Yair Lapid, Naftali Bennett and Benjamin Netanyahu

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press and other media are reporting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opponents have reached a deal to form a new governing coalition, paving the way for the ouster of the longtime Israeli leader.

The dramatic announcement by opposition leader Yair Lapid and his main coalition partner, Naftali Bennett, came shortly before a midnight deadline yesterday and prevented what could have been Israel’s fifth consecutive election in just over two years.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“This government will work for all the citizens of Israel, those that voted for it and those that didn’t. It will do everything to unite Israeli society,” Lapid said.

The agreement still needs to be approved by the Knesset, or parliament, in a vote that is expected to take place early next week. If it goes through, Lapid and a diverse array of partners that span the Israeli political spectrum will end Netanyahu’s record-setting but divisive 12-year rule.

Netanyahu, desperate to remain in office while he fights corruption charges, is expected to do everything possible in the coming days to prevent the new coalition from taking power. If he fails, he will be pushed into the opposition.

The deal comes at a tumultuous time for Israel, which fought an 11-day war against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip last month while also experiencing mob violence between Jews and Arabs in cities across the country. The country also is emerging from a coronavirus crisis that caused deep economic damage and exposed tensions between the secular majority and the ultra-Orthodox minority.

Under the agreement, Lapid and Bennett will split the job of prime minister in a rotation. Bennett, a former ally of Netanyahu, is to serve the first two years, while Lapid is to serve the final two years — though it is far from certain their fragile coalition will last that long.

The historic deal also includes a small Islamist party, the United Arab List, which would make it the first Arab party ever to be part of a governing coalition.

In the coming days, Netanyahu is expected to continue to put pressure on hard-liners in the emerging coalition to defect and join his religious and nationalist allies. Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, may also use his influence to delay the required parliamentary vote. There was no immediate comment from Netanyahu or Likud.

Lapid called on Levin to convene the Knesset for the vote as soon as possible.

Netanyahu has been the most dominant player in Israeli politics over the past three decades — serving as prime minister since 2009 in addition to an earlier term in the late 1990s.

Despite a long list of achievements, including last year’s groundbreaking diplomatic agreements with four Arab countries, he has become a polarizing figure since he was indicted on charges of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in 2019.

Each of the past four elections was seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s fitness to rule. And each ended in deadlock, with both Netanyahu’s supporters as well as his secular, Arab and dovish opponents falling short of a majority. A unity government formed with his main rival last year collapsed after just six months.

The new deal required a reshuffling of the Israeli political constellation. Three of the parties are led by hard-line former Netanyahu allies who had personal feuds with him, while the United Arab List made history as a kingmaker, using its leverage to seek benefits for the country’s Arab minority.

“This is the first time an Arab party is a partner in the formation of a government,” said the party’s leader, Mansour Abbas. “This agreement has a lot of things for the benefit of Arab society, and Israeli society in general.”

Among the concessions secured by Abbas were agreements for legal recognition of Bedouin villages in southern Israel, an economic plan for investing 30 billion shekels ($9.2 billion) in Arab towns and cities, and a five-year plan for combating violent crime in Arab communities, according to Army Radio.

Lapid, 57, entered parliament in 2013 after a successful career as a newspaper columnist, TV anchor and author. His new Yesh Atid party ran a successful rookie campaign, landing Lapid the powerful post of finance minister.

But he and Netanyahu did not get along, and the coalition quickly crumbled. Yesh Atid has been in the opposition since 2015 elections. The party is popular with secular, middle-class voters and has been critical of Netanyahu’s close ties with ultra-Orthodox parties and said the prime minister should step down while on trial for corruption charges.

The ultra-Orthodox parties have long used their outsize political power to secure generous budgets for their religious institutions and exemptions from compulsory military service. The refusal of many ultra-Orthodox Jews to obey coronavirus safety restrictions last year added to widespread resentment against them.

Bennett, 49, is a former top aide to Netanyahu whose small Yamina party caters to religious and nationalist hard-liners. Bennett was a successful high-tech entrepreneur and leader of the West Bank settler movement before entering politics.

In order to secure the required parliamentary majority, Lapid had to bring together eight parties that have little in common.

Their partners include a pair of dovish, left-wing parties that support Palestinian independence and three hard-line parties that oppose major concessions to the Palestinians and support West Bank settlements. Lapid’s Yesh Atid and Blue and White, a centrist party headed by Defense Minister Benny Gantz, and the United Arab List are the remaining members.

The coalition members hope their shared animosity toward Netanyahu will provide enough incentive to find some common ground.

