In his famous introduction to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that his countrymen ought to “have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment.” Well, Europeans do feel ashamed, but the consequences have proven far from revolutionary. Who are Greenland’s relevant colonizers—the Danes or the looming Americans? Who are the relevant former colonial subjects in the Chagos negotiations—the Mauritians or the Chagossians? Imperial guilt is a shallow, self-sabotaging basis for geopolitical strategy. It is time for European leaders to rediscover their own national self-interest.

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bogorad

2 days ago

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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Women Are More Likely Than Men to Endorse Political Violence // A new survey finding points to the dangers of digital outrage culture. by Colin Wright
Tuesday February 3^rd, 2026 at 1:18 PM

City-Journal text

Survey Basis: NCRI’s weighted 1,055-respondent study asked whether targeted murder of Trump or Mayor Mamdani could ever be justified on a seven-point scale.
Left-of-Center Findings: 67% of left-of-center participants expressed some justification for killing Trump, up 11 points from an earlier 2025 study.
Right-of-Center Findings: 54% of right-of-center respondents expressed some degree of justification for murdering Mamdani.
Generalized Tolerance: Justifications for killing Trump and Mamdani were strongly correlated, suggesting tolerance for political violence crosses partisan lines.
Gender Disparity: Women were roughly 21% more likely than men to justify Mamdani’s murder and nearly 15% more likely to justify Trump’s, even after controlling for age and other factors.
Punitive Femininity: The author labels the mindset driving this disparity “punitive femininity,” fueled by anger, moral certainty, and emotional manipulation rather than innate aggression.
Social Media Impact: Heavy social media use and a belief in America’s terminal decline are the strongest predictors of violence tolerance, as platforms reward outrage and moral absolutism that erode traditional norms.

When we talk about political violence, we almost always assume that its perpetrators are young men. That makes sense: men are statistically more likely to engage in physical aggression and get arrested for violent crimes at higher rates. At the same time, many are dealing with rising unemployment, declining educational achievement, and growing social disengagement. Given all that, researchers may reasonably assume that young men are driving greater tolerance for political violence.

New data complicate that assumption. A recent survey by the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers found that under certain conditions, women were more likely than men to express support for political violence. The findings were so counter to the prevailing narrative that they surprised even the researchers.

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It makes sense, though, when you start to recognize where these women’s impulses come from. The rise of what I call “punitive femininity” is downstream of the toxic political culture online, a culture that is transforming the sex long viewed as more restrained and less prone to violence.

To investigate toleration of political violence, NCRI use data from a survey of 1,055 respondents, weighted to be representative across sex, age, race/ethnicity, and education. The survey asked participants whether they saw any justification for the targeted murder of President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It recorded responses on a seven-point scale ranging from zero (“completely unjustified”) to six (“highly justified”).

Among left-of-center respondents, 67 percent expressed at least some justification for the murder of Trump, an 11-point increase over NCRI’s earlier 2025 study. Fifty-four percent of right-of-center respondents expressed some degree of justification for murdering Mamdani.

Strikingly, justification for killing Trump and justification for killing Mamdani were strongly correlated. This implies that support for political murder is not merely partisan but reflects a generalized tolerance for political violence.

The most unexpected result: women were significantly more likely than men to endorse such violence. Female respondents were approximately 21 percent more likely than males to express some justification for murdering Mamdani and nearly 15 percent more likely to justify murdering Trump.

Both differences were statistically significant. These effects persisted even after controlling for age and other variables.

This disparity isn’t obviously the result of biological sex differences or even political polarization. Rather, it reflects the rise of a distinct and disturbing mindset.

The strongest predictors of tolerance for violence in NCRI’s data were heavy social media use and a sense that America is in a state of terminal decline. The supporters of violence in the survey aren’t traditional extremists. Rather, they seem motivated by the despair, nihilism, and moral confusion online.

For whatever reason, women seem uniquely at risk for infection by this mindset. Over the past decade, women—especially younger women—have become more politically and affectively polarized in their political judgments. Political disagreement is increasingly treated as a serious moral offense rather than a simple difference of opinion. When you see the world that way, punishing someone for holding different views becomes a moral good.

I think of this mindset as “punitive femininity.” By punitive femininity, I do not mean to invoke notions of hostility, cruelty, or aggression in the conventional sense. I mean the transformation of moral concern into a license to act punitively. Adoption of this attitude is fueled by a combination of raw anger, emotional manipulation, and an exaggerated sense of moral certainty.

Social media plays a central role in this transformation. Modern platforms reward outrage, absolutism, and performative aggression. They flatten moral complexity, elevating and even glorifying condemnation.

This lens helps make sense of some of the strangest corners of the internet. Consider the online reaction to Luigi Mangione. After his arrest for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, some treated Mangione not as a killer, but as a celebrity. They even explicitly sexualized him, describing him as attractive, charismatic, and even romantic.

When violence is paired with attraction, it stops being judged on moral terms. Instead of asking whether an action is wrong, people start asking whether it feels meaningful, expressive, or somehow justified.

Women aren’t uniquely prone to this dynamic. But they do disproportionately occupy and get their news from the digital spaces where this kind of aestheticization spreads fastest.

