Amy Kapczynski, Reshma Ramachandran and Christopher Morten in Boston Review:

There have been no higher-stakes public investments recently than those the federal government made in biomedical research and production to make COVID-19 vaccines. Many commentators, conservatives and progressives alike, have seen the program that directed these investments, Operation Warp Speed (OWS), as a key example of how the government can enact new industrial policy—the deliberate attempt to shape different sectors of the economy to meet public aims. David Adler, for example, calls OWS “a triumph and validation of industrial policy,” concluding that the initiative “illustrates best practices in program design, as well as in government contracting” and should be a model for efforts to implement industrial strategy more broadly.

We think this view is seriously misguided. There is nothing new about industrial policy if it simply means public investments that yield vast benefits and outsized control for the private sector and comparatively little for the public. As historian Brent Cebul describes in his new book, Illusions of Progress, “supply-side liberalism”—a pattern of governance that directs federal money toward public aims but cedes critical aspects of policy, rules, and authority to the private sector—has a long history in the United States. In the late New Deal, ambitious federal spending programs like the Works Progress Administration gave significant control to local actors in order to overcome opposition of racist demagogues and business elites. This decentralized, deferential administrative model had staying power because it compensated for a lack of state capacity—and in turn, it helped ensure that no such capacity would be built. Cebul traces this template through the design of the postwar Federal Housing Administration and urban renewal into the 1980s and ’90s, when public-private partnerships and market-centered solutions became predominant during the Carter, Reagan, George H. Bush, and Clinton administrations.

The case of COVID-19 vaccines extends this pattern of political economy.

More here.

Jeffrey C. Isaac in LA Review of Books:

YOU CAN LEARN a lot about certain books from their covers.

The cover of Patrick J. Deneen’s latest features its two-word title—Regime Change—in caps across the center. The word “Change” appears larger, bolded in red beneath “Regime.” Below lies the disembodied head of an ancient Roman statue, knocked on its side with half of its face eroded.

What does it mean that Deneen’s newest volume is crowned by a phrase widely associated with failed, Bush-era neoconservative efforts to bring democracy to Iraq at the point of a gun? Does the destroyed image at bottom signify a tragic discarding of ancient wisdom, or does it suggest that regime change can be necessary and ennobling even if it requires smashing some idols? Or both?

Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed was a much-discussed philippic; its 2018 publication led to the author being hailed by some and reviled by others as “The Anti-Democratic Thinker Inspiring America’s Conservative Elites.” In Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, Deneen expands on the themes of his earlier book while developing a more robustly political account focused on liberalism’s failings and how it can—and must—be defeated.

Decades ago, a number of “communitarian” writers—including Christopher Lasch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Bellah, Daniel Bell, Michael Sandel, Jean Elshtain, and Deneen’s revered mentor, Wilson Carey McWilliams—critiqued liberalism for its narcissism, possessive individualism, and animus toward traditions and moral limits. Read generously, Regime Change seeks to repurpose this critique for 21st-century America. Had this book appeared a decade ago, such a reading might at least seem tenable.

But the book appeared a few months ago, during a time in which a dark and authoritarian anti-liberalism has risen to prominence and power in many liberal democracies, including the United States. Read under the shadow of this new authoritarianism, the book registers as both insidious and dangerous.

More here.

Alvin Camba in Phenomenal World:

A pillar of Indonesia’s unprecedented economic growth over the last decade has been its ban on the export of raw nickel ore. This national experiment in downstream industrial policy began with the 2009 Mining Law signed by former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, which mandated the domestic processing of all commodities mined in the country. The export ban on nickel was only partially implemented in 2014 amid widespread opposition from the mining sector, and it came into full effect in 2020.

Before the ban, Indonesia predominantly exported raw nickel ore, which is minimally processed into nickel matte. The country’s nickel-related exports were a modest US$6 billion in 2013. By 2022, this figure had risen to nearly US$30 billion, propelled by the exports of higher value-added products such as stainless steel and battery materials.

