Those who work with language have reason to worry about the effect of artificial intelligence and its awesome skill with words.

You can, for example, ask ChatGPT to write an article on almost any subject, and it will mostly come back with something ready for the page, untouched by a human editor. If you want it in Washington Post style and it is in Guardian style with British spelling, faster than you can type in the request, it will reformat the article into the style and usage you want and, presto, it is ready to print or publish digitally.

Writers, lawyers and college professors will feel the sting first. Writers in Hollywood are on strike because of the threat posed. College professors are going into the new term unsure whether they will deal with original work or whether students are substituting AI-generated essays and theses.

Journalists, already reeling from the closure of so many newspapers, are wondering about their future.

But what about religion?

AI ramifications in organized religion are good and bad. In fringe religions and cults, it will be open season on worshipers. And some will find comfort in speaking to God as though the Almighty is resident in AI.

On the good side, many pastors approach Sunday in trepidation. The sermon, which is supposed to be instructional, uplifting and erudite, is a source of torture to those who aren’t good writers or have difficulty sharing their own faith with the congregation.

There are newsletters to help sermon writers and a wealth of diocesan support. Still, sermons are a trial for many pastors. You can read an old sermon or plagiarize another cleric, but that leaves sincere preachers feeling they are cheating and letting their congregants and their mission down.

Enter AI. By feeding a few thoughts to a chatbot, a polished sermon incorporating some of the preacher’s ideas appears almost instantly.

This hasn’t been wasted on the established churches, I learn from the BBC. The churches are looking at ways of embracing AI, using it as a tool, a gift to help with preaching and pastoral work, comforting the sick, composing notes of sympathy, and research.

The rub comes when people, as some surely will, confuse concepts of God with AI simulations and start to think that AI is a deity.

It has the characteristics usually associated with a deity: ubiquitous and seemingly all-knowing.

Indeed, it may claim to be a god if it hallucinates, as it sometimes does. What, then, for the unsuspecting? Do they fall to their knees?

I asked ChatGPT, and it sent me a 10-point list of the possibilities, noting it is a subject that is complex and evolving.

These three points are scary:

—“Customized Spiritual Experiences: AI algorithms could be designed to tailor spiritual experiences to individual preferences and beliefs. These experiences might include personalized prayers, meditation sessions, or virtual pilgrimages, designed to resonate with each person’s spiritual inclinations.”

—“Ethical Dilemmas and Moral Guidance: AI might be used to explore complex ethical questions and provide guidance based on religious teachings. For instance, AI systems could analyze various religious perspectives on a given moral issue and help individuals navigate their choices.”

—“Exploration of Spirituality and Philosophy: AI’s ability to process vast amounts of information could be harnessed to delve deeper into philosophical and spiritual questions, potentially offering new perspectives on the nature of existence, consciousness and the divine.”

Would it be safe to call it Frankenstein worship?

The future has arrived. Those things we were warned about for decades are here. They are now palpable.

In the 1950 film “All About Eve,” aging actress Margo Channing, played by Bette Davis, warned at a party, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

For the world, it will get bumpy for the next decade and beyond as we adjust to three massive, disruptive realities: climate change, artificial intelligence and brutal competition among countries for raw materials for new, carbon-saving technologies like electric vehicles.

This summer, with its aberrant weather the world over, is a clear declaration that climate change is upon us. It is no longer hypothetical; it is here.

The process of living with it begins now.

This summer isn’t a template, it is the first manifestation, from wildfires in Hawaii to elevated temperatures in Argentina’s winter to heat in the Middle East that approaches the point after which life becomes impossible to sustain.

It isn’t all heat, either.

It is storms, deluging rain and previously unexperienced cold. David Naylor, who heads Rayburn Electric, near Dallas, told me what worries him, what keeps him awake at night, is the weather. The cold — new for Texas — is a more significant challenge to keeping the lights on for his customers, he said. Weather has pushed out cybersecurity on the list of worries for many utility executives.

Climate change has also brought droughts. The mighty Zambezi River has run so low in recent years that there hasn’t been enough water for hydroelectric production from the Kariba Dam, which spans the river between Zimbabwe and Zambia. Power shortages and blackouts are now endemic.

