Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks to the media about plans to repeal and replace Obamacare on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 27, 2017.

Senate Republicans have been forced into postponing major health care legislation in the United States Senate, and the backdrop is partly the difficult economics of health care: Costs for average Americans are high and rising, and the Senate legislation so far doesn’t appear to offer significant relief.

The challenge was highlighted on June 26, as the Congressional Budget Office came out with its score of the Better Care Reconciliation Act released by Senate Republicans. The CBO predicted that premiums would rise faster than under current law, through 2019, for people who aren’t insured through an employer or a government program.

And although the CBO’s nonpartisan scorekeepers forecast that premiums would then start coming in lower than under current law, they said the big reason for the drop would be the bill’s openness to less-generous health plans. So, it would be a cut in benefits more than in costs.

That’s tough news for a bill that was already under fire due to projections that its spending cuts would result in millions of people losing coverage. (The CBO report estimated that 22 million fewer Americans would have insurance as of 2026, largely due to cuts in Medicaid for the poor, disabled, and vulnerable.)

It helps explain why, as of June 27, Republicans in the Senate majority couldn’t muster the votes to even push their bill to the floor for debate, and have pushed the effort off until after the July 4 recess.

“Republicans have driven up a narrow, steep, hilly mountain road,” says Alan Sager, a professor of health law, policy, and management at Boston University. “It can be dangerous to back down. I think that's how they feel.”

Republicans are in a tricky spot. Moving forward with the bill as proposed could unsettle many working-class Republicans who might lose Medicaid or get less federal assistance for buying their own insurance.

Doing nothing isn’t an appealing option either, however. There’s the politics: Lawmakers would face criticism from their base if they fail to pass something that can be called an Obamacare repeal.

Beyond that, the nation’s health-policy challenges don’t go away. Health care in the US is the most expensive of more than a dozen high-income nations, a 2015 report found. Premiums and out-of-pocket expenses have been rising, and the state-based marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), are seeing fewer insurers offering plans – at least partly due to the uncertainty created by Republicans’ own promises to unravel what Democrats passed in 2010.

Double-digit increases in premiums

Enrollment in ACA exchanges has also been lower than expected, according to health policy analysts. Fewer healthy customers have signed up relative to the number of enrollees who incur medical expenses.

This is now happening on Republicans’ watch, with the GOP in control of the White House and Congress as of January.

“The debate over the Affordable Care Act ... casts uncertainty over the market,” Dan Mendelson, president of the health consulting firm Avalere, said in a report released June 19.

In eight states where insurers have already formalized their proposed rates for 2018, premiums are headed upward by an average of 18 percent next year, according to analysis by Avalere.

In Virginia, for example, proposed premiums for the second-lowest-cost “silver” plan under the ACA would rise to $568 per month for a 50-year-old male nonsmoker, up from $464 for 2017.

The 2018 rises will follow an average silver-plan jump of 25 percent nationwide in 2017, according to government data. Income-based subsidies have helped soften the increases for many consumers.

And some 41 percent of counties in the eight states featured in the Avalere report have only one insurer offering plans for shoppers in the ACA marketplace, up from 8 percent in 2016.

Although repealing the ACA has long been popular as a talking point with Republican voters, voters of both parties care about access to affordable health care. And opinions of Obamacare, while mixed, have been growing more positive in recent polls.

A mid-June nationwide poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found 51 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the ACA, versus 41 percent with unfavorable views. That’s a reversal from a year ago, when it was 42 percent with favorable views and 44 percent unfavorable.

Calls for bipartisan collaboration

According to the online news service Axios, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is telling his colleagues that they can’t simply stand back and watch the Obamacare exchanges dry up – and premiums soar further – amid political uncertainty. So it’s either pass their own bill or work with Democrats on legislation to shore up the marketplaces, compromise and all.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine is among the Republicans who resisted the Senate bill as rolled out by Senator McConnell.

“Senate bill doesn’t fix ACA problems for rural Maine. Our hospitals are already struggling. 1 in 5 Mainers are on Medicaid,” she said via Twitter on June 26. Senator Collins, among the Senate’s few moderate Republicans, also nodded to the possibility of bipartisan cooperation. “I want to work w/ my GOP & Dem colleagues to fix the flaws in ACA. CBO analysis shows Senate bill won’t do it,” she tweeted.