“Today, we succeeded. We made history,” said Merav Michaeli, leader of the dovish Labor Party.

The negotiations went down to the wire, with Labor and Yamina feuding over the makeup of a parliamentary committee.

Earlier this week, when Bennett said he would join the coalition talks, he said that everyone would have to compromise and give up parts of their dreams.

In order to form a government, a party leader must secure the support of a 61-seat majority in the 120-seat parliament. Because no single party controls a majority on its own, coalitions are usually built with smaller partners. Thirteen parties of various sizes are in the current parliament.

As leader of the largest party, Netanyahu was given the first opportunity by the country’s figurehead president to form a coalition. But he was unable to secure a majority with his traditional religious and nationalist allies.

After Netanyahu’s failure to form a government, Lapid was then given four weeks to cobble together a coalition. That window was set to expire at midnight.

Lapid already faced a difficult challenge bringing together such a disparate group of partners. But then war broke out with Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip on May 10. The fighting, along with the eruption of Arab-Jewish mob violence in Israeli cities during the war, put the coalition talks on hold.

But after a cease-fire was reached on May 21, the negotiations resumed, and Lapid raced to sew up a deal. He reached a breakthrough on Sunday when Bennett agreed to join the opposition coalition.”

To say the least, this would be the end of an era in Israel!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

NBC News and other media outlets reported  yesterday that the publisher of the National Enquirer agreed to pay a $187,500 fine after the Federal Election Commission found that it “knowingly and willfully” violated campaign law by paying $150,000 to a model who said she’d had an affair with Donald Trump to keep quiet during the 2016 presidential election, according to records released by a campaign finance watchdog group.

The FEC revealed the penalty in correspondence Tuesday with Common Cause, which had filed a complaint against Enquirer publisher AMI, Trump and the Trump campaign about the hush money payout to Karen McDougal after word of the supermarket tabloid’s unusual payment to silence a salacious story — dubbed “catch and kill” — became public.

The complaint alleged that the payment was made “for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential general election.”

In a letter to Paul S. Ryan, Common Cause’s vice president of policy and litigation, the FEC said the board had found “reason to believe” that AMI had violated campaign law but that there “were an insufficient number of votes to find reason to believe that the remaining respondents” — Trump and the Trump campaign — “violated the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971.”

In a signed agreement with the FEC that was forwarded to Common Cause, an attorney for AMI’s successor company, A360 LLC, agreed that the company would pay the fine. It acknowledged “the Commission’s reason-to-believe finding that these violations were knowing and willful,” but it said it “does not admit to the knowing and willful aspect of these violations.”

The FEC is expected to make its findings public within 30 days. The agency would not comment about the documents Wednesday.

Representatives for A360 and Trump did not respond to requests for comment.

Ryan hailed the fine against AMI as “a win for democracy” but said “the FEC’s failure to hold former-President Trump and his campaign accountable for this violation lays bare the dysfunction at the FEC.”

“All the other actors have been held accountable, but still no accountability for former President Trump,” he said.

AMI had previously acknowledged paying McDougal, a Playboy model, as part of a non-prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors who were investigating allegations that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen violated campaign law.

Cohen eventually pleaded guilty to having helped orchestrate the payment to McDougal, as well as a payment to another woman, porn star Stormy Daniels, who said she had slept with Trump, as part of a federal criminal case that sent him to prison.

Last month, the FEC dropped an inquiry into whether Trump should face sanctions for the payment to Daniels after two Republican commissioners voted against proceeding and a third recused himself. The commissioners who voted against moving forward noted that the commission is dealing with a substantial backlog and argued that the case was “statute of limitations imperiled” and “not the best use of agency resources.”

In an op-ed last month in The Washington Post, one of the Democratic commissioners, Ellen Weintraub, agreed that the agency had a large backlog to catch up on but said: “Are we too busy to enforce the law against the former president of the United States for his brazen violation of federal campaign finance laws on the eve of a presidential election? No.”

Trump has denied having had relationships with McDougal, and he defended the payments in a 2018 interview with Fox News.

“They weren’t taken out of campaign finance,” he said, adding: “They didn’t come out of the campaign. They came from me.”

The Manhattan district attorney’s office is believed to be scrutinizing the payments as part of its investigation of the finances of Trump’s company, the Trump Organization.

The six-member FEC board is made up of three Republicans, two Democrats and an independent. Four commissioners have to agree for a case to proceed.

