Charles Krupa/AP

A DraftKings advertisement outside Boston's Fenway Park in March features former Boston Bruins hockey player Zdeno Chára. Massachusetts started allowing online sports wagering March 10, 2023.

Tyree Singleton admits to having a gambling addiction, but says that he can manage his habit. He says he started out playing roulette but his heart led him to sports betting.

“I’m arrogantly confident in my sports knowledge in many different sports, so I feel like whatever bet I’m going to make I’m making to win,” he says, checking the FanDuel app on his phone from the comfort of his apartment living room in Philadelphia, where he is watching what else: sports.

As the Denver Nuggets finished off the Miami Heat in Game 5 of the NBA Finals to win the team’s first championship in franchise history, he wasn’t celebrating the win. He’d lost money thinking that Miami could win the series. It was a long shot, so he wasn’t upset about losing. And he didn’t care about the Finals MVP – Nikola Jokić’s impressive closeout performance of 28 points with 16 rebounds and four assists. He lamented that in the closing minutes, Jimmy Butler of the Heat made two 3-pointers – he bet Mr. Butler wouldn’t. He lost a chance to turn a $7 bet into $69.

Small $7 bets don’t seem like much, but when you place multiple bets a day on multiple sports, via a tap on your phone, it adds up quickly.

“Every day that I don’t bet is a missed opportunity. I don’t look at it as I’m saving money. I think that there’s a bet out there that’s guaranteed; I should take advantage of this. I’m leaving money on the table,” Mr. Singleton says. He has made $1 parlay bets, or multiple wagers, that have left him flush with four-digit wins.

Mr. Singleton is one of a growing number of Americans placing sports bets, both in person and online. Sports betting is now legal in 38 states and the District of Columbia, helped along by a 2018 Supreme Court decision that struck down a previous sports betting ban. Sports wagers generated a record $31.11 billion in the first quarter of 2023, reports the American Gaming Association, delivering a record revenue to the industry of $2.79 billion – a 70.1% increase over the first quarter of 2022. 

Jeff Chiu/AP/File

FanDuel, DraftKings, and other gambling apps are displayed on a phone in San Francisco, Sept. 26, 2022.

With that level of increase – and an estimated 7 million adults dealing with a gambling addiction, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling – comes more debate about regulation and the activity’s long-term effects on society. 

“In and of itself, I don’t think it’s a problem. I think there are things connected to sports betting that make it more likely that some people will develop problems,” says Lia Nower, director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University School of Social Work.

Research shows new bettors are young and mostly male, Dr. Nower says. Almost 90% of sports wagering is done online, she says, and there is no way for operators to police when underage kids are using a relative’s or older friend’s account with permission.  

Because gambling is so glamorized in society, most people don’t think that they can develop serious consequences from it, she adds. Her fear is that the generation growing up now won’t see sports as entertainment, but will only associate athletic competition with betting. Her biggest pet peeve: lack of government oversight. 

“The federal government is making millions of dollars off this, too,” she says. “Gambling winnings are taxable, so it’s not like the federal government is not benefiting. They’re just not doing anything to help people.”

She suggests establishing and funding an office of problem gambling, noting that there is no federal money being put toward this now. 

According to the American Gaming Association, since 2018 Americans have wagered $220 billion legally on sports betting. That has generated $3.7 billion in federal and state taxes. The state portion, about $3.1 billion, has helped fund things such as health care, education, and infrastructure, as well as problem gambling resource funding. The association released research in 2023 suggesting that 85% of American adults agree with the Supreme Court’s decision on loosening betting rules, and 77% support sports betting being legal in their state. A Pew survey from last year found that 57% of American adults say sports betting is neither a good nor bad thing for society. 

An eye on advertising 

The Supreme Court’s 2018 decision, which ruled the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) unconstitutional, put oversight in states’ hands. States allocate money toward setting gambling standards in person and online, checking sportsbook providers, and offer education and protections for consumers. The power to oversee gambling needs to stay at a state level, says Casey Clark, senior vice president of the American Gaming Association.