Historically, women have played a stabilizing role in moral and civic life. Across cultures, they score higher on measures of empathy, care, and harm avoidance.

When women become less likely to demonstrate these virtues, it doesn’t mean they’ve suddenly transformed. It means the moral climate itself has deteriorated. Social media is breaking down basic norms of restraint, and that breakdown is showing up in groups once closely associated with moral caution and care.

If we care about social stability and the well-being of the next generation, we need to change course. We must stop rewarding moral outrage—especially when it means support for violence.

Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist and fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images

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bogorad

2 days ago

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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Trump’s Fed Pick Could Be Just What the Central Bank Needs // If he acts in harmony with his past statements, Kevin Warsh could restore the Fed’s integrity and independence. by Allison Schrager
Tuesday February 3^rd, 2026 at 1:18 PM

City-Journal text

Warsh’s profile: Former Fed governor with political connections, not a monetary policy scholar, now favored by Trump to replace Jerome Powell.
Powell’s nomination rationale: Chosen in 2017 for his market experience and communication skills after a streak of Ph.D. economists chaired the Fed.
Policy shift critique: Powell’s 2019 framework review elevated employment goals, which the author links to inflation running hot despite unemployment concerns.
QE expansion concerns: Powell’s doubling of the balance sheet during the pandemic is blamed for distorting the housing market and leaving the Fed with a bloated balance sheet.
QE’s consequences: Enlarged balance sheet invites political pressure, more interference, and expectations that the Fed will buy long-term Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities.
Warsh’s stance: His opposition to QE, potential lower reserve rates, and consistent hawkish tone could restore Fed independence and shield it from future interventions.

I first became aware of Kevin Warsh, President Trump’s nominee to succeed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, in 2006, when I was in graduate school and he was nominated to the Fed Board of Governors. Just 35, with a respectable (if unremarkable) career in finance but extremely well-connected politically, he raised more than a few skeptical eyebrows that he could survive the grueling Senate confirmation process (even Nobel laureates aren’t a lock). But 20 years later, Warsh may be just what the Fed needs to restore integrity to the institution.

In some ways, Warsh is an obvious pick: he looks the part, was a former Fed governor, and is close to the Trump administration. Yet he’s also a surprising choice: he is not a great scholar of monetary policy, did nothing notable in his finance career, and has a long history of taking more hawkish stances on monetary policy than Donald Trump.

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True, Powell was not a scholar of monetary policy, either—but he is a lawyer. In nominating him in 2017, the first Trump administration’s thinking was that, after three consecutive economics Ph.D.’s, the next Fed chair should be someone steeped in markets, with strong communication and political skills, backstopped by board members with strong academic training.

Powell wound up making several major errors, though keeping interest rates too high for too long was not one of them. Some of his missteps—letting the Fed wade into climate change and racial-justice issues, for example—made it more vulnerable to political attacks. His big policy errors include shifting the central bank’s focus to weight employment more than inflation during the 2019 framework review. This contributed to letting inflation get out of control, and it remains high today.

Though unemployment is a serious problem, putting greater emphasis on the issue was never wise. Monetary policy’s impact on unemployment is still not well understood, and some unemployment is caused by supply conditions, over which the Fed has less control. A greater focus on unemployment also makes the institution more subject to political capture, because favored groups can be singled out to justify loose monetary policy. Warsh’s history suggests that he would be more concerned with reducing inflation. Some central banks target only inflation.

Powell’s other significant error was expanding the Quantitative Easing (QE) program by more than doubling the Fed’s balance sheet during the pandemic—a decision that continues to distort the housing market. Today, the balance sheet is still large relative to earlier rounds of QE. Warsh probably would have made a different choice.

Warsh was serving on the Fed Board when QE began in November 2008, as well as during the change to the ample, or even abundant, reserve system during the financial crisis. At the time, interest rates stood at zero, and the Fed was looking to support the economy, so it paid interest on the money that banks kept parked at the Fed and bought long-dated treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, hoping to boost demand. These actions did change the scope of monetary policy: the Fed’s balance sheet is now much larger. But they also created many problems in exchange for few benefits, since we lack strong, consistent evidence that QE ever did, in fact, boost economic demand.

QE imposes many costs. One heavy one is that central banks face more outside interference, which undermines independence. That the Fed buys things other than short-term debt means that it will come under greater pressure to buy long-dated treasuries to reduce debt-service costs, and to buy more mortgage-backed securities to bring mortgage rates down.

The balance sheet’s sheer size also makes it a target. The Cares Act directed the Fed to extend credit to middle-market firms. The FDIC borrowed from the Fed, rather than the Treasury (which is bound by the debt limit) to bail out bank deposit holders.

Warsh’s desire to phase out QE, or even potentially pay a lower rate on reserves, could enhance financial stability and insulate the Fed from more political attacks.

More recently, Warsh sided with President Trump on cutting rates. This position seems at odds with what he has argued for on the board and as a fellow at the Hoover Institution. But if, as chair, Warsh acts in harmony with his statements over the last 15 years, he could be the one to restore more independence to the Fed and protect it from future interference.

Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

Photo by Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images

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bogorad

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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Long-Running AI Agents Are Here - WSJ Thursday February 5th, 2026 at 2:19 PM

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Tuesday February 3^rd, 2026 at 1:18 PM