Not a huge fine for AMI but an important airing of this campaign violation.  The next question is whether the FEC will go after Trump or the Trump Organization.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As we edge back into a post-pandemic environment, colleges and universities across the country are evaluating the future of teaching and work, asking to what extent faculty and staff members could remain virtual and what that would mean for life on campus and off.

Before the pandemic, many colleges had remote-work policies, with arrangements often negotiated for individual employees. Colleges that closed during the pandemic had to not only move their entire student body online, but also had to train many faculty and employees on how to use remote technology.

Now some campuses are surveying employees on what they want once the risk of Covid-19 abates, and the results are loud and clear. Nearly three-quarters of Duke University faculty and staff members, for example, said they wanted to work remotely three to five days a week, citing the lack of a commute and higher productivity as key benefits.

Some campus leaders now believe that flexible work-from-home policies will make or break their future hiring and retention efforts, particularly in competitive fields like technology. Campuses that don’t embrace those policies may “suffer,” losing talent to other campuses and to the private sector, said Andy Brantley, president and chief executive officer of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.  As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“If we’re going to continue to attract and retain the greatest talent,” remote work “can’t be so exceptional anymore,” said Helena Rodrigues, vice president and chief human-resources officer at the University of Arizona. There is greater competition from private industry on benefits packages, she said. “It has to be part of our norm, for sure.”

Arizona had flexible-work agreements for employees before Covid-19, said Chanté C. Martin, an assistant vice president for human resources at the university. But after more than a year of working remotely, more campus staff members may recognize benefits to working at home, and she said she expects more employees to consider it. It will be up to supervisors to decide what work arrangements make sense for their employees.

A one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t make sense, Rodrigues said. While some campus jobs — think student-facing positions, for example — require an in-person component, other teams may have different needs or cultures, which may tilt the scales toward on-campus or remote work.

But the case-by-case basis of those decisions raises questions about unfairness, Martin said. Consultants from Arizona’s human-resources division will discuss remote-work decisions with supervisors across the campus, she said. In a meeting this week, she added, supervisors will talk about remote work and scenarios they might face.

At Duke, it will be impossible to adopt a single approach, said Kyle Cavanaugh, vice president for administration. “We are a collection of dozens if not hundreds of different cultures,” he said. “What works for one of our schools may not be applicable to another.”

Having part of the work force continue remotely could cut costs for an institution. If parking needs are projected to flatten or decrease, Duke may not need to build an expensive garage, Cavanaugh said. At Arizona, Rodrigues said, the university has decided to let real-estate leases lapse because fewer on-site employees need offices. When they do come to campus, she said, they can work in common spaces.

As they consider what campus work will look like in the future, colleges will have to wrestle with questions of equity. Are those who are allowed to hold remote jobs more likely to be white? Who has the space and technology to work effectively from home? Can expanding where people are permitted to work broaden access to employment opportunities?

At a town hall on April 14, leaders of the University of California at Los Angeles discussed the possibility of filling some remote jobs with people who live out of state or even in another country. That could expand recruitment, said Lubbe Levin, associate vice chancellor for human resources, noting the high housing prices in Los Angeles. (Levin, co-chair of the Re-Inventing UCLA Workplace of the Future Working Group, was unavailable for an interview, a spokesman told The Chronicle.)

Such practices raise questions about taxes and employment law, and human-resources officials should be prepared to work through those issues, Allison Vaillancourt, a vice president and senior consultant at Segal, previously told The Chronicle. Employee-leave laws, for example, vary by state. There’s also the question of whether staff members should be paid at the market rate of their campus or where they live. (The UCLA spokesman said that the university was committed to complying with all income-tax withholding and reporting requirements, and that employees must update their addresses if they leave the state.)

Boston University released a survey this week that asked staff and some faculty members about how productive they have felt working remotely and how well communication has been conducted during the pandemic. A committee aims to set new policies on remote work and flexible schedules.

“Even prior to the pandemic, more and more candidates for jobs were asking in interviews, ‘Do you have a flexible work policy?’” said Natalie McKnight, dean of the college of general studies and a co-chair of the committee leading that review. Expecting people to sit in traffic for two hours each day, just to come to an office and check email on a computer, she added, is “very old-school thinking.”

Such discussions have forced colleges to ask questions about their culture and the extent to which in-person operations are crucial to it. Colleges also make decisions slowly and deliberatively. They’re not technology companies, several of which this spring have outlined plans for long-term remote-work options.

Georgetown University’s senior leaders told the staff that this coming academic year would be “transitional,” with employees expected to work within commuting distance of their office. But after the 2021-22 academic year, human resources will add “mode of work” to job descriptions, “based on what we learn about the most effective ways to conduct our work,” the university’s administrators wrote last week.