Chinese firms that were large players in the downstream nickel-based production had no choice but to expand their operations within Indonesia to secure access to its abundant nickel resources. The rapid growth of the nickel sector was facilitated by direct investments under the Belt and Road Initiative. Chinese state-owned banks financed the construction of coal power plants and basic infrastructure, integral components of the industrial areas that fostered economies of scale and agglomeration.

The outcomes of these policies have been mixed.

More here.

William Callison in Sidecar:

Having led his libertarian party alliance La Libertad Avanza into Congress in 2021, the far-right Argentine politician Javier Milei has once again outperformed expectations. In the August presidential primaries he received 30% of the vote – beating the two candidates from the centre-left Unidad Ciudadana, who won only 27% between them, and those from the centre-right Juntos por el Cambio, who came away with 28%. Now, in the run up to the general election of 22 October, Milei sits alone atop every poll. The only uncertainty is whether he can break the threshold to avoid a second round.

For many onlookers, Milei’s politics have been difficult to classify. He is a former semi-professional footballer, rock musician, comic-con cosplayer, tantric sex guru and professor of economics. He is also a red-faced television pundit and self-made internet meme. Caricature of this admittedly cartoonish figure is the crutch of countless op-eds, which reduce him to a Trump knock-off with an even more eccentric hairstyle (his nickname is ‘The Wig’). Others view Milei as another iteration of Latin America’s amorphous ‘populist’ phenomenon. As an article in Foreign Affairs put it, the region’s socioeconomic volatility has a tendency to produce ‘radical iconoclasts’: ‘Milei, Castillo, Bolsonaro, Chávez, and Bukele would probably not have risen in a more stable setting.’ In this binary frame – liberal stability versus populist demagoguery – all variants of ‘anti-establishment’ politics are lumped together, with little sense of their local particularities.

More here.

Jesse Barron in Book Forum:

IN HIS 1980 ESSAY ON THE AMERICAN SCENE, “Within the Context of No Context,” George W. S. Trow supplies an anecdote from Harvard in the early 1960s. During an art history class on the Dutch masters, a Black student described Rembrandt as “‘belonging’ to the white students in the room.” The white students totally agreed with this. “They acknowledged that they were at one with Rembrandt,” Trow writes. “They acknowledged their dominance. They offered to discuss, at any length, their inherited power to oppress.”

At the time, the prevailing wisdom was that these students were expressing “white guilt.” A generation later, Trow thinks the prevailing wisdom was wrong. “No,” he writes, “it was white euphoria. Many, many white children of that day felt the power of their inheritance for the first time in the act of rejecting it.” One way to look at Trow’s revision is as a cynical teardown of ’60s idealism: it looked sincere in the moment but was actually just privileged self-indulgence. But guilt and euphoria are fully compatible moods, not mutually exclusive ones. You can usually detect both of them whenever the children of privilege try to describe their own experience.

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Rachel Cusk in Harper’s Magazine:

Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did—the rest of her remained obstinately alive. She took a considerable time to die and outlasted the nurses’ predictions by many days, so that those of us who had been summoned to her bedside had to depart and return to our lives.

No one cried at her death, though among the congregation at the funeral there were some outbursts of shocked weeping, as though at the sight of death being surprised in the act of stealing from life. It was the entrance of the coffin, rather than the death itself, that constituted the violence of this act. The coffin was shocking, and this must always be the case, whether or not one disliked being confined to the facts as much as our mother had. The body inside the coffin was entirely factual. She had never seemed to take much notice of her body: it had been her vehicle, that was all. But its authority, it turned out, had been absolute.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Picture this: the setting sun paints a cornfield in dazzling hues of amber and gold. Thousands of corn stalks, heavy with cobs and rustling leaves, tower over everyone—kids running though corn mazes; farmers examining their crops; and robots whizzing by as they gently pluck ripe, sweet ears for the fall harvest.

Wait, robots?

Idyllic farmlands and robots may seem a strange couple. But thanks to increasingly sophisticated software allowing robots to “see” their surroundings—a technology called computer vision—they’re rapidly integrating into our food production mainline. Robots are now performing everyday chores, such as harvesting ripe fruits or destroying crop-withering weeds. With an ongoing shortage in farmworkers, the hope is that machines could help boost crop harvests, reliably bring fresh fruits and veggies to our dinner tables, and minimize waste. To fulfill the vision, robot farmworkers need to be able to traverse complex and confusing farmlands. Unfortunately, these machines aren’t the best navigators. They tend to get lost, especially when faced with complex and challenging terrain. Like kids struggling in a corn maze, robots forget their location so often the symptom has a name: the kidnapped robot problem.