Professor Sager in Boston says some cross-aisle collaboration in Congress might help.

“We've gotten into a lot of partisan fights about health care,” he says. “Maybe it's a plague on both their houses,” he adds, pointing to a flawed track record for both big-government approaches and the notion of trying to abdicate a government role in overseeing the market for medical care.

“We should use government action and market forces as tools,” he says. “We shouldn’t become idolaters toward either one.”

The Supreme Court’s Monday ruling on President Trump’s proposed travel ban was certainly important on substance.

Via a nine-to-zero vote, high court justices allowed Mr. Trump to prohibit entry into the US of some (but not all) people from majority-Muslim countries he declares to be dangerous.

But the ruling’s tone was significant as well. What it did not say may indicate volumes about the Supreme Court’s approach to this big, defining issue of the early Trump presidency.

The high court ruling did not try to tease out Trump’s thoughts from his angry tweets or outrageous campaign statements. It did not make judgments about the president’s personal attitude toward Muslims. In that respect it was different from lower court rulings that have blocked the ban from taking effect since the White House issued it in March.

That does not necessarily indicate that Trump will win – or lose – when the court hears full arguments on the case in the fall. What it does mean is that the Supreme Court does not want to match Trump’s norm-busting, combative approach to the issue. They will treat him as being inherently the same as other recent US chief executives. That means they will give him wide latitude to make judgments about what is in the best interests of US national security. But they won’t cede him complete power on this important question.

“They dialed down the temperature a few notches,” says Josh Blackman, an associate professor at the South Texas College of Law who specializes in constitutional jurisprudence.

It’s important to remember that Monday’s action is only a preliminary round. The Supreme Court was considering lower-court rulings that had held the proposed travel ban to be such an egregious infringement on religious rights that it needed to be prevented from taking effect on an immediate, emergency basis.

The high court both agreed and disagreed with this conclusion. On the one hand, Trump can’t ban from entry anyone with a “bona fide relationship” to the US, justices ruled. That includes foreigners with a job, spouse, or school in America. On the other hand, citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries without such a connection now can be barred from entry, effective immediately. Many refugees may fall into this category.

The Supreme Court also accepted the travel ban case for full consideration, with arguments to be held in the fall. That could set up a showdown between the president’s historic ability to set the nation’s national security priorities and the Constitution’s prohibition against discrimination on the basis of religious belief.

Still, the arguments might never happen. The travel ban’s purpose, according to the administration, was to institute a limited pause in immigration to give officials time to study procedures and decide if stricter vetting is necessary. By fall, the court may decide that the time necessary for this review has passed and pronounce the whole thing moot.

“It’s possible the court will never rule on the case,” says Lyle Denniston, dean of the Supreme Court press corps and a legal expert at the National Constitution Center.

In any event, it’s now clear that the Supreme Court is approaching the issue in a somewhat different frame of mind than did lower federal circuit courts. That could explain, in part, the difference in their legal conclusions.

Circuit court judges who ruled on the issue often cited Trump’s non-presidential personality as a basis for their decisions. They talked about and referred to his intemperate tweets and campaign speeches. Some lower curt judges claimed that these means of communication showed, beyond a doubt, that Trump’s purpose was based in prejudice against Muslims, and not in a true concern to protect national security.

To some extent, these judges responded in kind. In May, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had harsh words for the president, saying his then-newly revised order “drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination.”

That statement is “a bit over the top,” says Professor Blackman.

Campaign statements are of necessity an exaggerated form of speech, and they haven’t before entered into a court’s consideration of presidential intentions, Blackman says. The Supreme Court recognizes this, and nowhere cited Trump’s tweets or irregular speech. They returned to what Blackman calls a “presumption of regularity”: this president is like any other. He won’t be treated as a unique danger who demands a unique approach to the law.

“Trump could still lose. But it’s done in regular order,” says the South Texas law professor.

