When COVID-19 swept across Uganda in 2020, the country’s clinics did not just battle a virus. They battled rumors. Pregnant women who should have been walking through the gates of their local health center for antenatal care suddenly stopped coming. Women living with HIV, people whose survival depends on taking antiretroviral therapy every single day, quietly interrupted their medications, afraid of something that had never been confirmed by a doctor. The source of that fear was not always the virus itself; it was what they had read on their phones or heard on the radio. A new qualitative study published…

Matt Garman, the chief executive of Amazon Web Services, has a straightforward message for Americans who are increasingly uneasy about the spread of data centers: pump the brakes and the country will pay for it. In a lengthy and carefully worded blog post, Garman argues that the wave of local protests against data center construction is not only misguided but, in some cases, deliberately fueled by foreign actors who want to see the United States fall behind in the global race for artificial intelligence. He acknowledges that data centers are easy to dislike. They are enormous, windowless structures packed with…