More here.

The Heart of Herakles

Lying under the stars,
In the summer night,
Late, while the autumn
Constellations climb the sky,
As the cluster of Hercules
Falls down the west
I put the telescope by
And watch Deneb
Move toward the zenith.
My body is asleep. Only
My eyes and brain are awake.
The stars stand around me
Like gold eyes. I can no longer
Tell where I begin and leave off.
The faint breeze in the dark pines,
And the invisible grass,
The tipping earth, the swarming stars
Have an eye that sees itself.

by Kenneth Rexroth
from News of the Universe, by Robert Bly
Sierra Club Books, 1995

Madeleine Connors in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

John Waters was kicked out of NYU film school for smoking marijuana. Even that incubator for original filmmakers couldn’t handle him. Now, among people I know, announcing yourself as a graduate of NYU film school is a shorthand for being an uppity, social-climbing brat (I should know, I’m one of them). It’s so much cooler to be John Waters. He’s a degenerate and an iconoclast, making even the most daring artists look like uninspired conformists. In fact, I don’t know anyone who dislikes John Waters. If I did, I would think it was an easy tell that they were boring and had bad sex.

Almost an hour into Multiple Maniacs, the protagonist—a murderous drag queen—gets raped by a giant lobster. The scene plays for slapstick laughs, and in the screening at the Academy Museum on September 21, the audience was cackling. (If a filmmaker attempted this today, he would naturally be crucified, but Waters pulls it off.) The 1970 film has not lost its sting, even decades later. Waters manages to violate every taboo.

More here.

Andrew Deck in Rest of World:

A string of job postings from high-profile training data companies, such as Scale AI and Appen, are recruiting poets, novelists, playwrights, or writers with a PhD or master’s degree. Dozens more seek general annotators with humanities degrees, or years of work experience in literary fields. The listings aren’t limited to English: Some are looking specifically for poets and fiction writers in Hindi and Japanese, as well as writers in languages less represented on the internet.

The companies say contractors will write short stories on a given topic to feed them into AI models. They will also use these workers to provide feedback on the literary quality of their current AI-generated text.

More here.

Zofeen T Ebrahim in The Guardian:

Deep in Pakistan’s countryside, Sindhi Chhokri and her teenage brother Toxic Sufi are raising a few eyebrows.

Under the banner the Pahnji Gang, the siblings have also been finding an audience for their rap music in rural Sindh. “Growing up, it was hard to navigate past a string of unsaid things that did not seem right. And when we did, we would be reprimanded by the village elders,” says Sindhi Chhokri, real name Urooj Fatima, speaking from her village in Yaqoob Kapri, near Jhuddo city.

Her 18-year-old brother, Mohammad Kapri, who raps as Toxic Sufi, says music has allowed them to “speak freely” about issues that are otherwise “conveniently shoved under the carpet because they make people uneasy”.

Songs around sexual violence, “honour” killings, police brutality, child labour, even enforced disappearances, are winning the pair a YouTube following although Fatima says they still cannot afford a studio to record videos.

More here.

Emilie Lucchesi in Discover:

In 1978, Kathy Kleiner was asleep in her bed at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University when serial killer Ted Bundy entered through an unlocked door. After attacking two of her sorority sisters, Bundy found Kathy’s door also unlocked. Kathy survived the attack and is one of only a few Bundy survivors. When we began writing her memoir, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy, she said she wanted to weave in as many stories about the other victims as possible. For about two years, I researched the more than 30 women and girls Bundy killed. By the time I started compiling their biographies for an appendix, I often felt stressed, saddened and a bit on edge. There were certain victims who I thought about daily. Later, I learned I had empathy overload, an experience that social scientists are finding can happen to people in both their professional and personal lives.