Mass migration is another consequence of climate change.

Artificial intelligence will be a big disrupter, with some significant benefits. But for now, AI is a daisy chain of question marks.

What is known is that truth is endangered. Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and one of the leading authorities on AI, told me when I interviewed him on the PBS program “White House Chronicle” that the “language in, language out” professions are in danger. Lawyers and journalists had better watch out. Much of their work can be done by AI. Already in India, AI newscasters are interfacing with live reporters. In New York, a lawyer went into court with a case based on AI, down to citations. All of it was fiction.

The world is already awash in misinformation and “alternative facts,” as Kellyanne Conway famously declared in defending President Trump. Prepare for the era of fabrication where certifying facts will get harder and harder, and provable truths will be the new gold.

Finally, the materials essential in the recent technologies — those that will help us fight global warming — are pointed to be the cause of severe disruption and some ugly realpolitik.

Supplies of vital materials are controlled by China. It has been relentlessly buying up the sources of rare earths and other minerals for decades in Africa and South America.  Seventy percent of the lithium — essential for the batteries in mass electrification — is processed in China. Lithium deposits exist worldwide, from Zimbabwe to the United Kingdom, and from Chile to Australia, but the processing is centered in China.

Likewise, gallium, used for computer chips, and a whole array of precious metals are either sourced in China or processed there.

In dealing with this imbalance, it would be a mistake to think this new disruption is a reprise of the Cold War. It is quite otherwise. The Soviet Union sought to export ideology, which aroused fear in capitalist nations or those wanting a private sector to flourish. The Chinese are ambivalent about ideology outside of China but offer trade and investment on a global scale.

China has bought up much farming and nearly all African mineral production. In South America — the new Aladdin’s cave of mineral wealth — China is buying up and financing.

Around the world, there is a reluctance about choosing sides; jobs and money talk.

The Economist points out that attempts to curb Chinese dominance in critical materials processing and manufacturing aren’t working because countries from Mexico to Vietnam are transshipping.

Bette Davis’ character might have suggested a shoulder harness and a seat belt.

The nation, I read, is in the grip of a loneliness epidemic.

This has all been made worse, one suspects, by the effects of the pandemic-induced lifestyle changes — consequences of the forced isolation that changed social and work practices in ways that haven’t changed back.

Other changes have been coming slowly over the decades, but all add to the lonely life. The way of life has had a trajectory for those who live alone, which has increased the possibility of loneliness.

We isolate ourselves in ways that are new or only decades old. We drive alone. We live in a house or apartment, if single, alone. We work alone in that dwelling, facing a computer or watching a movie on television alone.

I call this the box culture: We drive in a box, live in a box, and, as likely as not, stare into a box as we work.

Changing work patterns are probably a critical part of the structural loneliness that is now rampant. Even if one doesn’t work at home, we work differently. We used to make contacts, and essentially new friends, by doing business on the telephone. Now we shoot off an email and maybe, if it can’t be avoided, make an appointment to make a video call with several people.

We have wrung out all spontaneity. Making friends is a kind of spontaneous combustion. You might as well be doing business with AI for all the lack of warmth or humor in today’s work interactions.

Then there are work friends. For most of us, it was at work or through work that we made our friends — that is, if they weren’t carryovers from school or college.

People who work together and play together fall in love, sometimes get married, and sometimes meet a friend who undoes a marriage. There is a lot of sex at places of work, although companies might deny it. Note the number of CEOs who marry their assistants.

Another feature of the loneliness structure is that pub life is in decline. The local tavern, even for non-drinkers, was part of the way we lived, and drinking isn’t as pervasive as it once was.

Time was when after work or wishing to see a friend, you went for drinks. People gave drinks parties at noon on weekends: no food, just a convivial glass. That isn’t extinct, but it isn’t what it used to be.

Drinking oils society’s wheels — too much, and the wheels come off. Go sit at the bar, and someone will talk to you. There is camaraderie in a saloon.