“If you look at what PASPA did when it was in place for 25 years, it’s pretty clear that the federal government trying to oversee sports betting was an abject failure, except for perpetuating and growing a massive illegal marketplace that was done by these offshore websites or corner bookies. And often illicit activity is tied to other illicit activity,” Mr. Clark says. In total there are 5,000 regulators in states across the country committed to monitoring gambling, he says.

Eric Risberg/AP/File

People gamble at the Native American-owned Graton Resort and Casino in Rohnert Park, California, in 2013. In-person gambling is allowed in some outlets in California, but Californians voted against online sports betting in a November 2022 election.

States will work together and tweak their response as time goes on, he says, noting that some states, like Utah, will flat-out not allow sports betting. Other states have thought about banning or limiting gambling advertisements, including flashy commercials with celebrities espousing the benefits of placing bets online and through apps. 

Mr. Clark says that his group believes that such bans would violate the First Amendment. Even so, one U.S. congressman, Paul Tonko, a Democrat from New York, is forging ahead. He introduced the Betting on Our Future Act in February, which would ban all sportsbook advertising – which he says has “run rampant” after the 2018 high court decision – on the internet, TV, and radio. So far, it hasn’t gotten much traction.

“I am pursuing this legislation to start a conversation in Congress about the real harms associated with disordered gambling, and the threat that constant deceptive advertising imposes on millions of vulnerable Americans,” Representative Tonko writes via email.

Promotion of a known harmful product is no different than the heyday of tobacco advertising, he says, when cigarette companies created catchy slogans and sponsored television shows. “That’s why the inspiration for the text of this bill comes directly from the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned tobacco advertising in 1969,” he adds.

Mr. Tonko says alarm bells went off when he learned that there are colleges and universities signing million-dollar deals with entities such as Caesars Sportsbook to bring betting to campus. The potential effects on young people, and research that shows a relationship between gambling product ads and increased gambling activity, inspired him.

Advertising is useful because it helps gamblers know what the legal sportsbooks are, Mr. Clark of the American Gaming Association counters. “It’s the primary way that we market responsible gambling content, tools, and problem gambling resources,” he says. “Everything that we put out has content on how people can get help if they need it, and I think restricting that kind of advertising is just going to put up a barrier to support for anybody who might need it.”

Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP

Democratic Rep. Paul Tonko of New York speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill, May 10, 2023, in Washington. Mr. Tonko introduced the Betting on Our Future Act in February, which aims to ban sportsbook advertising on various platforms.

Efforts to help 

Other countries have already started exploring safeguards, including limits on advertising. Australia, for example, bans sports betting advertising on TV from 5 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. and during live games. In the United Kingdom, where online betting started in 2005, the government reports that more than 400 deaths by suicide a year are linked to gambling. The government has opened gambling clinics for children because 55,000 of almost 400,000 problem gamblers were between the ages of 11 and 16. 

A difference between what has happened in the U.K. and the U.S. is how the systems were built, Mr. Clark says. Yes, the U.K. is implementing safeguards now, he notes, but it is retrofitting its system since sports betting has been legal for many years there. That’s in contrast with the American market, which is new and has protective infrastructure built into it from the inception. 

That infrastructure includes the American Gaming Association issuing a marketing code in 2019, after the high court ruling. The AGA updated its Responsible Marketing Code for Sports Wagering in March, adding protections for college-age students and athletes, and banning the term “risk free” in advertising.

In medical terms, gambling disorder is the only behavioral addiction formally recognized by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. 

“It feels identical to a hit of heroin or a hit of cocaine,” says Timothy Fong, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles and co-director of the school’s Gambling Studies Program.

Dr. Fong says that because sports betting has experienced rapid expansion in five years, natural questions arise about the possible damage that it’s doing versus the benefits that society gets from it. He acknowledges that increased revenue is a positive, and so are diminished criminal elements around illegal gambling, but that the flip side can be increased risk of addiction for people who are already vulnerable biologically and psychologically, or even worse, the introduction of gambling addictions to new people.

He emphasizes that gambling addictions can be treated with therapies, medication, and support groups. Stopping cold turkey is unlikely, he says.

Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, says 1-800-GAMBLER, a national hotline for people seeking help, gets a text, chat, or call every 90 seconds. All those people are referred to treatment specialists in their area. 

