Ville Lähde in Aeon:

Sometimes words explode. It is a safe bet that, before 2022, you had never even heard the term ‘polycrisis’. Now, there is a very good chance you have run into it; and, if you are engaged in environmental, economic or security issues, you most likely have – you might even have become frustrated with it. First virtually nobody was using polycrisis talk, and suddenly everyone seems to be.

But, as often happens, people seem to mean quite different things with the word. So, what does ‘polycrisis’ mean? The term reverberated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh in November 2022, and in Davos the following January, as The New York Times noted. In the Financial Times, Jonathan Derbyshire chose it for his 2022 ‘Year in a Word’ piece, defining ‘polycrisis’ as a collective term for interlocking and simultaneous crises.

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Pete Riehl in The Millions:

Hiding in plain sight, the largely unexamined crack epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s has much to teach us about current US drug policy, the blatant racism of drug-related sentencing, and the power of community action. In his important, balanced book When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era, Donovan X. Ramsey takes a wide and necessary view of the choices—sinister and well-meaning alike—that led to the epidemic.  To complement his sweeping historical and political analysis, Ramsey also spends time with individual people who weathered the worst of the era and lived to share its lessons.

I spoke with Ramsey about the crack epidemic and what it can teach us about propaganda, criminalization, racist policing, and community care.

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Cara Buckley in The New York Times:

The tiny forest lives atop an old landfill in the city of Cambridge, Mass. Though it is still a baby, it’s already acting quite a bit older than its actual age, which is just shy of 2. Its aspens are growing at twice the speed normally expected, with fragrant sumac and tulip trees racing to catch up. It has absorbed storm water without washing out, suppressed many weeds and stayed lush throughout last year’s drought. The little forest managed all this because of its enriched soil and density, and despite its diminutive size: 1,400 native shrubs and saplings, thriving in an area roughly the size of a basketball court.

It is part of a sweeping movement that is transforming dusty highway shoulders, parking lots, schoolyards and junkyards worldwide. Tiny forests have been planted across Europe, in Africa, throughout Asia and in South America, Russia and the Middle East. India has hundreds, and Japan, where it all began, has thousands. Now tiny forests are slowly but steadily appearing in the United States. In recent years, they’ve been planted alongside a corrections facility on the Yakama reservation in Washington, in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park and in Cambridge, where the forest is one of the first of its kind in the Northeast.

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Melissa Koenig in The New York Post:

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The Music Pool

You have to put your head in.
It’s so much like silence
it takes all your breath
to begin
hearing it. Then you never forget
the sound of being held
completely still by someone you love.
Soon you will undress
but not yet

by William Matthews
from Sleek for the Long Flight
White Pine Press,1988

Advait Arun in Phenomenal World:

The world urgently needs financing for renewable energy, infrastructure, public transit, land restoration, and much more to face the storm of climate change. But these necessary capital investments in the green transition face real barriers, such as a high cost of capital or slow land acquisition. Policymakers, their critics, and investors alike are right to worry about these financial and regulatory obstacles.

The pandemic, commodity price shocks, and US interest-rate hikes have left global South countries with limited fiscal room to invest in cutting emissions and building resilience against climate change. The upper crust of development policymakers believe that the best way to bridge this green finance gap is to incentivize deep-pocketed institutional investors:  a broad category that includes pension funds, investment banks, asset managers, insurers, and private equity funds. Assumed to collectively possess the capital that governments do not, they are meant to fund and operate the green infrastructure and services people need. In this view, the trillions of dollars per year needed this decade for climate adaptation and mitigation investments are trillions of dollars worth of new assets for investors.

Policymakers promote “mobilizing private finance” as a solution that mutually benefits common people and investors. Achieving this requires the state to shoulder the costs as well as the investment risks; this is the logic of financial derisking, which operates chiefly through loan guarantees, blended finance funds, securitization structures, and project preparation services. Critics argue that these forms of financial derisking socialize investors’ risks while allowing them to reap profits, accelerate the privatization of public goods across emerging markets, and place the private sector in the drivers’ seat of the green transition. But it’s unclear if investors can actually finance all the world’s unmet financing needs. Is it technically possible?