From Science:

We asked young scientists this question: If you could introduce any two scientists, regardless of where and when they lived, whom would you choose, and how would their collaboration change the course of history? Read a selection of the responses here. Follow NextGen Voices on social media with hashtag #NextGenSci.

Randy Boyagoda at the New York Times:

Bookish flexing aside, I have for years been an evangelist for Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. And “evangelizing” is an apt word, given the vibrant, mirror-dark religious feeling of his books. Fosse converted to Catholicism in 2012, when he was already a well-established playwright and fiction writer in his native Norway, which celebrates Fosse with a biannual festival dedicated to his work. (The most recent took place this past summer, over 12 days.) His international stature and popularity in a generally secular country is a strong indicator that Fosse’s books aren’t just for the faithful: Indeed, many religiously minded readers of the Chesterton, Lewis and Tolkien club may be put off by Fosse’s formal and stylistic demands, and also by his obscure, at times even willfully inchoate writing about human and divine life.

The Nobel announcement comes only a few weeks before his latest novel, “A Shining,” will be published in English (beautifully and brilliantly translated, as was “Septology,” by Damion Searls), and it affords an excellent occasion to make a stronger case for why reading Fosse is a singular and transporting experience.

more here.

Jackson Arn at The New Yorker:

In a past life, he was an arsonist. A bold accusation, I realize, but nobody makes that many paintings, drawings, and photographs of fire without some buried lust for the real deal. By the time I left “Ed Ruscha / Now Then,” an XXL retrospective at moma comprising some two hundred works produced between the Eisenhower years and the present, I had lost count of the burning things, which are as lowbrow as a diner and as la-di-da as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The title of Ruscha’s 1964 photo series, “Various Small Fires and Milk,” could have been, minus the milk, a reasonable title for the exhibition itself, if he hadn’t painted various large ones, too.

The strangest thing about these fires, other than their quantity, is their calm. There are no people running out of lacma, and if there were you get the feeling they’d be fine. Tranquillity, often simple but rarely simpleminded, may be Ruscha’s essential quality as an artist.

more here.

Rosemarie Ostler in Lapham’s Quarterly:

Corn offers an example of how English words evolved in America. Before 1492, the plant that Americans call corn (Zea mays) was unknown in England. The word corn was a general term for grain, usually referring to whichever cereal crop was most abundant in the region. For instance, corn meant wheat in England, but usually referred to oats in Ireland. When American corn came to Britain, it was named maize, the English version of mahiz, an Indigenous Arawakan word adopted by the Spanish. When the first colonists encountered it in North America, however, they almost always referred to it as corn or Indian corn, probably because it was the main cereal crop of the area.

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Ben R. Newell and David R. Shanks in the MIT Press Reader:

A famous experimental example of this too-much-thinking effect involves strawberry jam. The setup was as follows. Participants were brought into a laboratory and were asked to taste five different jams lined up on a table in front of them. After tasting the jams, they were asked to rate how much they liked each one. However, before making the ratings, half of the participants were asked to write down their reasons for liking or disliking each of the jams, while the other half (a control group) listed reasons for a completely unrelated decision: choosing their university major. The experimenters had carefully selected the jams to be representative of a spectrum of quality according to trained experts. The crucial question was whether the participants who were asked to think and provide reasons for their preferences or those who judged without justification ended up with ratings more similar to those of the experts.

The results were intriguing.

More here.

Rachael Scarborough King and Seth Rudy in Aeon:

Right now, many forms of knowledge production seem to be facing their end. The crisis of the humanities has reached a tipping point of financial and popular disinvestment, while technological advances such as new artificial intelligence programmes may outstrip human ingenuity. As news outlets disappear, extreme political movements question the concept of objectivity and the scientific process. Many of our systems for producing and certifying knowledge have ended or are ending.

We want to offer a new perspective by arguing that it is salutary – or even desirable – for knowledge projects to confront their ends. With humanities scholars, social scientists and natural scientists all forced to defend their work, from accusations of the ‘hoax’ of climate change to assumptions of the ‘uselessness’ of a humanities degree, knowledge producers within and without academia are challenged to articulate why they do what they do and, we suggest, when they might be done. The prospect of an artificially or externally imposed end can help clarify both the purpose and endpoint of our scholarship.

More here.