Since the start of the war in Gaza, Saleh Abu Shamala, a 34-year-old Palestinian man living in London, has spent more than $250,000 trying to keep his family alive. Over the last two years, he has emptied his savings, borrowed money from friends and started a GoFundMe campaign, but it hasn’t been enough. He is more than $125,000 in debt. Months after the cease-fire, Gaza’s economy remains strangled for Palestinians like Saleh’s family. Israel’s long list of banned or restricted imports — including basic items like poultry, batteries and hygiene products — has also helped create a raging black market of smuggled goods sold at sky-high prices. Money sent from family members abroad is often the only way many Gazans can afford food and other essential items. One kilogram of flour, enough to bake a couple of loaves of bread, used to cost about 50 cents. During the war, it rose at least as high as $27. One kilo of eggs, once about $2.50, went up to $130. Cooking gas that had been $2 per kilogram climbed to $190. Documents and interviews with more than 80 truckers, merchants, brokers, business leaders, aid executives and former government officials show that the opaque wartime economy has had dire consequences for ordinary Gazans. Read the story. FEATURES ON THE COVER
FROM THE ARCHIVES Before ChatGPT, There Was BarbieIn 2015, James Vlahos wrote about the development of an artificial-intelligence-powered Barbie doll, back when A.I. was “nowhere near sophisticated enough to fool us into seeing machines as fully alive.” For psychologists who study the imaginative play of children, the primary concern with A.I. toys is not that they encourage kids to fantasize too wildly. Instead, researchers worry that a conversational doll might prevent children, who have long personified toys without technology, from imagining wildly enough. ‘‘Imaginary companions aren’t constrained,’’ says Tracy Gleason, a professor of psychology at Wellesley College who studies children’s imaginative play. ‘‘They often do all kinds of things like switching age, gender, priorities and interests.’’ With a toy like Hello Barbie, the personality is limited by programming — and public-relations concerns. Mattel, rather than kids, ultimately controls what she can say. ‘‘She is who she is,’’ Gleason says. ‘‘That might be a lot of fun, but it is definitely less imaginative, child-generated and truly interactive than someone with whom you can imagine whatever you want.’’ COLUMNS
COMMENT OF THE WEEK The Medium Is the Text MessageFrom a comment on this week’s On Language column from Barrett Swanson about how talking to the “chat” crossed over into real life: McLuhan’s famous claim was that media reshapes the conditions under which messages are experienced. The medium becomes an environment. What Swanson is describing is precisely that sort of environmental effect. The chat has ceased to be merely a technological feature of a platform and has become a psychological category. The students are behaving as though there is always an audience, whether one is physically present or not. For centuries, people often invoked God, providence, fate, nature and history as a kind of imagined witness. Now the students invoke the Chat. Not literally, but psychologically. The role has shifted. Instead of an imagined cosmic observer, there is an imagined network observer. That’s extraordinary, because it suggests that a technological structure has become a cognitive structure. The medium has migrated into the mind. That’s about as McLuhanesque as it gets. That’s all for this week. Email us at magazine@nytimes.com with your thoughts, questions and feedback. Stay in touch: Like this email? Forward it to a friend and help us grow. Loved a story? Hated it? Write us a letter at magazine@nytimes.com. Did a friend forward this to you? Sign up here to get the magazine newsletter.
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