It’s true that there is nothing in the Supreme Court order that indicates justices are treating Trump differently than any other US chief executive, says Mr. Denniston of the National Constitution Center.

Traditionally the courts have given presidents great leeway on national security. Justices are reluctant to replace a chief executive’s judgment in this area with their own. 

The problem is, says Denniston, that Trump is different. For the Supreme Court, that’s the apparently unacknowledged elephant in the room. “I’m disappointed there aren’t passing hints this president is not normal,” Denniston says.

Partisanship might be in play here, of course. Political leanings play a role in court decisions, from the Supreme Court to federal circuit courts and down the line.

Chief Justice John Roberts would probably disagree with that – he works hard to try and shape decisions that do not appear to have been decided along strictly partisan lines. But judges are citizens, too.

“At some level these decisions can be political,” says Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

Henry Gass contributed to this report.

The naming of 31-year-old Mohammed bin Salman as Saudi Arabia's crown prince was more than a power play. It was a seismic generational shift.

For more than half a century, the Saudi throne has been passed down between the increasingly aging sons of state founder Abdulaziz Ibn Saud – transferring power between septuagenarians and octogenarians.

But with the naming of 81-year-old King Salman’s son last week as heir to the throne, the Saudi royal family appears set to usher in a new generation of princes and kings they say are more in tune with – and at the age of – their Saudi subjects.

By elevating Mohammed bin Salman, a self-proclaimed economic reformer, the royal family is betting he can modernize a rigid royal palace, identify with the next generation of Saudis, and meet their needs to ensure the House of Saud’s hold on power in increasingly uncertain economic and political times.

"Behind the strong targeting of the youth are quite frankly the issues of regime survival and staving off domestic unrest," says Frederic Wehrey, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment's Middle East program.

It’s a big ask, however. Considering the wide gap between the entrenched conservative clerics and the desires of younger reformists, the crown prince is likely to disappoint someone. Already, conservatives have resisted subtle social reforms that Prince Mohammed bin Salman is planning to make, even as advocates of reform express dismay they don’t go nearly far enough.

Vision 2030

Since his sudden rise to prominence as deputy crown prince in 2015, Mohammed bin Salman, nicknamed “Mr. Everything,” has effectively run Saudi’s foreign and domestic policies for his father, Western diplomats say, pushing Saudi Arabia into aggressive military and diplomatic offenses.

His most public role has been as the architect of the Saudi offensive in Yemen. It was a promised swift strike against Shiite Houthis – seen by the Saudis as Iranian proxies – that has dragged out into a costly war of attrition and one of the world’s largest humanitarian disasters.

But it has been his far-reaching plan to transform the Saudi economy – by weening the country off oil revenues and building a private sector to meet the growing demand for new jobs – that has made the prince the face of Saudi Arabia’s future.

Vision 2030, released last year, aims to raise the private sector’s contribution to the Saudi economy from 40 to 65 percent, increase foreign direct investment from 3.8 to 5.7 percent, sell off stakes in state-owned oil giant Aramco to fund investments abroad, and cut unemployment from 11.6 to 7 percent.

Saudi officials have been eager to play up the crown prince’s ties to the younger generation, which did not live through the excesses of the oil-boom years of the 1970s and early '80s, and is highly educated, well-traveled, and looks at emerging economic powers in the Gulf as models.

More than 70 percent of the Saudi population is under 30. This segment is of particular concern to the Saudi regime, as it cannot provide them the cushy state jobs, free housing, and higher education their parents enjoyed.

"The sense is that the new generation is no longer part of the welfare state their parents joined. How do you reform the economy to accommodate them?" says Carnegie’s Mr. Wehrey.

The crown prince has brought with him a group of young princes, advisers, and non-royal technocrats the regime hopes will bring the kingdom in line with the demands of its young population.

As a replacement for Mohammed bin Nayef, the former crown prince, King Salman named Prince Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Nayef, a 33-year-old, as interior minister, the youngest ever to hold the post.

Rift over entertainment

But the crown prince has at times moved too fast, setting up a potential future showdown between the palace and the hard-line religious establishment that the Saudi royals have relied on for legitimacy for more than a century.