Some departments may offer their own flexibility. Think of the registrar’s office. Graduate students at Lewis & Clark College — some of whom work day jobs — may prefer to meet with a registrar or adviser virtually and in the evening, said Scott Fletcher, dean of the Oregon college’s graduate school of education and counseling and chair of a task force on post-Covid work.

Perhaps, then, one out of three people in that office could work remotely and in alternative hours, he said. “From the outside that office will look the same.”

No matter what form work will take in the future, employees’ expectations must be evaluated alongside the institution’s identity and students’ desires, said Lisa Brommer, associate vice president for human resources at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut. “We’re first and foremost a residential campus.”

“That’s always the tension, for every employer on the planet — the needs of the institution and the needs, desires, and expectations of the employees,” she said. “That’s not new just because of the pandemic; that’s always there. This conversation about remote work has really been elevated for employers because of the pandemic.”

It is my sense that remote teaching and learning will be here to stay for many segments of higher education particularly those institutions that serve large commuter populations.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning examining the battle going on in America over the teaching of critical race theory. From school boards to the halls of Congress, Republicans are mounting an energetic campaign aiming to dictate how historical and modern racism in America are taught, meeting pushback from Democrats and educators in a politically thorny clash that has deep ramifications for how children learn about their country.

Republicans have focused their attacks on the influence of “critical race theory,” a graduate school framework that has found its way into K-12 public education. The concept argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions, and that the legacies of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow still create an uneven playing field for Black people and other people of color.

Many conservatives portray critical race theory and invocations of systemic racism as a gauntlet thrown down to accuse white Americans of being individually racist. Republicans accuse the left of trying to indoctrinate children with the belief that the United States is inherently wicked.

Democrats are conflicted. Some worry that arguing America is racist to the root — a view embraced by elements of the party’s progressive wing — contradicts the opinion of a majority of voters and is handing Republicans an issue to use as a political cudgel. But large parts of the party’s base, including many voters of color, support more discussion in schools about racism’s reach, and believe that such conversations are an educational imperative that should stand apart from partisan politics. As reported in the article:

“History is already undertaught — we’ve been undereducated, and these laws are going to get us even less educated,” said Prudence L. Carter, the dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Attempts to suppress what is still a nascent movement to teach young Americans more explicitly about racist public policy, like redlining or the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, amount to “a gaslighting of history,” she said, adding, “It’s a form of denialism.”

The debate over the real or perceived influence of critical race theory — not just in schools but also in corporate, government and media settings — comes as both parties increasingly make issues of identity central to politics. And it accelerated during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, when discussions over racism in the country were supercharged by his racist comments and by a wave of protests last year over police killings of Black people.

In Tulsa on Tuesday, Mr. Biden said the killing of Black citizens by a white mob a century ago had been driven by racism that became “embedded systematically and systemically in our laws and our culture.” America, he said, can’t pretend “it doesn’t impact us today.” In response, he announced policies to narrow the racial wealth gap by aiding Black home buyers and small-business owners.

Some of the discussion about education has been fueled by the 1619 Project, developed by The New York Times Magazine, which argues that “the country’s very origin” traces to when the first ship carrying enslaved people touched Virginia’s shore that year. “Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” the magazine’s editor wrote.

Educators have embraced curriculums created along with the project, responding to a changing nation in which a majority of public-school students are now nonwhite, but the teaching force remains nearly 80 percent white.

Republican pushback has been intense. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the G.O.P. leader, said recently that he disagreed that 1619 was important in U.S. history. He and other Republican senators are pushing the Biden administration to drop efforts by the Education Department to prioritize history courses that emphasize “systemic marginalization” of peoples.

In Ohio, Republicans in the General Assembly introduced a bill last week to ban teaching that any individual is “inherently racist,” that any individual “bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by the same race or sex,” or that the advent of slavery “constitutes the true founding” of the United States.

“Critical race theory is a dangerous and flat-out wrong theory,” State Representative Don Jones, the bill’s lead sponsor, said in a statement. “Students should not be asked to ‘examine their whiteness’ or ‘check their privilege.’”

Mr. Jones, in an interview, could not cite any examples of such teaching taking place now in Ohio. He said his bill was a response to voter concerns.

Although parents have appeared before school boards in Ohio and elsewhere to object to critical race theory, calling it “Marxist,” many school administrators vehemently deny that they are teaching the subject, or are being influenced by it. They say that much of what conservatives object to amounts to little more than more frequent and frank discussions of subjects like slavery. Parents are also pushing back against the loosely related trend of anti-bias training for students and staff members, which has led to dust-ups across the country…

…Republicans’ attacks on critical race theory are in sync with the party’s broad strategy to run on culture-war issues in the 2022 midterm elections, rather than campaigning head-on against Mr. Biden’s economic agenda — which has proved popular with voters — as the country emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.