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Greg Conti in Compact Magazine:

In recent years, as opposition to the cluster of ideological shibboleths known as wokeness has become the unifying cause of the political right, negative polarization has ensured that much of the left continues to fall in line with the latest progressive cause. Nonetheless, one strain of anti-woke politics has managed to gain some influence within the Democratic coalition: so-called popularism, identified especially with the pollster/strategist David Shor and liberal pundits like Matthew Yglesias. Rather than contest woke ideology on the merits, popularists limit themselves to pointing out its unpopularity with voters outside of highly educated settings. Politicians attempting to appease the boutique activist concerns of their far-left college-educated voters, they argue, will turn off working-class voters and thereby set back the liberal agenda as a whole.

A version of this popularist line of criticism was on display in a recent New York Times column by David Brooks, an erstwhile conservative exiled to the center-left by the rise of Trump. Reflecting on his fellow meritocrats’ addiction to rapid cultural change—and to punitive measures for those who can’t keep up—Brooks remarks: “Using words like ‘problematic,’ ‘cisgender,’ ‘Latinx’ and ‘intersectional’ is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells.” In their ruthless enforcement of new mores that originate in NGOs and higher education, Brooks worries, progressives will continue to play into the hands of a gleefully politically incorrect figure like Donald Trump, who promises liberation from this onerous moral oversight.

There is doubtless some truth to all this.

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Jodi Dean in LA Review of Books:

CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC INTELLECTUALS raging against critical race theory and drag queen story hour are receiving book endorsements from prominent figures on the left. Patrick J. Deneen’s Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023) has a cover endorsement from Cornel West (President Barack Obama praised Deneen’s previous book, 2018’s Why Liberalism Failed). Sohrab Ahmari’s new book Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It features a blurb by Slavoj Žižek. What’s going on?

Ahmari is the founder of the magazine Compact and a former editor with the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame. Deneen, Ahmari, and theologian Chad Pecknold have co-authored editorials for The New York Times. Together with Gladden Pappin, president of the Hungarian Institute for International Affairs, and Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, Deneen and Pecknold founded the Substack newsletter Postliberal Order. Vermeule, Deneen, and Pappin have published essays in Compact. Ahmari dedicates Tyranny, Inc. to “Adrian, Chad, Gladden, and Patrick.” It’s a whole thing.

The project of Ahmari, Deneen, and their postliberal compatriots has been variously labeled national conservatism, populism, Orbanism, and integralism (the view that political rule should be governed by the teachings of the Catholic church). It amplifies—and attempts to give theoretical expression to—the division within the conservative movement associated with Trump: a base infuriated by its declining socioeconomic status and the condescension meted out by the professional managerial class.

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Steven Poole at The Guardian:

Depending on which source of pop-rationality you consult, there are three, five, six or more ways of thinking that need to be mastered before the psychology-entertainment complex will consider you “smart”. So is there a good argument for four? And is making good arguments one of them?

Well, here one will not learn about syllogisms or the perils of affirming the consequent. The author, a professor of applied mathematics, has instead adapted a classification of natural systems once proposed by the whiz-kid Stephen Wolfram to describe in turn four ways of understanding the world: statistical, interactive, chaotic and complex. Statistics can help uncover broad truths across populations, such as, for example, the basic truths of healthy eating, but headline-grabbing claims can be statistically underpowered and so unreliable, as Sumpter lucidly demonstrates with claims such as that psychological “grit” is a hugely important factor in success.

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Dwight Garner at the NY Times:

Two pages into his new biography of Harry Smith, the enigmatic anthropologist, underground filmmaker, painter and music collector responsible for the influential “Anthology of American Folk Music,” John Szwed sends up a flare of distress. “How did I get here?” he writes. “Who is Harry Smith? Why am I writing this book?”