“If you stick with the self-help group, if you stick with therapy, if it’s available, roughly two-thirds of people [who] try to get help succeed,” he says.

Mr. Whyte says the National Council on Problem Gambling isn’t pro- or anti-regulation, but is in favor of federal dollars being allocated to treat gambling addiction. Legislation addressing this is going to be introduced by Rep. Claudia Tenney, a Republican from New York, and will be called The GRIT (Gambling addiction Recovery, Investment, and Treatment) Act. It would set aside half of federal sports excise tax revenue and dedicate it to problem gambling treatment and research.

“I got it!”

Back in Philadelphia, losing money on the NBA Finals didn’t dull Mr. Singleton’s mood. While the Nuggets are celebrating at their trophy presentation, he clicks FanDuel open on his phone, smiles, and quickly switches the TV channel to baseball.

“I got it!” he exclaims.

The Philadelphia Phillies have just lost to the Arizona Diamondbacks, with a final score of 9-8. The $100 wager he made on Diamondbacks left fielder Corbin Carroll to get two hits for his three times at bat has come back as a $350 win for him. It is a Monday night, the beginning of a new week of gambling for him, off the back of an $800 tally the week before. He bought himself a new Google watch for $400 as a present.

He is childless, lives alone, and is gainfully employed, he says. He has never ruined a relationship from gambling and has never asked people for money to support his habit. He loses money and loses sleep because of it sometimes. He wins big and pays his rent and buys material items at times, but ultimately, he says he isn’t hurting anyone by gambling.

“I would need some real circumstances to stop, because I don’t plan to.”

Mice under the floorboards. Falling masonry. Leaky sewage pipes. Asbestos everywhere. 

Britain has no shortage of historic buildings in need of repair. But none presents a challenge on the scale of that facing the Houses of Parliament, the heart of British power and politics on the banks of the River Thames, and which ranks among the world’s most recognizable buildings.

The occupants of this vast and dilapidated building, however, the elected and unelected politicians who work in what is formally known as the Palace of Westminster, cannot decide how to go about renovating it. Nor can they agree on where they should legislate during the work.

“We’re becoming a laughingstock,” says Meg Hillier, a member of Parliament for the opposition Labour Party who chairs the Public Accounts Committee. “We want to run the country, but we can’t make a decision about the place we work in.”

The debate over how to manage such a complex refurbishment, which could cost as much as $16.5 billion, has been going on for years. But Ms. Hillier’s committee warned in May that there was “a real and rising risk” that a catastrophe such as the fire that broke out at Notre Dame in Paris could destroy the building before it could be renovated.

Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal Programme

The iconic Parliament building, officially known as the Palace of Westminster, is seen from across the River Thames.

It is not an easy building to overhaul, covering 1.2 million square feet over seven floors linked by almost 3 miles of corridors. While the main neo-Gothic structure was erected after a previous building burned down in 1834, parts of the palace are much older, such as Westminster Hall, the vaulted 11th-century hall where Queen Elizabeth II lay in state last year for five days before her funeral.

A deadline. Or maybe not ...

The extent of the rot, and the dire risks facing the building and its inhabitants, are well known. In 2018, lawmakers voted to create an independent body, run by lawmakers, administrators, and outside experts, to manage the renovation project. They also agreed to move out while the project was underway. But those decisions were scrapped last year, sending the effort back to square one.

Parliament has now set itself a December deadline for a decisive vote on a plan of action. But that deadline is hostage to British politics: Facing an election next year, members of Parliament (MPs) may prefer to postpone a vote so that they cannot be accused during a possible campaign of wasting public money on a refit of their own offices at a time of economic hardship.

Meanwhile, Ms. Hillier reports that the toilet outside her office leaks onto the floor below, where buckets have been deployed to collect the water. Other MPs complain that crumbling staircases to their offices are often closed by safety officers. Sections of the building’s exterior are covered by scaffolding and nets to protect passersby from falling masonry.

