Pessimism is rife, optimism naive. What's left?
Within every news story and talking point that floods our present awareness, the same question emerges over and over. We hear it in the World Bank's poverty estimates, in the increasingly frequent headlines of gun violence and terrorism in the US and Europe, in the press releases logging Google's latest achievements with artificial intelligence. It's a question so pervasive to our discourse, we barely register its existence. And yet it shapes the frame through which we interpret most of the information we consume daily.
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