His unease is understandable. Smith (1923-91) is a hard moth to pin to the specimen board. Facts about his life, especially his early life, are hard to come by. The occupations I provided above aren’t the half of it. Smith had his fingers in a thousand pies, the more occult and arcane the better.

He was one of the great downtown New York figures of the second half of the 20th century. Scraggly, stooped, wild-haired, impeccable in his sloppiness, he was a knowingly inverted dandy, as Walker Evans once said of James Agee.

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From Lapham’s Quarterly:

Writing to his uncle from quarantine in Rhodes, a twenty-eight-year-old Gustave Flaubert complained of the graffiti he had seen on Pompey’s pillar in Alexandria: an Englishman’s name carved in block letters. What right, Flaubert grumbled, did this man have to insert himself into other travelers’ experiences of the column? “Have you sometimes reflected, old uncle, on the limitless serenity of fools?” wrote the young novelist-to-be. “Stupidity is immovable…It has the nature of granite, hard and resistant.” According to him, the graffiti turned Pompey’s pillar into a monument not only to the Roman emperor Diocletian’s victory over a would-be usurper, but also to the foolishness of the public.

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John Leland in The New York Times:

Human Chain

Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand
In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers
Firing over the mob, I was braced again

With a grip on two sack corners,
Two packed wads of grain I’d worked to lugs
To give me purchase, ready for the heave—

The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing
On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain
Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed

That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback,
A letting go which will not come again.
Or it will, once. And for all.

by Seamus Heaney
from Human Chain
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2010

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

The Moshiach came to Madison Avenue this summer. All over a not particularly Jewish neighborhood, posters of the bearded, Rembrandtesque Rebbe Schneerson appeared, mucilaged to every light post and bearing the caption “Long Live the Lubavitcher Rebbe King Messiah forever!” This was, or ought to have been, trebly astonishing. First, the rebbe being urged to a longer life died in 1994, and the new insistence that he was nonetheless the Moshiach skirted, as his followers tend to do, the question of whether he might remain somehow alive. Second, the very concept of a messiah recapitulates a specific national hope of a small and oft-defeated nation several thousand years ago, and spoke originally to the local Judaean dream of a warrior who would lead his people to victory over the Persians, the Greeks, and, latterly, the Roman colonizers. And, third, the disputes surrounding the rebbe from Crown Heights are strikingly similar to those which surrounded the rebbe Yeshua, or Jesus, when his followers first pressed his claim: was this messianic pretension a horrific blasphemy or a final fulfillment? Yet there it was, another Jewish messiah, on a poster, in 2023.

The messianism on our street corners is a reminder of Judaism’s peculiarly long-lived legacy. Who can now tell Jupiter Dolichenus from Jupiter Optimus Maximus, two cult divinities once venerated at magnificent temples in Rome?

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Rebecca Roberts in The Scientist:

Everyone knows about the importance of a good night’s sleep. Researchers have also shown the harmful effects of prolonged sleep deprivation on human health.¹ Because the primary indicator of sleep is a loss of consciousness, and many of the ill effects from the lack of sleep associate with the brain, sleep researchers have naturally focused on neurons for sleep regulation studies.²

Now, a new study published in Cell Reports has turned sleep research on its head. Researchers from the University of Tokyo and University of Tsukuba reported three key genes that are critical for regulating sleep—not in the brain, but in peripheral tissues.³ The findings demonstrate that sleep is all about protein homeostasis: endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress and downregulation of protein biosynthesis in peripheral tissues trigger pathways that induce sleep. “For a long time, researchers have focused on studying sleep in the brain, but we found that the peripheral tissues are really requesting the brain to sleep,” said Yu Hayashi, a neuroscientist at the University of Tokyo and coauthor of the study. Given that prolonged wakefulness results in longer and deeper sleep, Hayashi hypothesized that there must be sleep-promoting substances that accumulate in the body during the time organisms are awake.

More here.