His Vision 2030 calls for increasing women’s participation in the labor force from 22 percent to 30 percent, an ambitious target for a country where women face barriers in transportation and free movement.

The prince also has waded into Saudi Arabia’s high-profile ban on women driving, saying the policy is not rooted in religion, as clerics claim, but in society, which may one day change its view.

Yet it is not the empowering of women so much as the young prince’s plans for relaxed guidelines on culture and entertainment that have left clerics in an uproar.

Vision 2030 calls for the establishment of entertainment parks, cultural venues, and social clubs to provide a “variety of cultural activities and entertainment events.” The aim is to double the Saudi household spending on local cultural activities from 2.9 percent to 6 percent of household budgets.

Already, Saudi Arabia has agreed to a preliminary deal with Six Flags to build amusement parks as part of a new “entertainment city” south of Riyadh, while the crown prince has hinted that the country may open cinemas for the very first time.

These steps all come as a shock to a country that only allowed satellite TV in the 1990s. Cinemas have been banned because of the Saudi Wahhabi religious establishment’s claim that movies and music are un-Islamic and may have a corrupting influence on society.

There is still firm opposition to loosening restrictions, says Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Washington-based Gulf States Analytics. “Given the positions of certain hardline clerics in the kingdom, this could lead to future clashes,” he says.

In a Foreign Affairs article in January, Mohammed bin Salman, then deputy crown prince, hinted he was prepared to take punitive measures against clerics who opposed his reforms, indicating he had the backing of more than half the religious establishment.

The religious authorities have already seen their power curbed under Mohammed bin Salman’s guidance. In 2016, the Mutawa, or religious police, had their powers to arrest Saudis for violations of Islam revoked – a decision celebrated by Saudis on Twitter to this day.

Economic challenges

Elsewhere, however, the prince has proven to be disinterested in democracy or bettering Saudi Arabia's human rights record.

Saudi rights activists have privately criticized his hardline stance against Saudi Arabia's Shiite population and critics of the regime.

The young Saudis the crown prince is courting, particularly those who have studied and worked outside the kingdom, are likely to be disappointed with the prince's refusal to consider basic political openings in the kingdom ­– such as lifting free speech restrictions.

Yet his greatest challenges may be on the economic front.

The bulk of Saudi youth support development of a larger private sector – but it has yet to create opportunities to ween them off government jobs that Saudi Arabia can no longer afford in the wake of weak oil prices.

And in April, King Salman, facing domestic pressure, was forced to reverse austerity measures and cuts introduced by the young prince, reinstating bonuses and special allowances for civil servants and military personnel – which account for 45 percent of government spending.

Now that Mr. Everything has been elevated to crown prince, and may soon assume the throne, experts say his aspirations for the kingdom will finally be put to the test.

"Now that Mohammed bin Salman has centralized power, he has no impediments in the government or the palace to realize his grand vision," says Gregory Gause, a Saudi expert and chair at the Bush School at Texas A&M University in College Station.

"The goals are there, but now he has to enact the policies – which will prove to be the difficult part.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Cars are on display at the General Motors headquarters in downtown Detroit. The city remains the hub of America’s carmaking industry, yet it also has sky-high insurance costs that the mayor calls ‘devastating’ for Detroit's largely black population.

On a recent Friday morning Diana Jordan was on her way to the hospital, driving an elderly friend who had fallen and hurt her leg, but she still stopped for a few minutes at Uncle Rob’s Auto Repair, on Seven Mile Road in northeast Detroit. A brake light in her 1998 Pontiac Bonneville was out, and Jordan was wary of getting pulled over and fined. She told the Monitor she hasn’t had a traffic ticket in decades.

Ms. Jordan is 61 and black. For nearly 30 years she worked as a certified nursing assistant. Now she still volunteers as a caregiver but lives off a small fixed income, and needs the Bonneville to get around – even if it’s had engine problems and the minimum liability-only insurance costs her $1,600 annually. “That’s the only thing you can afford,” she says. “Especially when you’re on a budget.”

Jordan lives on Seven Mile Road. If she lived just a mile north – in largely white Macomb County instead of largely black Detroit – she knows her premiums would likely be lower. “You stay across Eight Mile,” she says, “you get cheap insurance. You stay on this side of town, your insurance is high.”   