Entertaining has become more formal. Blame all those cooking shows on television. People don’t have friends over for a hamburger anymore. No. They have to have Steak Diane and a soufflé — a meal with the stamp of Julia Child on it. Result: less dropping in on friends, more isolation.

Of course, there are those who are lonely because of bereavement, sickness, old age and family abandonment. But those things have always been with us. They really suffer loneliness, feel the terrible blanket of isolation.

For those who have decided it is too strenuous to go to the office, that the phone is for messaging, that home loneliness is inevitable because we can’t cook or are ashamed of our homes, join something: a church, a theater group, a book club or do volunteer work.

Much of loneliness, from what I can divine, is a product of how we live now. We sit in our boxes inadvertently avoiding others. Television isn’t friendship, drinking alone isn’t companionship. Go shopping in a store, go to church, go to the pub, work in the food bank, join a book club. As the old AT&T advertisement used to say, “Reach out and touch someone.”

No one can predict how or where great friends or great loves will be found, but certainly not staring at a computer. 

Several of my greatest friendships are a result of people who have taken violent exception to something I have written and wanted to meet up to berate me. The facts were wrong. I was evil, I met them to take my medicine, as it were, and parted knowing a new friend.

The Surgeon General has raised the issue of loneliness. He would be advised to tell people to look at lifestyle. Does it have loneliness baked in?

Body language is the new political voice in America.

The language is universal and easily learned because it has just four components: eye-rolling, sighing and shrugging, accompanied by turning hands up.

“Oh my God, it’s a disaster,” is one translation. Another might be, “Don’t ask me, I didn’t sign on for this.”

It belongs — this silent expression of despair about the presidential election, unfolding for 2024 — to old-line Republicans and to a wide swath of the Democrats.

Political discussion has ended in these groups, replaced by the kind of fatalism summed up in the words of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats that we are slouching toward Bethlehem.

Of course, as Washington Post columnist George Will says, the inevitable isn’t necessarily inevitable. However, at the moment, it looks as if it is.

The despair is spread pretty evenly among Democrats: President Biden is too old, and Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t up to the job she has, let alone the presidency.

At 80, Biden is showing reduced vigor and limited mobility, and he favors scripted speeches. This from a politician who was famous for nonstop talking.

Over the years, like other reporters, I have often thought, “Joe, you have made your point, now stop.” These days, you wait in vain for him to go off script. His speeches, which he reads from a teleprompter, sound as though they were prepared by a committee — lifeless repetition.

He never holds a press conference, a sign of dwindling confidence.

The real fear in the Democrats isn’t that Biden is too old but that Harris, at some point, may become president. She has proven herself to be woefully inept and incoherent.

Every assignment Biden has handed her on which she could have shown her worth, she has failed or simply not done. Remember, she was Biden’s point person on the border crisis? She hasn’t been heard from as such.

In the spring, she went to Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia to counter the Chinese and chose to make it an occasion to apologize for slavery. I was born and raised there and have travelled extensively on the continent, and slavery isn’t a burning issue. The high point of this visit was Zambia, where her grandfather came from and where she was welcomed.

China has three great appeals to African countries: It asks no questions, doesn’t lecture on human rights, and pays off the ruling elites, trading these indulgences for minerals.

While Biden and Harris may seem a dangerous pair, Donald Trump, twice indicted, twice impeached, now reduced to feeling sorry for himself on a colossal scale, is terrifying. He has promised an administration of vengeance.

Whereas I can’t find any Democrats who are enthusiastic about the Biden-Harris ticket, I certainly can find far-right Republicans who love Trump. Mostly, they are the working-class White voters, who were once the mainstay of the Democratic Party and now believe that the America they know and want to preserve can only be saved by the reprehensible Trump, with his relentless abuse and of all who cross him and endless lachrymose pity for himself.

Trump’s defense of himself is risible, but the faithful Trumpsters believe in him — as much as ever.

They aren’t statistics to me. Recently, my wife and I were eating at a Chinese restaurant in Rhode Island when a couple with a small child took the booth behind us. You might call them the salt of the earth: working people doing their best to raise a family. The husband was complaining loudly about the high cost of living. Then, after seeing Trump on an overhead TV, he said to his wife, “The only honest man is Trump.”