Beyond these daily inconveniences for the 3,000 people who work in the building is the risk of a major fire or flood. Among the most pressing concerns is what to do about the basement. A central underground passage built for ventilation that runs the length of the building is now a tangle of steam and gas pipes, electric wires, and telephone and data cables. One MP compared the drooping electrical wiring to “jungle creepers.”

Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal Programme

A surveyor examines a door bolt in the Parliament building, parts of which are over 900 years old.

While the building exudes ancient tradition and pomp, its architectural design and construction – particularly its ventilation system – were groundbreaking in the mid-19th century, says Henrik Schoenefeldt, a professor of sustainable architecture at the University of Kent who has studied the original designs. 

“It’s a technologically complex building and that adds to the challenge” of renovation, he says. 

The Gothic towers that make Parliament’s silhouette so recognizable, for example, are in fact air shafts connected to an internal network of flues and channels. The stone walls are hollow and grafted onto a steel frame, masking a complex system of ventilation and climate control inside a building that has more than 1,000 rooms. This allowed lawmakers to seal their windows against the noxious air pollution outside and the stinks wafting up from the Thames. 

Much of this system is still intact and is another aspect of heritage preservation, says Professor Schoenefeldt, who has been working with surveyors to map out the air circulation features. “It's not just about the arts and architecture. It’s also about the technology of the building,” he says. 

The green bench effect

As MPs debate next steps, building staff has upgraded the fire alarm system, adding sensors and sprinklers, while some outdated electrical and mechanical systems have been replaced. Fire wardens patrol the building around the clock.

“We are getting on with work across the Parliamentary estate to ensure the safety of those who work and visit here, and to support the continued business of Parliament,” a Parliament spokesperson told the Monitor in a statement. 

Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal Programme

Workers repair a section of roof on the British Parliament building.

Critics say it’s all too little, too late, and that neglect of basic maintenance is one reason why the cost of long-term renovation has spiraled. Writing for “Politics Home,” a U.K. website, architectural historian James Stevens Curl laments “a deplorable pusillanimous national tendency to avoid spending money on maintenance. All buildings require maintenance, and failure to carry it out for reasons of ‘economy’ is daft.” 

Those who want to bring the project in-house argue that doing so will make it easier to control costs. Edward Leigh, a Conservative Party MP, said in a parliamentary debate that the independent body had offered “wildly expensive proposals” and would provide “very bad value for money.” 

But the biggest sticking point has been how lawmakers would carry on their work during a multiyear renovation of the building. Mr. Leigh is among a group of MPs who oppose any plan that would require them to move out, or “decant” in the parliamentary vernacular. The anti-decanters insist that building repairs can be effected around them and that moving offsite into a temporary chamber would be a waste of money. 

This resistance is more about status and tradition than value for money, suggests Alexandra Meakin, a politics professor at University of Leeds who has studied the renovation program. “For many MPs, sitting on the same green benches in the House of Commons where Winston Churchill sat, … that’s the reward they get” for being members of Parliament, she says. “To have that taken away is very upsetting.” 

Though fears of a backlash against the expense certainly unnerve lawmakers who face a tough reelection campaign, such concerns may be misplaced. Polls show that voters are more upset that MPs “are letting a piece of British heritage fall into the Thames” than by the cost of fixing it, says Professor Meakin, who is a former parliamentary researcher.

“The public,” she says, “have a far more mature and nuanced view of the situation than politicians give them credit for.”

Editor's note: The original story misspelled James Stevens Curl's middle name.

Several days of held-up holiday air travel, due to storms and logistics, have given way to slightly bluer skies this week. But the late-June tide of flight delays and cancellations has signaled the risk of more summer disruptions.

This is raising questions around responsibility and long-term solutions. That’s because the industry faces a confluence of weather-related uncertainties, surging demand from airline passengers, and challenges with labor supply and technology. The structural challenges won’t be quick to fix, experts say.  

“It’s going to take time to find lasting solutions to the problems that we have right now,” says Stephen West, director of the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative at the University of Oklahoma.

Americans, meanwhile, are raring to jet – and experts expect demand to continue to soar. Following the official end of the COVID-19 public health emergency this spring, a record number of people – nearly 2.9 million individuals – were screened at airport checkpoints last Friday, surpassing a 2019 high. 