Because the nation’s three million public-school teachers have a great deal of autonomy over what happens in classrooms, legislation will most likely be ineffective in controlling how children are exposed to concepts of race and racism, said Robert Pondiscio, an education expert who in June will join the center-right American Enterprise Institute, a think tank.

Still, he said, the controversy over critical race theory serves a purpose in warning educators to tread carefully on a divisive subject. “People have strong feelings about the degree to which race should be central to a kid’s educational experience,” he said.

While few K-12 educators use the term “critical race theory,” discussions of systemic racism have become more common in American schools in recent years, particularly in liberal areas.

State social studies standards and textbooks have been updated to highlight subjects like redlining and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Historically, curricular changes have often drawn backlashes, said Albert S. Broussard, a historian at Texas A&M University and an author of middle and high school American history textbooks. “It’s what we as historians have seen throughout African-American history when whites — particularly conservatives — feel they have lost control,” he said.

Conservatives and even some liberals have said that discussions of race are crowding out the traditional curriculum and are encouraging students and teachers to see themselves less as individuals and more as members of identity groups….

…..Some Democratic strategists said the issue was a political liability for their party. Ruy Teixeira, a longtime political scientist and the co-editor of a Substack newsletter called The Liberal Patriot, recently wrote, “The steady march of ‘anti-racist’ ideology” into school curriculums “will generate a backlash among normie parents.”

…A parent group began a petition drive in April to recall six of nine school board members. The effort is led by Ian Prior, a former political appointee in the Trump administration, who created a political action committee that he said had raised about $50,000 in small donations. It gathered signatures in May at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va.

“What we’re seeing is a focus less on individuals, who they are and their unique experiences, but more about identity groups and putting everybody into an identity box,” Mr. Prior said.

The district’s interim superintendent, Scott A. Ziegler, denied that critical race theory was part of the curriculum or teacher training.

“Unfortunately, our efforts to provide an excellent education in a place of caring, safety and affirmation for our students has gotten swept away in a controversy about critical race theory,” he said. “We are not teaching critical race theory. We are not indoctrinating students or staff into critical race theory.”

“We are making a better environment for our students.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning describing Woebot, a therapeutic chatbot, that is designed to replace a therapist. Introduced in 2017, it is one of a handful of apps that use artificial intelligence to deploy the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, a common technique used to treat anxiety and depression. Woebot also uses natural language processing and learned responses to mimic conversation, remember past sessions and deliver advice around sleep, worry and stress.  Below is the entire article.

Get me to a couch with my iPhone!

Tony

——————————————————————–

The New York Times

Something Bothering You? Tell It to Woebot.

By Karen Brown

June 1, 2021

“I understand that you’re experiencing a relationship problem, is that right?”

Yes.

“Okay, I’m delighted that you want to work on this K. I’ve good and bad news for you… Which do you want to hear first?”

Good news.

“The good news is, I have very powerful skills that I can teach you! These skills have really helped a lot of people build better relationships.”

And the bad news?

“The bad news is that you would have to be willing to accept 100% of the responsibility for changing the relationship.”

Why?

“Because you’re only ever going to be able to have control over your part of it.”

This conversation may sound like a fairly typical therapist’s session, but in this case, it was directed by Woebot, a therapeutic chatbot, with the psychiatrist’s couch swapped for a smartphone screen.

The app presents itself as an automated therapist when finding a real one can feel like a logistical and financial impossibility. At the same time, the need for therapists is only growing.

During the pandemic, about four in 10 adults in the United States reported that they had symptoms of anxiety or depression, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. At the same time, the federal government warns of a critical shortage of therapists and psychiatrists. According to the advocacy group Mental Health America, almost 60 percent of those with mental illness last year did not get treatment.

Woebot Health says the pandemic has driven up demand for its services. The number of its daily users doubled and is now in the tens of thousands, said Alison Darcy, a psychologist and the founder and president of the company.

Digital mental health has become a multibillion-dollar industry and includes more than 10,000 apps, according to an estimate by the American Psychiatric Association. The apps range from guided meditation (Headspace) and mood tracking (MoodKit) to text therapy by licensed counselors (Talkspace, BetterHelp).

