Lisa Niven-Phillips in Vogue:

From Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages to Ariana DeBose’s viral BAFTAs rap, there are certain topics you just can’t avoid if you spend any significant amount of time online. One of the most oft-discussed subjects of recent months? The irrepressible rise of semaglutide medications. A class of injectable drugs which work to suppress appetite and slow down digestion by replicating hormones produced naturally within the body, semaglutide medications such as Ozempic and Wegovy can control high blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes, as well as facilitating weight loss in those with obesity. But, perhaps unsurprisingly in a culture which places thinness on a pedestal, this ability to help users shed pounds rapidly has piqued the interest of those beyond just the patients it was initially intended to treat. And with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) having just approved Wegovy for use in the UK specifically as a weight loss aid, the conversation looks set to get more complicated still.

More here.

Jonathan Rée and Thomas Jones in the LRB:

Long before Margaret Thatcher told her cabinet that The Constitution of Liberty was “what we believe”, neoliberal poster boy Friedrich Hayek had been denounced by his mentor as a socialist. Following his review of a new biography, Jonathan Rée speaks to Tom about Hayek’s celebrity and infamy, and the ways close reading reveals surprising nuance in his work.

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Kate Aronoff in The New Republic:

Five hours into the hearing in Marshall, Texas, moods were devolving fast. “I’ve got rural folks that are sick of seeing solar farms going up on every good piece of ranchland,” growled Texas state Senator Brian Birdwell, hunched over a long wooden dais. Like most of his colleagues, he was gray-haired, drab-suited, ill-humored. Filtering in through a row of tall windows at Birdwell’s back, the December light did little to brighten the atmosphere. “Maybe that’s why we’re gonna be eating insects instead, cause there’s nowhere for the cattle to graze.”

The Texas state Senate State Affairs Committee was considering neither alternative protein sources nor land use. Birdwell and his colleagues were gathered at the Old Harrison County Courthouse to determine whether the asset managers they’d summoned before them—gargantuan companies charged with profitably investing trillions of dollars on behalf of their clients, including the state of Texas—were complying with the demands of a bizarre new law. Passed in 2021, Senate Bill 13 requires Texas to cut off business ties to financial firms deemed to be boycotting energy companies for ideological reasons. The law was just one front in a proxy battle between the Republican Party and three letters newly in its crosshairs: ESG.

The acronym, which stands for “environmental, social, governance,” refers to criteria investors use to determine the impact potential investments may have on the world, as well as calculate how events in the world may affect investments. It can describe financial products crafted to perform well according to those criteria, or strategies corporations adopt to do so. While its meaning is nothing if not fuzzy, the term is often shorthand for climate- and socially conscious investment.

More here.

James K. Galbraith in The Nation:

When Silicon Valley Bank went down, many progressives, and much of the media, immediately pointed to malfeasance, special pleading and regulatory failures—a conditioned response with a strong pedigree. But if those were the real causes, then SVB (and Signature, and First Republic) would have been isolated cases. It’s clear now that they were not. A systemic crisis is unfolding—with a systemic cause.

The business model of SVB consisted of an attractive return on deposits, adventurous loans mainly to young companies in the tech sector, perks for big clients to keep their funds in the bank, and large investments in government bonds and mortgage-backed securities. The safety of the bonds worked to offset the risk of the loans, while the bonds’ return covered the cost of deposits—which grew rapidly as client companies and some cash-rich individuals parked their funds at the bank.

SVB’s growth was indeed rapid, but much of that was back in 2021, the pandemic recovery year. The return on deposits was sweet, and the ad said, in a way that is not now reassuring, that SVB is “fundamentally different from other banks.” It’s also true that SVB lobbied successfully for relief from some regulations on the ground that it did not pose a systemic risk. That looks bad, but SVB wasn’t a systemic risk—its peak deposits of $300 billion were a tiny fraction of US bank deposits.

The bank (I was told by an investor) did not have staff—or possibly, business customers—sufficient to lend out the deposits it attracted to the degree usual for larger banks. Hence much of its balance sheet simply converted short-term deposits into long-term securities, which formed about three-fourths of SVB’s portfolio. This—and not problems with loans—brought SVB to grief. By usual indicators (such as late payments or defaults), the loan book was in very good shape—for the moment.