People are purchasing flights “albeit the prices are higher,” says Paula Twidale, senior vice president of travel at AAA. “Keep in mind, also, that they’ve saved a lot of money not traveling for a couple years.”

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

A traveler checks the status of their flight at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, June 30, 2023.

That demand collided with factors like storms in the Northeast and reports of staffing issues. In the week leading up to July 4, more than 47,000 flights were delayed and some 4,000 were canceled, according to FlightAware, an aviation intelligence company. While cancellations have dipped from 4.5% last Wednesday to around 2% yesterday, delayed arrivals still hover at about a quarter of scheduled flights.

Bad weather aside, last week the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), airlines, and unions took turns pointing fingers, leaving many frustrated flyers to problem-solve themselves. 

Among those inconvenienced was 16-year-old Tanish Chauhan. On June 28, he waited for news of his luggage at the Denver International Airport baggage claim.

“Exhausted,” he called himself, standing in a long line around midnight. 

Due to two canceled United Airlines flights, the high schooler, who was headed home from Seattle to Newark, New Jersey, ended up stranded solo in Denver. Hotels declined to book him as a minor, so his parents scrambled to find a family friend who hosted Tanish last-minute. He arrived home Friday, four days later than planned. His checked bag is still missing. 

Ways to improve

Weather is the leading cause of air travel disruptions, but the risks are being amplified currently by a tight supply of key personnel – and in some cases also by wobbly computer systems. The airline with the most cancellations in recent days, United, issued a July 1 letter signed by CEO Scott Kirby calling last week “one of the most operationally challenging weeks I’ve experienced in my entire career.” 

He cited a range of ways to improve, including updated crew scheduling technology. Other observers have called for equipment upgrades industrywide; faulty scheduling technology was one factor behind major disruptions at Southwest Airlines last year.

The United executive joined peers at other airlines casting blame on the FAA for reducing arrival and departure rates. The FAA, in turn, blamed the weather and said the agency had added new East Coast routes since the spring.

Still, the FAA has faced air traffic controller staffing shortages at critical facilities without a plan to solve the problem, posing “a risk to the continuity of air traffic operations,” an independent government audit found last month. The report also notes that the pandemic delayed controller training, which can take more than three years. 

That means increasing hiring and training of controllers is necessary, but that won’t pay off in the immediate future, says training director Mr. West, who is also a former air traffic controller.

Marco Bello/Reuters

A plane takes off from Miami International Airport after the Federal Aviation Administration said it had slowed the volume of airplane traffic over Florida due to an air traffic computer issue, Jan. 2, 2023.

It isn’t a simple problem to solve, in part because controllers aren’t easily interchangeable. These professionals “have to be trained for their individual piece of airspace,” he says, adding that staffing challenges around other roles like pilots must also be addressed. 

As one point of progress, however, the FAA has agreed with recommendations put forth by the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General. The agency also plans to increase its annual hiring of controllers. 

Such solutions rely on Capitol Hill, where Congress is running out of time to extend the government’s funding and authorities for air travel. The five-year FAA Reauthorization Act runs out at the end of this fiscal year on Sept. 30; House and Senate bills are still in committees. 

Traveler preparedness 

Travelers are responsible for a level of preparedness, too, says Ms. Twidale of AAA. She recommends booking early morning flights to minimize the risk of disruptions, for instance, as well as opting for carry-on versus checked bags and buying travel insurance.

Passengers can also research airlines’ commitment to rebooking and compensation – tied to “controllable” cancellations and delays – through FlightRights.gov, a federal dashboard. 

“Knowledge is power,” says Ms. Twidale. “And planning’s important.”

Only so much falls under a customer’s responsibility and control, of course. On June 26, Ariana Duran’s JetBlue flight from Newark, New Jersey, heading home to Orlando, Florida, was delayed 11 times and then finally canceled.

The company reimbursed Ms. Duran for the canceled return flight, but not for the almost $700 she spent on another airline to head home as soon as possible. Ms. Duran, who needed to ask for an additional day off from work, received an apology email from JetBlue Airways stating that since her flight disruption was “uncontrollable,” she didn’t qualify for reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses. 