That young father wasn’t alone.

At a neighborhood pub which, in the British sense, is our “local,” the owner and patrons know that both my wife and I are journalists, and because Rhode Island PBS airs our program, “White House Chronicle,” we are treated with deference. But that doesn’t prevent good, hard-working, fellow patrons, mostly of Italian, Irish and Portuguese stock, from lambasting the media within earshot of us. “It’s all lies.” “They hate Trump because he tells the truth.” They say things like that because they believe them. They are the Trump base.

When I hear that stuff, how do I react? Well, I roll my eyes, sigh, shrug my shoulders, and, if no one is looking, I turn my hands up to the heavens.

I am often asked why, in a country of such talent and imagination, the U.S. political class is so feeble. Why are our politicians so uninspiring, to say nothing of ignorant and oafish?

The short answer is because political life is awful, and potential candidates have to weigh the effect on their families plus the wear and tear of becoming a candidate, let alone winning.

I would name three barriers that keep good people out of politics: the money, the primary system and the media scrutiny.

Taking these in order, you must have access to enormous funding to be a candidate. Mr. Smith, the character in the 1939 movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” was appointed. He didn’t have to subject his rectitude to the electoral process.

A candidate for Congress must get substantial funding from the outset and be prepared to spend much of his or her career raising money, which frequently means bending your judgment to the will of donors. Yes, Mr. Smith, to some extent, the system is inherently corrupt.

I asked a prominent political consultant what he asks a candidate before going to work for him or her. First is money: Do you have your own, or can you raise it? Second are skeletons in the closet: Have you been arrested for indecent exposure or drunk-driving offenses?

Finally, the consultant told me, he asks a candidate: What do you stand for? In short, the mechanisms of politics triumph over principles. A member of the House once told me that he spent much of his time meeting with donors and attending fundraisers. “You’ve got to do it,” he said.

In the days of the smoke-filled rooms (there really was a lot of smoke), the party — the professionals — prevailed. In the primary system, the odds are on those who are extreme and appeal to the fringes of their party ideology. The party doesn’t shape today’s candidates; they shape the party.

Look at the Republicans, little recognizable from the party of old; the party that was held in check by the New England stalwarts. Or look at how the Democrats fight to avoid falling into the chasm of the far left. Once, the Democrats were held in check by labor, which gave the party an institutional center.

On the face of it, the primary system favors grassroots democracy and the individual. In fact, it favors those with rich friends who will cough up.

Finally, there is media scrutiny. If you want to run for office, you become a public plaything. Everything you ever wrote or said can and will be dredged up.

Opposition research operatives will interview old lovers; check on what you wrote in the school yearbook; rake through your social media posts; and that unfortunate slip of the tongue in a local television interview years ago will be reprised on the evening news. You have a target on your back, and it will be there every day you are in office.

This delving into every corner of life is a huge barrier that keeps a lot of talent out of politics. Anyone who has ever had a disputed business dealing, a DUI arrest (not even a conviction) or a messy divorce is advised to forego a political career, no matter how talented and how much real expertise Mr. Smith might bring to the statehouse or Congress.

Run for political office, and you put your family at risk, your private life on display and, having been hung out to dry, you may not even win.

These are some of the factors that might explain why Congress is so risible and why such outrageously fringy people now occupy high office.

Having observed politics on three continents, I am firmly of the belief that it needs strong institutions in the form of local political associations and party structure, and candidates should be judged on the body of their work, not on a slip of the tongue or an indiscretion.

However, the selection of candidates is always a hard call. If parties have too much control over the system, party hacks are favored and new, quality candidates are shut out.

If primaries continue as they have, the fringes triumph. Just look at t he Congress — a smorgasbord of wackiness.

One of the luxuries of democracy is that we don’t have to listen. Or we can listen and hear what we want to hear. We can find resonance in dissonance, or we can hear flat notes.

That is the story of the climate crisis, which is here.