Car-insurance premiums vary based on many factors, from age and driving history to local traffic patterns. But consumer research has concluded that, nationwide, drivers in predominantly black neighborhoods are consistently charged more than comparable drivers in predominantly white areas. Insurance companies have long maintained that those differences can be attributed to geographic risk. But other experts and advocates disagree, and say that until states do a better job of ensuring fair pricing, millions of Americans will continue to suffer from what appears to be broad economic discrimination.

“We’re not saying they necessarily tried to discriminate against minorities or blacks,” J. Robert Hunter, director of insurance for the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America, says of the pricing. “But that was what happened.”

While the problem is national in scope, the challenge is especially acute in the Motor City, where the last Census counted 83 percent of residents as black and where full insurance coverage can easily run double or triple what Jordan pays on her Bonneville. Insurance prices amount to a city-wide crisis that Detroit’s mayor is pushing to resolve.

‘It’s not right’

Today every state except New Hampshire has some kind of liability insurance requirement. Laws have long prohibited “redlining,” unfairly charging residents of certain areas. But analysts say that, whether intentionally or not, insurance-company pricing algorithms produces the same effect, in part by incorporating factors such as education level or and credit scores.

Mr. Hunter says a driver’s credit score, in particular, often has a bigger impact on his or her rate than driving history. “A rich person with a DUI pays less than a poor person that’s clean,” he says. “It’s not right.”  

In a November 2015 study, the Consumer Federation of America compared liability-only premiums – the basic insurance that covers other drivers' bodily injury and property damage – around the country, controlling for an area’s population density and income levels as a proxy for area traffic patterns: In largely black ZIP codes premiums for a single good driver averaged 70 percent higher than they did in otherwise similar largely white ZIP codes.

In April, a new study from ProPublica and Consumer Reports, this time comparing liability-only premiums against actual amounts paid out by insurance companies in neighborhoods throughout California, Illinois, Missouri, and Texas (the only four states where the data is available) found that in some cases companies charged premiums that were 30 percent higher in largely minority ZIP codes than in white ZIP codes with similar accident costs. In Illinois, 33 of 34 companies charged rates that were at least 10 percent higher in minority communities.  

Travor Bach

Tim Jenkins, a retired factory worker in Detroit, says his auto insurance costs much less than is typical in the city – $30 a month – because his 1990 Chevy van is registered at his brother’s address in Mississippi. It’s a common workaround in a city where insuring a car can run 10 times that amount or more, and the mayor is among those saying reforms are urgently needed.

The insurance industry has long pushed back against any claims of wrongdoing, emphasizing that insurers don’t collect racial information and that pricing is highly nuanced. James Lynch, chief actuary with the trade group Insurance Information Institute, accuses the ProPublica authors of flawed methodology.

“What is more likely,” he says in an interview, “that all of the nation’s insurance companies are somehow in cahoots to discriminate against African Americans for no discernible reason, and they have explicit or implicit approval by the state insurance departments...or is it more likely that these studies are not thorough enough to capture what’s going on?”

Researchers admit that studies have been imperfect, but say industry lobbyists have consistently blocked efforts that would lead to more transparency. “The basic argument” from insurance companies, Hunter says, “is ‘you guys aren’t doing perfect research.’ And our response is, ‘Give us the data and we’ll be happy to.’ ”

Full coverage ... at $5,000 a year?

In Detroit, one 2015 CarInsurance.com analysis determined an average annual full coverage premium of more than $5,000 in several Detroit zip codes for a hypothetical 40-year-old. And a 2014 NerdWallet analysis, looking at comprehensive coverage for a hypothetical 26-year-old, found an average annual rate of $10,700.

Both analyses ranked Detroit’s premiums as easily the highest in the country. In a city where most residents are poor and public transportation is widely considered to be abysmal, insurance is a problem that “forces residents to make decisions that they should not have to make,” says DaRell Reed, a Detroit pastor. Often that means choosing between immobility or risking arrest: An estimated half or more of the city’s drivers don’t have valid insurance.