The marketing specialist says she understands some factors like weather are beyond an airline’s control, but she was frustrated by what she calls confusing exchanges with customer service – including an automatic rebooking for a week later that she couldn’t take. 

Overall, the experience has inspired Ms. Duran to do more consumer-protection homework ahead of future flights.

“You don’t really care until it happens to you,” she says.

Afraa Ahmed left with nothing.

When the Sudanese artist fled her home in Khartoum, the country’s capital, in late April, bombs were already falling on her neighborhood. There wasn’t time to pack a suitcase, let alone make a plan for the dozens of paintings and ceramics she had scattered across her home and throughout the city’s galleries. 

“I live for my art and I live by it,” she says of her life before a war that unexpectedly cleaved apart the lives of millions of Sudanese. Now, she can’t bear to paint. And even if she could, who would buy art in a time like this? “We all live every day in anxiety, tension, and fear,” she says from near the northern Sudanese city of Shendi, where she has temporarily found refuge. 

For Rahiem Shadad, a curator whose Khartoum-based space, Downtown Gallery, once displayed Ms. Ahmed’s works, such stories cut especially deep. “We formed to display the revolution’s art,” he says, referring to the 2019 movement that overthrew the three-decade dictatorship of former President Omar al-Bashir. “Since then, many of our artists have been able to completely devote their life to their art” for the first time, he says. 

But the overthrow of Mr. Bashir’s authoritarian rule was followed by more than three years of political upheaval, which culminated in the fighting that began in April between Sudan’s army and a rival paramilitary force, both vying for political control. 

Mr. Shadad wondered what these artists were going to do. 

Fatma Fahmy/Reuters

Rahiem Shadad, co-founder of the Downtown Gallery in Khartoum, created a process for supporting Sudanese artists who fled the ongoing conflict in Sudan. He arranges art in his rented space in Cairo, May 29, 2023.

But instead of simply asking, he and his colleagues at Downtown Gallery decided to come up with an answer. They created Sponsor a Sudanese Artist, a crowdfunding site to collect money for artists, joining the grassroots movement of thousands of small-scale aid projects that have sprouted to assist Sudanese uprooted and thrown into crisis by the war. From university students rescuing people from areas under siege to neighborhood committees buying supplies in order to open clinics and replace the city’s shuttered hospitals, Sudanese have responded to the recent crisis with action.  

“As Sudanese we realize our plight is not Ukraine, and it’s not the Notre Dame de Paris, where an old building burns and millions of dollars come out of nowhere to restore it,” says Azza Satti, a Sudanese curator based in Nairobi, Kenya, who was among the founders of Sponsor a Sudanese Artist. 

But neither Ms. Satti nor Mr. Shadad dwelt long in that unfairness. Instead, they and their partners began reaching out to artists, asking them to fill out a Google form answering a basic question: What do you need?

The replies that came back were stark and simple. Food. Safe drinking water. To get my family out of Khartoum.  

“We began to see how many people had fled with just the clothes on their backs,” Ms. Satti says. “And so we said, what can we do to help?”

Aiding artists felt especially monumental because Sudanese art was undergoing a renaissance. For the three decades that Mr. Bashir was president of Sudan, the country’s artists had worked in fear. His regime censored creative work and threw its dissidents into prison, forcing many artists into exile. But when a mass protest movement against Mr. Bashir’s regime ripped through the country in 2018 and 2019, visual art became its mouthpiece. “People expressed their politics with their brushes,” says Mr. Shadad. 

Overnight, murals appeared on vacant walls and underpasses, depicting the movement’s martyrs and foot soldiers, and sometimes sharing the times and dates of protests. A social media movement, #BlueforSudan, resulted in people around the world changing their social media profiles to blue squares in solidarity with the country’s protesters. 

Umit Bektas/Reuters/File

Artist Rashid Drar (right) works on a mural with a friend near the Defense Ministry compound in Khartoum, Sudan, May 4, 2019.

“Artists are not just nice to have – they’ve been an integral part of the framing of the narratives of the democracy movement,” says Linda Bashai, an adjunct professor of international affairs at George Washington University who studies social movements in Sudan. “People were exploding with the desire to create. It’s a marker of the democratic movement that it draws on this creativity.”  