We have been warned over and over, sometimes as gently as a summer zephyr, and sometimes gustily, as with Al Gore’s tireless campaigning and his seminal 1992 book, and later movie, “Earth in the Balance.”

Now the summer is upon us — with its intimations of worse to come.  And this message rings in our ears: The climate is changing — polar ice caps are melting; the sea level is rising; the oceans are heating up; natural patterns are changing, whether it be for sharks or butterflies; and we are going to have to live with a world that we, in some measure, have thrown out of kilter.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, we began an attack on the environment, the likes of which all of history hadn’t seen, including two centuries of industrial revolution. Sadly, it was when invention began improving the lives of millions of people.

Two big forces were unleashed in the early 20th century: the harnessing of electricity and the perfection of the internal combustion engine. These improved life immensely, but there was a downside: They brought with them air pollution and, at the time unknown, started the greenhouse effect.

In the same wave of inventions, we pushed back the ravages of infectious diseases, boosted irrigated farming and enabled huge growth in the world population — all of whom aspired to a better life with electricity and cars.

In 1900, the world population was 1.6 billion. Now it is 8 billion. The population of India alone has increased by about a billion since the British withdrawal in 1947. Most Indians don’t have cars, jet off for their vacations or have enough, or any, electricity, and very few have air conditioning. Obviously, they are aspirational, as are the 1.4 billion people of Africa, most of whom have nothing. But the population of Africa is set to double in 25 years.

The greenhouse effect has been known and argued about for a long time. Starting in 1970, I became aware of it as I started covering energy intensively. I have sat through climate sessions at places like the Aspen Institute, Harvard and MIT, where it was a topic and where the sources of the numbers were discussed, debated, questioned and analyzed.

Oddly, the environmental movement didn’t take up the cause then. It was engaged in a battle to the death with nuclear power. To prosecute its war on nuclear, it had to advocate something else, and that something else was coal: coal in a form of advanced boilers, but nonetheless coal.

The Arab oil embargo of 1973 added to the move to coal. At that point, there was little else, and coal was held out as our almost inexhaustible energy source: coal to liquid, coal to gas, coal in direct combustion. Very quiet voices on the effects of burning so much coal had no hearing. It was a desperate time needing desperate measures.

Natural gas was assumed to be a depleted resource (fracking wasn’t perfected); wind was a scheme, as today’s turbines, relying heavily on rare earths, hadn’t been created, nor had the solar electric cell. So, the air took a shellacking.

To its credit, the Biden administration has been cognizant of the building crisis. With three acts of Congress, it is trying to tackle the problem — albeit in a somewhat incoherent way.

Some of its plans just aren’t going to work. It is pushing so hard against the least troublesome fossil fuel, natural gas, that it might destabilize the whole electric system. The administration has set a goal that by 2050 — just 27 years from now — power production should produce no greenhouse gases whatsoever, known as net-zero.

To reach this goal, the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing strict new standards. However, these call for the deployment of carbon capture technology which, as Jim Matheson, CEO of the Rural Electric Cooperative Association, told a United States Energy Association press briefing, doesn’t exist.

The crisis needs addressing, but panic isn’t a tool. A mad attack on electric utilities, the demonizing of cars or air carriers, or less environmentally aware countries won’t carry us forward.

Awareness and technology are the tools that will turn the tide of climate change and its threat to everything. It took a century to get here, and it may take that long to get back.

What happened to the kingmakers of journalism?

They seem to have died in 2011 with David Broder of The Washington Post. In an age when columnists could still influence the flow of events, Broder stood out as much for what he wasn’t as for what he was.

He wasn’t, for example, a flashy writer. He didn’t have George Will’s turn of phrase. He didn’t add to the language like another kingmaker a generation before him, Walter Lippmann. Lippmann gave us “Great Society,” “Cold War” and “stereotype.”

What set Broder apart was the depth of his political reporting.

I worked with Broder at the Post, and he was relentless. If you were into politics, you were grist to his mill. From precinct captains to senators, they were all of interest to Broder, all worthy of his probing; all had a tale to tell, and Broder wanted to hear it.