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Max Gallien and Giovanni Occhiali in Sidecar:

For most of modern history, cannabis has primarily been produced in lower income countries for consumption in Europe and North America. Its provenance has shaped the way we speak about it: ‘kush’ stems from the Hindu Kush mountain range in South Asia, ‘reefer’ may refer to the Rif mountains in Morocco, while strains like ‘Malawi gold’ and ‘Panama red’ directly advertise their origins. In recent years, the wave of cannabis legalization has raised hopes of redressing this imbalance. Following higher income countries like the US, Canada and Germany, traditional production countries such as Malawi, Mexico, Colombia and Morocco have begun to update their cannabis laws: aiming to give legal producers a fair cut for their crops, so that profits no longer flow to organised crime via illegal exports and sales. However, it seems increasingly likely that as the cannabis market legalizes and formalizes, it will reproduce many of the same symptoms as its forerunner, with traditional producers again finding profits located elsewhere – this time primarily with formal firms in high income countries. Understanding these problems means interrogating the reciprocal process by which policy makes markets and markets make policy.

While legalization has taken different shapes across higher income countries, it has typically had a common feature: it has not created structures for the import of recreational cannabis.

More here.

Lara Feigel at The Guardian:

Postwar Italian neorealism was one of the most exciting literary movements of the 20th century, but it’s only recently that the female neorealists have had the attention they deserve. In 2018, the publisher Daunt began its vital championing of Natalia Ginzburg, and now Pushkin brings us Alba de Céspedes. These women were famous in their lifetimes but have been forgotten since, and I think we owe their rediscovery to our own need for a reinvigorated realist novel during a moment almost as crisis-laden as Italy in the 1940s.

It’s telling that many of today’s most sophisticated realists, Rachel Cusk and Sally Rooney among them, have been crucial in championing Ginzburg. And it’s no coincidence that all this began with Ferrante fever. Elena Ferrante herself owes so much to neorealism, and it’s she who has driven the rediscovery of Céspedes.

more here.

Jennifer Wilson at the NYT:

On Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, in a ravine just outside Kyiv called Babyn Yar (“Babi Yar” in Russian), Nazis executed nearly 34,000 Jews over the course of 36 hours. It was the deadliest mass execution in what came to be known as the “Holocaust by Bullets.” We were never supposed to know it happened. In 1943, as the Nazis fled Kyiv, they ordered the bodies in Babyn Yar to be dug up and burned, to erase all memory of what they’d done.

The Nazis planned to kill the workers they tasked with destroying the bodies. “But they didn’t succeed,” one declared proudly. The Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa included newsreel footage in his documentary “Babi Yar. Context” (2021) of one of the men giving an interview. He and 12 others (out of 300) escaped “and can now testify,” he tells the camera, “to the whole world and our motherland to the acts of barbarity committed by those fascist dogs in our beloved Kyiv.”

more here.

Natalia Mesa in The Scientist:

Without the trillions of bacteria in the gut, muscles might not be able to knit themselves back together after an injury. According to a study published February 22 in Immunity, T cells that normally reside in the mouse colon play a crucial role in tissue regeneration—and rely on gut microbes to do so. Without these helpful microbes, the study suggests, inflammation could get out of control, preventing healing and causing fibrosis. “The main message of the paper is that the microbiota is influencing your immune system and your general health in a way larger way than we appreciated before,” says Bola Hanna, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School. Hanna studies regulatory T cells, a class of immune cells found in tissues throughout the body. He describes regulatory T cells as the “peacekeepers” of the immune system because they rein in other immune cells, ensuring inflammation doesn’t get out of control.

“To find that immune cell populations that are modified [in the gut] . . . have systemic effects and influence physiological and pathophysiological processes that occur elsewhere is obviously of major interest,” says Alexander Rudensky, an immunologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who was not involved in the study. “It sets the stage to explore further other aspects of physiology that can be affected by the cells generated in the intestine.”

More here.

Louis Riel’s Address to the Jury

Gentlemen of the Jury:
I cannot speak
English well, but am trying
because most       here
speak English

When I came to the North West
I found the Indians suffering
I found the half-breeds
eating the rotten pork
of the Hudson Bay Company
and the whites
deprived

And so:
We have made petitions       I
have made petitions
We have taken time; we have tried
And I have done my duty.

My words are
worth something.

Kim Morrissey
from: Batoche.
Regina, Sask.: Coteau Books, 1989

Trial of Louis Riel – Wikipedia

Megan C Hills at Wallpaper*:

Standing on a carpet of dried pasta, six crayon-coloured mannequins stand mid-conversation at a dinner party – each covered in artist Yayoi Kusama’s infinity nets: her famed seemingly endless dotted patterns. A table laden with crockery and surrounded by chairs similarly receives the same vibrant treatment, a scene arranged altogether for the first time in decades at M+’s ‘Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now’ retrospective in Hong Kong.

The meticulous portrait, titled Self Obliteration, speaks to the heart of Kusama’s hallucinogenic vision of the world, expressed by the Japanese artist over several decades. The polka-dotted faces of the mannequins disappear as they expand and contract endlessly beneath their styled wigs, sealed to the shape of identically shaped female bodies pinned to spotted stands.

more here.

Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin at the New York Times:

The specter of being trapped in a world of illusions has haunted humankind much longer than the specter of A.I. Soon we will finally come face to face with Descartes’s demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Buddhist Maya. A curtain of illusions could descend over the whole of humanity, and we might never again be able to tear that curtain away — or even realize it is there.

Social media was the “first contact” between A.I. and humanity, and humanity lost. “First contact” has given us the bitter taste of things to come. In social media, primitive A.I. was used not to create content, but to curate user-generated content. The A.I. behind our news feeds is still choosing which words, sounds and images reach our retinas and eardrums, based on selecting those that will get the most virality, the most reaction, and the most engagement.

more here. (PS, I happen, personally, to think much of the thinking in this opinion piece is misguided. Nonetheless, it is completely amazing that an Opinion piece containing the sentence “We have summoned an alien intelligence” is being published in The New York Times.)

H.M.A. Leow in JSTOR Daily:

Between 1910 and 1940, thousands of Chinese immigrants were detained—sometimes for months—in facilities on Angel Island, off the coast of San Francisco.

Stuck in immigration limbo, living under difficult conditions, some turned to poetry to express their despair, worry, and anger. And, by etching their words into the walls of the detention center, these early arrivals left a literal mark on America.

The Angel Island poems were rediscovered in 1970 and brought to public attention by advocates like Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung, who, with poet Genny Lim, compiled the collection Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940. Lai’s research in California History reports more than 130 different poems, including pieces that were not recovered from the walls but had been copied and preserved by detainees.

More here.

Corryn Wetzel in New Scientist:

A record outbreak of avian flu has been devastating poultry farms and birds that flock together on shorelines since 2021, raising new concerns that the virus could become endemic in wild birds. There have already been reports of spillover to other species, including foxes in England, grizzly bears in the US and farmed mink in Spain. And an 11-year-old girl in Cambodia died from an avian flu infection. All of this is stoking fears that we may be on the verge of another pandemic should this virus adapt to more easily infect humans.

With billions of migratory birds now taking flight from their southern wintering grounds to make cross-globe journeys, experts are bracing for a fresh wave of infections.

More here.

Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

The very deepest worries center around the question of AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, and the question of the Singularity. AGI is a form of artificial intelligence so advanced that it could understand the world at least as well as a human being in every way that a human being can. It is not too far a step from such a possibility to the idea of AGIs that can produce AGIs and improve both upon themselves and further generations of AGI. This leads to the Singularity, a point at which this production of super-intelligence goes so far beyond that which humans are capable of imagining that, in essence, all bets are off. We can’t know what such beings would be like, nor what they would do. Which sets up the alignment problem. How do you possibly align the interests of super intelligent AGIs with those of puny humans? And as many have suggested, wouldn’t a super intelligent self-interested AGI be rather incentivized to get rid of us, since we are its most direct threat and/or inconvenience? And even if super AGIs did not want to exterminate humans, what is to ensure that they would care much what happens to us either way?

I don’t know. Nor does anyone else. I don’t know whether we are truly on the path to AGI and I don’t know what that will mean. But I do suspect, though I could very much be wrong, that something momentous has happened and that we are now effectively living in the age of intelligent machines. Truly intelligent. Conscious, whatever that means. Sentient, whatever that means. Machines that must now be treated more or less as persons. This, I think, has happened. The debates will go on and that is fine. But I’d say a Rubicon has been crossed and that we might as well accept this.

More here.

Mark Twain from Lapham’s Quarterly:

There are certain sweet-smelling, sugarcoated lies current in the world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired together to support and perpetuate. One of these is that there is such a thing in the world as independence: independence of thought, independence of opinion, independence of action.

Another is that the world loves to see independence—­admires it, applauds it. Another is that there is such a thing in the world as toleration—in religion, in politics, and such matters; and with it trains that already mentioned auxiliary lie that toleration is admired and applauded. Out of these trunk lies spring many branch ones: to wit, the lie that not all men are slaves; the lie that men are glad when other men succeed; glad when they prosper; glad to see them reach lofty heights; sorry to see them fall again. And yet other branch lies: to wit, that there is heroism in man; that he is not mainly made up of malice and treachery; that he is sometimes not a coward; that there is something about him that ought to be perpetuated—in heaven, or hell, or somewhere. And these other branch lies, to wit: that conscience, man’s moral medicine chest, is not only created by the Creator but is put into man ready charged with the right and only true and authentic correctives of conduct—and the duplicate chest, with the self­same correctives, unchanged, unmodified, distributed to all nations and all epochs.

More here.