But Woebot, which was introduced in 2017, is one of only a handful of apps that use artificial intelligence to deploy the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, a common technique used to treat anxiety and depression. Woebot aims to use natural language processing and learned responses to mimic conversation, remember past sessions and deliver advice around sleep, worry and stress.

“If we can deliver some of the things that the human can deliver,” Dr. Darcy said, “then we actually can create something that’s truly scalable, that has the capability to reduce the incidence of suffering in the population.”

Almost all psychologists and academics agree with Dr. Darcy on the problem: There is not enough affordable mental health care for everyone who needs it. But they are divided on her solution: Some say bot therapy can work under the right conditions, while others consider the very concept paradoxical and ineffective.

At issue is the nature of therapy itself. Can therapy by bot make people understand themselves better? Can it change long-held patterns of behavior through a series of probing questions and reflective exercises? Or is human connection essential to that endeavor?

Hannah Zeavin is the author of the forthcoming book “The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy.” The health care system is so broken, she says, that “it makes sense that there’s space for disruption.”

But, she added, not all disruption is equal. She calls automated therapy a “fantasy” that is more focused on accessibility and fun than actually helping people get better over the long term.

“We are an extraordinarily confessing animal; we will confess to a bot,” she said. “But is confession the equivalent of mental health care?”

Eli Turns to Woebot

Eli Spector seemed like the perfect client for A.I. therapy.

In 2019, Mr. Spector was a 24-year-old college graduate, working in a neuroscience lab in Philadelphia. Having grown up with an academic father who specialized in artificial intelligence, he considered himself something of a technologist.

But Mr. Spector’s job was isolating and tedious, and after four stimulating years in academia, he felt bored and lonely. He couldn’t sleep well and found that his moods were consistently dark.

“I was just having a really hard time adjusting and I didn’t have any co-workers I liked,” he said. “It was just a tough period for me.”

But he wasn’t sure he wanted to bare his soul to a real person; he didn’t want to worry about anyone’s judgment or try to fit around someone else’s schedule.

Besides, he didn’t think he could find a therapist on his parents’ insurance plan that he could afford, as that could run from $100 to $200 a session. And Woebot was free and on his phone.

“Woebot seemed like this very low-friction way to see, you know, if this could help.”

Therapy by Algorithm

Woebot’s use of cognitive behavioral therapy has a philosophical and practical logic to it. Unlike forms of psychotherapy that probe the root causes of psychological problems, often going back to childhood, C.B.T. seeks to help people identify their distorted ways of thinking and understand how that affects their behavior in negative ways. By changing these self-defeating patterns, therapists hope to improve symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Because cognitive behavioral therapy is structured and skill-oriented, many mental health experts think it can be employed, at least in part, by algorithm.

“You can deliver it pretty readily in a digital framework, help people grasp these concepts and practice the exercises that help them think in a more rational manner,” said Jesse Wright, a psychiatrist who studies digital forms of C.B.T. and is the director of the University of Louisville Depression Center. “Whereas trying to put something like psychoanalysis into a digital format would seem pretty formidable.”

Dr. Wright said several dozen studies had shown that computer algorithms could take someone through a standard C.B.T. process, step by step, and get results similar to in-person therapy. Those programs generally follow a set length and number of sessions and require some guidance from a human clinician.

But most smartphone apps don’t work that way, he said. People tend to use therapy apps in short, fragmented spurts, without clinician oversight. Outside of limited company-sponsored research, Dr. Wright said he knew of no rigorous studies of that model.

And some automated conversations can be clunky and frustrating when the bot fails to pick up on the user’s exact meaning. Dr. Wright said A.I. is not advanced enough to reliably duplicate a natural conversation.

“The chances of a bot being as wise, sympathetic, empathic, knowing, creative and being able to say the right thing at the right time as a human therapist is pretty slim,” he said. “There’s a limit to what they can do, a real limit.”

John Torous, director of digital psychiatry for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, said therapeutic bots might be promising, but he’s worried they are being rolled out too soon, before the technology has caught up to the psychiatry.

“If you deliver C.B.T. in these bite-size parts, how much exposure to bite-size parts equals the original?” he said. “We don’t have a good way to predict who’s going to respond to them or not — or who it’s good or bad for.”

These new apps, Dr. Torous said, risk setting back other advances in digital mental health: “Do we in part end up losing trust and credibility because we’re promising what is not yet possible by any machine or any program today?”

Other mental health professionals say that therapy should simply not be delivered by machine. Effective treatment involves more than just cognitive skill-building, they say. It needs a human-to-human connection. Therapists needs to hear nuances, see gestures, recognize the gap between what is said and unsaid.