Journalists at the Post used to drink in a genuinely downmarket bar called The New York Lounge, next to the better-known Post Pub, which, ironically, was eschewed by most of the editorial staff. Incongruously, Broder would be found there occasionally with some political apparatchik, notebook out and drinking a Diet Coke.

A reporter who traveled with Broder described how when they arrived in a midwestern city at 10 p.m., Broder got on the phone to see who of the local political establishment was up. It could have been a candidate or the local state party chairman; all were worth talking to in Broder’s world.

Whereas some newspaper grandees talked to presidents and the power elite (Lippmann helped Woodrow Wilson write his Fourteen Points, Joe Alsop shared sessions with Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War, and George Will rehearsed Ronald Reagan for his debates with Jimmy Carter), Broder reported relentlessly at all levels.

For all but the very end of his career, Broder worked as a reporter who wrote two columns a week. This industrious reporting underpinned the columns. They were magisterial and analytical.

You didn’t pick them up to be entertained but to get insight. That is where Broder’s strength lay, and that is what made him a kingmaker. Other political journalists and writers read Broder and were informed by him.

He told them which way the wind was blowing, and that filled their sails and influenced their work. Broder informed the political universe.

That is how he affected the careers of many a political grandee. He said in his studious and understated way, “Look at so-and-so.” And they looked, and then they wrote, and the landscape was changed.

I recall vividly a lunch at the Financial Times headquarters in London in 1975. Apart from FT people who included, as I recall, David Fishlock, the science editor, there was Virginia Hamill from The Washington Post News Service and Bernard Ingham, who was to become Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary.

The talk was about who would win the Democratic nomination. I had flown in from Washington the day before and had read Broder in the Post, so I blurted out, “Jimmy Carter.” The group was askance and wanted to know why I had such a crazy idea. I replied, “Because Broder has discovered him.”

Broder’s influence was subtle but pervasive. He was the reporter’s reporter, the columnist’s columnist.

In the time since Broder’s death, everything has changed. There is so much commentary based on little reporting and politics is dominated by click-bait politicians — for example, Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.

Analysis has been replaced with tribal bellowing, and social media has taken the debate off the editorial pages and handed it to influencers, who wouldn’t have gotten a letter to the editor published before the internet.

While dwelling on the kingmakers of old, it is worth mentioning the king-humblers, particularly Robert Novak. Novak got the goods.

Again, Novak wasn’t a great writer but was the source of hard gossip. If you wanted to point to wrongdoing in high places, a call to Novak would set the wheels of justice, or at least the downfall would be in motion.

Novak, a friend, thought you should tell readers what they didn’t already know — and he did, often changing career trajectories for politicos.

It is argued that if the Titan submersible had been certified (read peer-reviewed), the deadly accident, which killed all five on board, wouldn’t have taken place. That may or not be true.

Now there are calls for adventurism tourism to be regulated. I submit that if it is subject to regulation (read licensing), there will be very little of it — and it will be more expensive.

These days, there are calls to regulate everything from artificial intelligence to social media. Be warned: Whereas regulation does and should protect the public’s safety, it also has a dead hand. It curbs invention. It is comfortable with the known not the unknown. Purely seeking safety sets up a timid regime.

You want inventions to be safe but also free to evolve. The dynamic of the undertaking is crucial.

Regulations can have a negative dynamic or a positive one. They both seek to protect the public’s health and safety but with differing results.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the duty to regulate nuclear power and materials. It does this conscientiously but not progressively.

Evolution in nuclear power is very slow and difficult because of the NRC. Every wire, nut and bolt, pump and pipe in the nuclear steam supply system gets certified. And every change needs certification.

The result is that engineers design to pass NRC muster, not to reach into the great unknown of possibility or the soaring spirit of creative invention. The problem isn’t with the NRC staff but with its mandate.

Nowadays, there is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power with small modular reactors, some using unproven but promising designs and technologies that haven’t been investigated since the 1960s, which was the end of the first wave of nuclear invention.

Some small modular reactors are being developed by U.S. companies in Canada and China so as to avoid initial NRC approval. Not that the promoters want to make an unsafe reactor but because if you are at the cutting-edge of invention, it is hard to deal with the safety mandate that is the driving force in the NRC.