One resident, Courtney Moore, a casino worker, told the Monitor she pays $326 monthly for basic coverage for her 2004 PT Cruiser. Roscoe Franks said he pays over $500 a month for basic coverage for two cars. Tim Jenkins, a retired factory worker who’s lived in the city for 45 years, said he pays $30 a month for his 1990 Chevy van – because it’s registered at his brother’s address in Mississippi. It’s a typical workaround. “I’ve heard of some people here going to Ohio and getting insurance,” Jenkins says.

The sky-high costs are due in large part to state laws: Michigan is one of 12 states that mandates no-fault coverage, where insurance companies are liable for certain damages regardless of who caused a collision, and it’s the only state that mandates insurance companies provide unlimited lifetime medical coverage. But rates in Detroit are still much higher than elsewhere in the state.

Quest for fixes, Detroit and nationwide

Detroit’s mayor, Mike Duggan, has called the prices “devastating” for the city and was elected in 2014 partly on a promise of bringing relief through the creation of a new city-run plan for residents. The idea, called “D-Insurance”, ultimately stalled in the state legislature, but recently Duggan announced a new effort to work with state lawmakers.  

“A whole lot of people are moving out of the neighborhoods because they can’t afford car insurance,” he told the Detroit Free Press. “It’s almost as much as a housing payment.”

Pastor Reed is also part of a new coalition of city leaders, called the Detroit Alliance for Fair Auto Insurance. The group says it’s not trying to dismantle Michigan’s no-fault law, but aims to eliminate redlining and the use of socioeconomic factors in rate-setting.

Advocates say similar reforms are needed nationwide. California, Massachusetts, and Hawaii already prohibit insurers from using credit scores and limit other socioeconomic factors. Similar bills were also recently proposed in Delaware, Maryland, and Montana.  

In California, which passed a landmark auto-insurance law in 1988, Hunter said the reforms have mostly worked. “There’s a whole system in place to make sure that rates are fair.”

In Detroit, the mayor and other leaders have started referring to auto insurance as a civil rights issue. “Detroiters feel like they’re held hostage when it comes down to car insurance,” says Reed. “We need this done.”

Jessica Gresko/AP/File

Flowers and notes left by well-wishers are displayed outside Comet Ping Pong, in December 2016. The Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant was the target of fake news stories linking it to a child sex trafficking ring.

A lie can travel halfway around the world, goes the well-known Mark Twain quote, before the truth can get its boots on.

Twain himself might have appreciated this quotation's self-reflexivity: There's no record of him ever having said or written it.

Today, with half of Americans now turning to social media for news, many of us are getting misinformation – for instance, that NASA has contacted intelligent extraterrestrials, that a “breatharian” couple can survive on a “food-free lifestyle” – mixed in with the legitimate news articles in our feeds. And, as the news cycle accelerates, it's becoming harder to tell the difference. 

A new study reveals the mathematics underlying this phenomenon, modeling how information overload can erode an individual's ability to distinguish high-quality information from its opposite, causing falsehoods to propagate. But with a little effort, readers and social media platforms can cut the information surplus, perhaps sharpening our powers of discernment. 

“On a daily basis,” says Daniel Levitin, a professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, “the onslaught of information is preventing us from being evidence-based decision makers, at our own peril.” 

Misinformation is as old as culture itself, and the phenomenon uncovered in this study shows its spread is not limited to one kind of social media. 

“Many arguments around gossip and rumors are really driven by the same social mechanisms,” says Brian Uzzi, the co-director of Northwestern University's Institute on Complex Systems in Evanston, Ill. “The internet has essentially turbocharged the inclination of human beings to behave this way in regard to news and facts.” 

A paper published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour by an international team of researchers offers a mathematical model that demonstrates that, as information load increases, so do the odds that low-quality information will go viral. 

“It was the first paper I've seen in this area that quantifies what many people thought was happening, and that's basically with limited attention we're unable to see the full range of potential arguments or sides of the story,” says Dr. Uzzi, who has studied how social media users isolate themselves into echo chambers. 

Losing ability to tell fact from fiction

Using mathematical modeling, a team led by Xiaoyan Qiu and Diego Oliveira of Indiana University's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research statistically confirmed that when flooded with a steady stream of high- and low-quality information, even the most critical readers start to lose their ability to tell fact from fiction.