Art is a language

Once Mr. Bashir was out of power, Mr. Shadad and his colleagues wanted to keep that artistic momentum going. Downtown Gallery, founded at the end of 2019, was the product. And from the start, the gallery’s goal was to create a space where Sudanese art could sustain itself.

“The idea [of Downtown Gallery] was always to have a space that’s self-sustained and not reliant on any foreign entity,” he says. “We wanted to be completely locally led and self-funded.”

And the plan had gone well. By 2023, the gallery worked with more than 60 Sudanese artists, both established and up-and-coming. In early April, it shipped a collection of Sudanese art curated by Mr. Shadad to Lisbon, Portugal, for an exhibition that would tour Europe. 

Then, on the evening of April 14, Mr. Shadad’s colleagues closed and locked the gallery as they would on any other day, leaving hundreds of works of art inside. But they never returned. The following day, explosions tore through the neighborhood around the gallery, Khartoum 2. Fighting broke out between Sudan’s army and the Rapid Support Forces, the violent culmination of a rivalry between two of the country’s top generals. Downtown Gallery – like much of Sudan – was suddenly caught in the crossfire of war. 

Since fighting began in mid-April, more than a million Sudanese have been displaced, and half the country’s population is now in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. To date, Sponsor a Sudanese Artist has collected more than $12,000, nearly all of which has already been dispersed to local artists, mostly via small grants of $100 to $500. 

For now, the organizers say, people’s needs have largely been similar to those of Ms. Ahmed, who asked for help getting her family out of the path of bullets. But already, Sudan’s artists are beginning to express what they’re going through in their art. 

Five hundred miles northeast of Khartoum, in Port Sudan, a collective of artists has begun organizing public art projects in which people can paint and listen to music to relieve stress. Other artists have started displaying art about the war on Instagram pages and other social media platforms. 

“Throughout history, art is always this time stamp,” Ms. Satti says. “Art is a language to tell the stories of this moment. It’s a way of narrating our own story.” 

AP

Ballard High School social studies teacher Shawn Lee talks to his students at MisinfoDay, an event hosted by the University of Washington to help high school students identify and avoid misinformation, March 14, in Seattle.

On Tuesday, a federal judge barred the Biden administration from contacting social media companies to persuade or coerce them into deleting content containing “protected free speech” from their platforms. The case, which will likely land at the Supreme Court, reflects a rising desperation among democracies to counter online disinformation and misinformation.

In clear emergencies, government jawboning of firms like Instagram to stop spreading lies may be constitutional. Yet for everyday instances of falsehoods parading as facts, many places are instead now tapping into the inherent honesty and truth-seeking of citizens – through media literacy campaigns.

In January, for example, New Jersey began to implement a new law that explicitly requires media literacy instruction in K-12 classrooms. In both its bipartisan support and the scope of teaching digital defenses, the law has become the leading model for other states trying to educate children and teens in how to detect accurate information with critical thinking skills. This citizen-centric approach to achieving digital competency assumes that citizens have a civic duty to embrace the truth as media consumers and creators.

In many countries, the effort has expanded to adults, especially to older people. Perhaps the most advanced country in teaching media literacy is Estonia. In a survey last year of 41 democracies, mainly in Europe, the tiny Baltic nation ranked first in this type of specialized education. Since 2007, when it suffered a massive cyberattack – presumably from Russia – it has been an innovator in helping citizens be at the vanguard of discerning facts and countering disinformation. Last year, for example, the government created a card game called Smarter Than a Troll to develop young people’s media literacy.

The survey, conducted by the Open Society Institute in Bulgaria, took measure of each country’s “resilience potential to fake news with better education, free media and higher trust between people.” Overall Finland ranks highest. Yet among former Soviet states, Estonia was first, and in media education, it was tops.

“If plucky little Estonia can do it ... I think the United States should be able to implement a similar program to great success as well,” says Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert at the Wilson Center.

As the court case in the U.S. illustrates, regulation of social media in a free society can be cumbersome and contentious. While government action could sometimes be necessary, the survey concluded, “education is the necessary, but long road.”