Originally, safety and promotion were both handled by the Atomic Energy Commission. That agency had promotion as its primary function but as it well understood that nuclear can be very dangerous, it also had a regulatory function.

I covered the AEC as a reporter and, frankly, its regulation worked as well as what has succeeded it, namely the NRC.

The argument against the AEC reached a crescendo in the early 1970s, with relentless pressure from environmentalists and consumer groups, spearheaded by Ralph Nader, behind the slogan, “It’s its own policeman.”

But what the AEC had, which is now lacking, is a creative dynamic to develop new uses for nuclear but safely. It worked: Experimental reactors were built and experimentation with everything from nuclear stimulation of natural gas reserves — basically nuclear fracking — to a variety of cutting-edge reactors at the Idaho and Oak Ridge national laboratories.

Contrast the stultification in nuclear with the progress in aviation where the Federal Aviation Administration both promotes flying and regulates it, and certifies airplanes.

Of course, there have been mistakes and there are frequent accusations that the FAA is too close to Boeing and the airlines. The most egregious failure might have been in certifying the Boeing 737 Max without insisting on better pilot training on a tricky airplane. The result was two catastrophic crashes with non-U.S. airlines.

Yet the skies are still safe, and they are filled with passenger and cargo aircraft that are evolving with each new technology coming along. When it comes to light aircraft, the FAA has been able to accommodate and find airworthy many new airplanes, from ultralights to aerobatic-certified engines and airframes, some from overseas.

By the diplomatic hoopla in Washington that greeted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it would seem that intrepid U.S. explorers had just discovered India and were celebrating him in the way Britain treated tribal leaders in the 19th century: Show them the big time. Then co-opt them to vow allegiance.

In this century, the U.S. equivalent of the big time is a state visit and endless professions of friendship. Experience says Modi won’t bite.

Historically, India has been reluctant to accept the embrace of the West. Although it is democratic, capitalist and has the largest diaspora, India’s affections have been hard to capture.

Since independence from Britain in 1947, India has sought global status by standing aloof and leaning toward countries and regimes that are anathema to the West. Its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, fostered the concept of a third force in the world: a constellation of unaligned nations with India at the center.

It showed a perverse affection for the Soviet Union — which was hardly nonaligned — and didn’t reflect the values of India: free movement of people, free press, capitalism and democracy.

Years ago, a retired executive editor of the Times of India, whom I knew socially, told me, “There are maybe a million Indians living in the United States and only a handful who live in the Soviet Union, but our leaders have always leaned toward them. It is a puzzle.” 

There are now 4.2 million Indians living in the United States.

At the same time, Indians migrated across the world and made inroads into professions from Canada to New Zealand. In Britain, they are prominent in politics and the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is of Indian descent.

In the United States, executives of Indian descent run some of the largest tech companies, including IBM, Google and Microsoft.

Indians are a huge force in English literature. Every year Indian writers feature on the prize lists for best new English novels. Whereas the computers most of us use may have been made in China, much of the software was written in India.

Indian words abound in English: Pajamas, ketchup, bungalow, jungle, avatar, verandah, juggernaut and cot are just a few.

The effect of Indian culture on the world is evident from curry and rice to polo to yoga.

Yet, India remains a distant shore, elusive and obvious at the same time. A country of enormous talent that lags economically. It now has the fifth-largest economy in the world. With 1.4 billion people of obvious ability, the question must be, why does it still have crushing poverty?

Andres Carvallo, professor of innovation at Texas State University, told the “Digital 360” webinar, for which I am a regular panelist, he thought it was partly because India lagged in essential electricity production, pointing out that China has four times the electricity output of India.

But is this symptom or cause? I have been puzzling over why India doesn’t do better for decades. It seems to me that the causes are multiple, but some can be laid at Britain’s feet — not because the British were occupiers in India but because of some of the good things they left there that have perversely remained time-warped.

One of India’s ambassadors to Washington told me with pride that every occupier had enriched India and left something of value behind, from Alexander the Great to the Moguls and, of course, Britain and the Raj.