“These apps really shortchange the essential ingredient that — mounds of evidence show — is what helps in therapy, which is the therapeutic relationship,” said Linda Michaels, a Chicago-based therapist who is co-chair of the Psychotherapy Action Network, a professional group.

Dr. Darcy of Woebot says a well-designed bot can form an empathetic, therapeutic bond with its users, and in fact her company recently published a study making that claim. Thirty-six thousand Woebot users responded to statements like, “I believe Woebot likes me,” “Woebot and I respect each other” and “I feel that Woebot appreciates me.”

Eli Spector tried Woebot, when he was reluctant to bare his soul to a therapist. “Woebot seemed like this very low-friction way to see, you know, if this could help,” he said.Credit…Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

The study’s authors — all with financial ties to the company — concluded that a significant percentage of participants perceived a “working alliance” with Woebot, a term that means the therapist and patient have formed a cooperative rapport. The study did not measure whether there actually was a working alliance.

Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who writes about technology and relationships, is not swayed by such evidence. For therapy to heal, she said, the therapist must have a lived experience and the ability to empathize with a patient’s pain. An app cannot do that.

“We will humanize whatever seems capable of communicating with us,” Dr. Turkle said. “You’re creating the illusion of intimacy, without the demands of a relationship. You have created a bond with something that doesn’t know it is bonding with you. It doesn’t understand a thing.”

Eli Pours Out His Problems

Eli Spector started with Woebot in the summer of 2019.

He liked that he could open the app whenever he felt like it and pour out his thoughts of distress on his own schedule, for even a few minutes at a time. Most of the words coming out had to do with how unhappy he felt at his job.

He also took advantage of Woebot’s other features, including tracking his mood and writing in an online journal. It helped him realize how depressed he really was.

But he had doubts about the algorithm. The bot’s advice often felt generic, like a collection of “mindfulness buzzwords,” he said. “Like, ‘Can you think more about that feeling, and what you could do differently?’”

And worse, the advice could be nonsensical.

“I would type in, like, ‘My boss doesn’t appreciate the work I do’ and ‘I can’t seem to get her approval,’” Mr. Spector said. “And Woebot would be like: ‘That sounds difficult. Does this happen more in the morning or at night?’”

“It felt sort of silly,” he said.

Is It Really Therapy?

Much of the debate over therapeutic bots comes down to expectations. Do patients and clinicians understand the limitations of chatbots? Or are they expecting more than even the companies say they deliver?

On its website, Woebot promises to “automate both the process and content of therapy,” but Dr. Darcy is careful not to call Woebot medical treatment or even formal therapy.

Instead, she says, the bot delivers “digital therapeutics.” And Woebot’s terms of service call it a “pure self-help” program that is not meant for emergencies. In fact, in the event of a severe crisis, Woebot says that it is programmed to recognize suicidal language and urge users to seek out a human alternative.

In that way, Woebot does not approach true therapy — like many mental health apps, the current, free version of Woebot is not subject to strict oversight from the Food and Drug Administration because it falls under the category of “general wellness” product, which receives only F.D.A. guidance.

But Woebot is striving for something more. With $22 million of venture capital in hand, Woebot is seeking clearance from the F.D.A. to develop its algorithm to help treat two psychiatric diagnoses, postpartum depression and adolescent depression, and then sell the program to health systems.

And it is here that Woebot hopes to make money, using its practical advantage over any human therapist: scale.

While other virtual therapy companies, like BetterHelp or Talkspace, must keep recruiting therapists to join their platforms, A.I. apps can take on new users without paying for extra labor. And while therapists can vary in skills and approach, a bot is consistent and doesn’t get stressed out by back-to-back sessions.

“The assumption is always that, because it’s digital, it’ll always be limited,” Dr. Darcy of Woebot said. “There’s actually some opportunities that are created by the technology itself that are really challenging for us to do in traditional treatment.”

One advantage of an artificial therapist — or, as Dr. Darcy calls it, a “relational agent” — is 24-hour-a-day access. Very few human therapists answer their phone during a 2 a.m. panic attack, as Dr. Darcy pointed out. “I think people have probably underestimated the power of being able to engage in a therapeutic technique in the moment that you need to,” she said.

But whether Woebot can be involved in medical diagnosis or treatment is up to the F.D.A., which is supposed to make sure the app can back up its claims and not cause harm, an agency spokesperson said.

One possible harm, the spokesperson said, is a “missed opportunity” where someone with mental illness fails to get more effective treatment or delays treatment. “And what the consequences of those delays would look like — that’s something we’d worry about,” the spokesperson said.