“Even when individual users can recognize and select quality information,” says study co-author Filippo Menczer, a professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University, “the social media market rarely allows the best information to win the popularity contest.”

The researchers suggest that social networks could curb information overload by aggressively limiting content shared by so-called bot accounts, software agents that flood social networks with low-quality information. 

“Deceptive bots can be quite sophisticated and hard to recognize even for humans. And huge numbers of them can be managed via software, so it is difficult for operators to keep up,” says Dr. Menczer. 

The research reveals some of the math that drives what psychologists have long known: Information overload makes it harder to make decisions. “The key point of this article is what neuroscientists have been what showing on the biology side has very practical, real-world implications in our daily lives,” says Dr. Levitin, the author of “Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era.”

Fighting information overload

Levitin notes that the average American is exposed to about five times as much information than in 1986. “In the old days, I'd get the newspaper in the morning and I'd read about what happened yesterday,” he says. “Now, everyone seems to be addicted to what happened five minutes ago.” 

Levitin recommends unplugging from the internet for a couple hours each morning and again each afternoon. “If you're constantly checking your phone for the latest news, you're allowing your thoughts to become disrupted and fractionated and it becomes harder and harder to concentrate, and you get addicted to this constant stimulation,” he says. “So I think what we can do is give ourselves a break.”

But taking a break can be difficult for people who have become accustomed to steady social media contact with friends and family.“Trouble arises when we use the same networks to access news,” says Menczer, who advises against defriending or unfollowing those with different opinions, because echo chambers make users more susceptible to misinformation.

“We hope that by now, citizens and policymakers from across the political spectrum recognize the need for research to study digital misinformation and how to make the web more reliable,” says Menczer. “We are all vulnerable to manipulation irrespective of our political leanings.”

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

A group of tourists from the United States take a guided bicycle tour of Havana, Cuba, June 17.

For more than half a century US presidents have wrestled with Cuba. Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in 1959 turned what had been a friendly nearby island escape for American tourists into a defiantly independent – and potentially dangerous – foe.

An early failed US attempt to overthrow Mr. Castro was followed by an economic blockade and, eventually, by the Cuban missile crisis – a stare-down with Cuba’s patron, the Soviet Union, that threatened to end in nuclear war.

Over the decades US presidents of both parties have tried sticks of various sizes and types to force Castro to leave, or at least move toward a more open and democratic system of government. None has succeeded. So when late in his presidency Barack Obama decided to dangle carrots instead – restoring diplomatic ties and easing travel restrictions – many Americans were ready to give the new approach a try.

But in mid-June President Trump, the 12th inhabitant of the White House to deal with the Castro regime, made a dramatic announcement that seemed to end that short-lived experiment. His new policy tries to divert US tourist dollars away from hotels, restaurants, and other companies run by the Cuban military by restricting where Americans can stay and requiring them to travel only as part of supervised tour groups.

The details of how the new policy will play out won’t be known for many months. But it appears many of the Obama changes will remain. Cruise ships will continue to dock and airplanes will continue to land filled with passengers from the United States, though where visitors may spend their money will be more restricted.

The new restrictions seem likely to harm many ordinary Cubans, including about 22,000 who signed up to welcome visitors into their homes via Airbnb. The company says these entrepreneurs earned about $40 million last year.

The Obama opening also has increased the access Cubans have to the internet. If these arrangements are left in place they could prove to be one of the greatest tools in creating greater understanding between Cuba and the US.

Mr. Trump is right in saying that the Castro regime – headed by Fidel’s brother, Raúl, since 2008 – continues to oppress the Cuban people. One human rights group recorded nearly 10,000 people who had been arbitrarily detained by the Cuban government last year.

But whether the new  modest rollback in relations with Cuba will do anything more than please the dwindling number of Cuban-Americans who demand a hard line against the Castros remains to be seen. It could just as easily stiffen the resolve of the Cuban government to stay the course as promote reforms.

In the long run the Trump policy may be seen as one step back in a relationship that keeps building momentum to move forward.