The Industrial Revolution created a sea change in the way people worked. For the first time in human history, the workers of the 1800s were selling their time rather than the products of their labor. Many workers found themselves working in sweatshop conditions for a pittance, with few regulations to protect their safety or dignity. When they agitated for a living wage, workers were often assaulted or fired, as their employers replaced them with other “unskilled labor.”

Though industrial nations passed laws about working conditions in the nineteenth century, for most of that century workers were on their own when it came to what they were paid. Unions fought — often literally — for better pay, but governments let companies and workers establish their own arrangements. …

It’s very difficult to predict the future with any precision. If you had told me four years ago that my biggest accomplishment in 2020 would be simply staying alive during a pandemic, I wouldn’t have believed you. But we can use patterns from the past to paint a broad picture.

What we do know is that none of our country’s serious problems got better during the Trump presidency (unless you thought our biggest problem was that rich people paid too much in taxes). Many of our problems have gotten quite a bit worse.

Joe Biden and the narrow majority of Democrats in Congress will have to make an attempt at governing after four years in which the Republicans didn’t even try. Even if Biden pulls off his COVID response masterfully, distributing vaccines and boosting the economy, he will still have to contend with issues like relations with our global rivals, economic inequality, racism, threats to democracy, education, gun violence, and the biggest challenge for humanity in the 21st century, climate change. …

What time is it? It’s a simple question and one expects an instant and precise answer. You probably can guess the time to within a couple of minutes, given that most Americans check their phones or other time-keeping devices at least 80 times a day. But for much of human history, this was a difficult question to answer with any precision.

Over the last two centuries, humans’ relationship with time has changed profoundly. We have made ourselves more productive and precise, but we have also robbed ourselves of some of the natural rhythms that used to shape our days. …

After the January 6 assault on the Capitol, and in the midst of a raging pandemic, Joe Biden’s inauguration is likely to be the strangest in American history.

Airbnb is refusing to rent lodging to travelers in Washington, and the mayor of the city has actively encouraged people to stay away from the event. Tens of thousands of soldiers are occupying our national capitol, and the National Mall is off-limits.

The inauguration, assuming it goes smoothly, should be the moment when the country can finally exhale after being held hostage President by Donald J. Trump (R-Florida) for four years. But the week leading up to it is likely to be one of the most tense in American history, as reports emerge about extremist groups that continue to plan terrible acts of violence against the incoming administration. …

In 1939, Americans were mired in an economic depression and the world was on the brink of the most terrible war in history. That same year, a group of New York business executives launched the New York World’s Fair as a way to boost the local economy and provide some entertainment for the public. It’s not surprising that the theme of the fair was the “world of tomorrow;” people wanted to look ahead after a decade of pain. Over two summers, the fair attracted 40 million visitors eager to get a glimpse into the future.

The fair had dozens of exhibits; 60 nations built pavilions (Nazi Germany declined to participate), and many of the world’s largest corporations set up shop as well. There were exhibits predicting the technology of the future, imagining robots and transatlantic travel by rocket. The biggest attraction at the fair was one of the boldest: General Motors’ Futurama. The exhibit was designed by Norman Bel Geddes, one of the world’s most prominent theater and industrial designers. Rather than do what other companies were doing — demonstrating their manufacturing techniques or showing off the virtues of their products — Bel Geddes wanted to do something more. He wanted to show fair-goers the world of 1960, according to GM. …

It was a time of deep division between urban and rural Americans. Many white, devoutly Protestant, rural Americans looked at the country’s increasingly diverse cities with suspicion.

They feared that the political power they had long enjoyed was about to slip from their grasp. These conservatives waded in a swamp of conspiracy theories and misinformation made possible by an expanding media universe. The theories convinced people that they were in danger and America was on the brink of disaster. They responded with violence and discrimination.

I’m not writing about our current era; I’m describing the anti-Catholic panic that captivated America a little more than a century ago. The right-wing conspiratorial playbook is at least a century old, and we can clearly see the predecessors of President Donald J. …

The disaster at the Capitol has rightfully absorbed all of our attention this week, but the elections in Georgia — in which two incumbent Republican senators lost their seats in runoff elections — means that the Democrats have taken control of the White House, House of Representatives, and the Senate. This is big — it’s the elusive “trifecta” that allows a party to actually pursue its agenda, bypassing many of the checks and balances built into our system.

It’s very rare for an incumbent president to lose the White House — Donald Trump is only the fifth incumbent to lose an election in the last century. It’s even rarer for a president to enter his four-year term with control of the trifecta, as Trump did, and manage to lose them all by the time he was shown the door. The last president to enter the White House with his party in full control of the executive and legislative branches, and leave it having been thoroughly defeated, is our last world-historically bad president, Herbert Hoover. …

It feels like our country has been in the grip of some form of insanity for a few years now. Our political system has gone berserk, tested by a person who should never have gotten anywhere near real power. Perhaps more surprisingly, Donald Trump has remained, if not popular, at least steady in the approval ratings.

Nothing he has done — from separating children from their parents to maintaining numerous conflicts of financial interest to profoundly mismanaging a deadly pandemic — seems to have put a dent in his approval rating, which has hung around 40% since 2016. It may be that his latest indignity — the assault on the Capitol — will be a breaking point. …