Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:

• The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think : Everybody knows about the decline in birthrates. Fewer people understand why—or just how significantly it could transform society in the next few decades. ( Derek Thompson )

• The Feed Is Fake: That “viral” song, movie, meme, influencer, and celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign . Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users.…