An enormous swathe of the Gulf of Mexico, spanning an area the size of Italy, was put up for auction on Wednesday for oil and gas drilling, in the latest blow to Joe Biden’s increasingly frayed reputation on dealing with the climate crisis.

Ships and ports are ripe for operation without humans — but only if the maritime industry can work through the practical, legal and economic implications first.

>Today, in 2022, American men suffer Depression-era employment rates, even though they inhabit the wealthiest and most productive society ever known.

>After the pandemic, we have gone from men without work, to work without men,

this category of people that you’ve been studying, by which you mean that there are millions of open job positions after the pandemic, increasingly chasing fewer and fewer workers.

Who are these prime-age men who are just simply absent from working life, and what are they doing instead? What do their lives look like?

Nicholas Eberstadt:

>Well, it’s a trend that’s been underway for over half a century now. It began in the ’60s, and it had been underway for two generations when I wrote the first volume of “Men Without Work.”

>Now this second edition, six years later, we see that, unfortunately, the trend has only continued. We’ve got seven million prime-age men, 25 to 54 years old, who are out of the job market altogether, neither working nor looking for work.