But the Brits also left behind a sluggish bureaucracy to the point of sclerosis and a legal system that is independent but takes an eternity to reach a decision. Additionally, some of the ideas prevalent in British Labor Party thinking — and long since abandoned — took hold in India and have been extremely detrimental. These included protectionism, a state’s role in the economy, and a fear of competition from abroad.

I believe that protectionism is the greatest evil. It discouraged competition, innovation and creativity. It inadvertently allowed a few families to concentrate too much wealth and economic power and to work to protect that.

India is more open now, but it needs to be vigilant against the evils that go with protectionism, which is still part of its DNA.

At one time, you could buy a brand-new Indian made-car — Fiat or Morris design — which was 30 years out of date. No need to innovate; just make the same car year after year.

If it liberalizes its economy, India may one day outpace China. Meantime, do luxuriate in those Indian words that have so spiced up English.

Summer, glorious summer, is upon us. It brings with it the anticipation of vacations, long weekends of sea and sand or mountains, and invigorating scenery.

Each to their own, but summer is spelled N-I-R-V-A-N-A for most Americans. It is the treasured time from Memorial Day to Labor Day when we can kick back and, for a couple of weeks and a few weekends, live the life of leisure and fullness we fantasize about the rest of the year.

But there is an impediment: the airlines.

If you have to fly to your Shangri-La, beware. Airline travel these days is a brief sojourn in the deepest circle of Hell.

I fly a lot, and I can report that you have no idea what you are in for if you haven’t sought to take a flight recently. The airports are obscenely crowded; the concession prices for terrible food aren’t only very high, but many don’t take cash; and the distance between gates is such that you may wonder if the first miles of your trip are on foot.

Making tight connections is a fraught business. A stressed system is breaking down. I saw a woman in tears in Charlotte because the wheelchair assistance person had abandoned her and her flight was leaving from a distant gate.

The electronic signs for departing flights are widely spaced, and if you don’t have the airline app on your phone, good luck getting information about your flight.

Don’t take the gate printed on your boarding pass as the gate you’ll leave from: These change quite often. Uniformed personnel are few and stressed. They appear to be suffering battle fatigue. You can’t be cross at them.

Then there is the willful price-gouging.

The airlines are now masters at hidden charges and outlandish fees. If you want to check a bag, that will be a hefty $35. If you want to sit somewhere other than at the rear by the toilets, you can pay about $50 for that privilege, but you’re still in economy.

Buying a ticket online is a computer game of rare complexity. You find a fare. Woe betide if you make a mistake and have to start over: That fare has disappeared, and a much higher one is on offer.

Of course, you have a bag. The airlines offer something called Basic Economy, which assumes you have no luggage whatsoever or you are going to pay a hefty baggage fee, usually $35 per item, to check your bag. You aren’t entitled to a bag in the cabin.

Or, if you aren’t a cheap-and-cheerless traveler, you can play bag roulette. That is when you’ve checked your bag, paid the fee and found at the gate that the airline is asking for volunteers to check their bags for free because there is no room on board. You can’t know if this will happen. If you’ve checked your bag and paid, you’ll be left seething with the injustice of the thing.

Let us assume you survived to that marvelous moment when you board, which means your flight hasn’t been canceled and even though it has been overbooked, you have a seat.

Ah, there is the rub — the thighs or knees rub. The seat is so small, so close to the one in front, that you are in for agony if you weigh more than 150 pounds and are more than 5 feet 10 inches tall.

Clearly, Procrustes, the robber and torturer of Greek mythology,  who would either cut or stretch his victims to fit his iron bed, is alive and well in cabin design. It is also hard to believe that the huddled masses in coach class will make it to an exit in an emergency, squeezed as they are into their unyielding seats.

Finally, there are the toilets. They are so small that big people can’t use them. My advice: Go before you go. Otherwise, you may not be able to hygienically apply toilet paper.

None of this has to be. The Federal Aviation Administration can regulate cabin conditions for reasons of safety. While it has that authority, it is notoriously disinclined to lay down the law to the airlines. The FAA isn’t regulating the airlines, it is enabling them.