Artificial intelligence can be problematic in other ways. For instance, Dr. Zeavin worries that racial and gender bias or privacy breaches could simply get translated into bots.

“Therapy has enough problems on its own,” Dr. Zeavin said. “And now they’ve brought all of the problems of algorithmic technology to bear.”

But even some skeptics of chatbot therapy believe it has the potential to complement the human-guided mental health system, as long as it comes with serious research.

“As the market gets saturated, the bar for evidence will get higher and higher and that’s how people will compete,” Dr. Torous said. “So maybe we’re just in such early stages and we don’t want to punish people for being innovative and kind of trying something.”

The idea, Dr. Darcy says, is not to replace human therapists with bots; she thinks it’s important to have both. “It’s like saying if every time you’re hungry, you must go to a Michelin star restaurant, when actually a sandwich is going to be OK,” she said. “Woebot is a sandwich. A very good sandwich.”

Eli Breaks Up With Woebot

After about a month, Eli Spector deleted Woebot from his phone.

He was unimpressed by the bot’s advice for beating back loneliness and despair, but he is not entirely sorry that he tried it out.

The mere act of typing out his problems was helpful. And through the process, he pinpointed what he actually needed to feel better.

“So maybe this was just evidence that I needed to, like, actually address this,” he said. “It was enough to inspire me to just take the plunge and find a flesh-and-blood therapist.”

Now, Mr. Spector pays a human psychotherapist in Philadelphia $110 a session.

They’ve been meeting on Zoom since the pandemic began, so the flesh-and-blood part is somewhat theoretical. But it’s close enough.

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday was the centenary of a massacre (see video above) targeting Tulsa’s prosperous African-American community in the district of Greenwood that bore the nickname “Black Wall Street.” 

After a Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman, an allegation that was never proven, white rioters gunned down Blacks, looted homes and set fire to buildings block by block. More than 1,000 buildings were destroyed.

An estimated 300 people were killed, thousands were left homeless and an entire community that had been seen as a symbol of what Black Americans could achieve was devastated.  As reported by Reuters.

“This was the Mecca. Tulsa’s considerably what Atlanta is today,” said Duke Durant, 30, a Tulsa native, referring to one of the U.S. cities noted for its large, thriving Black community.

Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106, can still remember a house engulfed in flames and the bodies stacked in truck-beds, one hundred years later.

“I was quite a little kid but I remember running and the soldiers were coming in,” Randle said in an interview with Reuters as her hometown of Tulsa prepared to mark one of the darkest chapters in its history.

Friday’s Black Wall Street Legacy Festival included a parade led by Randle and two other centenarian survivors, Viola Fletcher and Hughes Van Ellis. The three were joined by community organizations and about 450 students from George Washington Carver Middle School, where the parade began.

At the parade’s start, members of the African Ancestral Society surrounded a horse-drawn carriage holding the three survivors and sang blessings, before marchers headed past tidy homes toward the heart of Greenwood.

“We are one,” Van Ellis, 100, said from inside the carriage.

The commemoration is slated to include a visit by President Joe Biden tomorrow and the unveiling of the $20 million Greenwood Rising museum.

The museum, which is devoted to telling the story of Greenwood, will not be completed in time for the centennial but there will be a “limited preview,” a Tulsa commission formed to commemorate the anniversary said on its website.

This year’s attention is a departure from the past. For decades, newspapers rarely mentioned the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921. The state’s historians largely ignored the massacre and children did not learn about it in school, according to a 2001 report written by a commission created by the state legislature.

Tulsans attribute the silence to a number of factors. Black Tulsans were traumatized, feared it could happen again and did not want to pass on the information to their children, while white Tulsans would not have wanted to believe respected members of their community participated, according to Phil Armstrong, the project director of the centennial commission, and Michelle Place, executive director of the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum.

Place said the 2001 report was written before it was too late.

“Many of those survivors of the race massacre were dying or had died so it was an effort to tell their stories and to remember that part of our history and not let it go to the grave, if you will,” Place said.

The history is also recorded in court records. Randle described the bodies and burning house she saw in a deposition in a lawsuit filed in February by survivors and descendants seeking justice for victims. Calls for reparations have long gone unanswered.

Greg Robinson, 31, a community activist and 2020 mayoral candidate, said he was pleased with the increased attention on Tulsa during the anniversary, but added that more work needed to be done to repair the damage.

“I’m glad to see people from across the country coming to understand the story of Greenwood,” he said. “But make no mistake about it, we have a very clear message that until justice is done, we have work to do.”

Tony