Gardiner Means in Phenomenal World:

If they are remembered at all, the 1950s are now thought of as a lost golden age of stable growth and political economic consensus. But the second half of the decade saw rising prices, tightening financial conditions, diminished industrial employment, and stagnant investment. With knowledge of the turbulence that followed, historians have increasingly interpreted the economic history of the late 1950s not as a minor aberration to a stable political order but as revealing structural pathologies latent in the twentieth-century industrial economy. If contemporaries did not yet use the word “stagflation,” they might as well have, referring to the decade’s rising prices with terms such as “new inflation” and “recession-cum-inflation.”

Gardiner C. Means was one of the most astute analysts of the policy dilemma created by this anti-inflationary monetary policy. Means owed his original prominence to The Modern Corporation and Private Property, which he co-authored with Adolf Berle in 1932. This surprise best-seller popularized the idea that corporate capitalism—specifically, its tendency to separate ownership and management—represented a radical transformation in social organization. The book placed the question of corporate power on the agenda at the depths of the Great Depression, and Means parlayed this commercial and intellectual success into a position at the Department of Agriculture in the first Franklin Roosevelt administration. The New Deal’s response to that conjuncture was in part shaped by his distinctive analysis: the length and depth of the 1930s recession was, he argued, a consequence of an imbalance in relative prices between economic sectors—a diagnosis which prescribed national economic planning to raise agricultural prices and allow farmers to afford an expanded volume of industrial production.

Twenty-five years later, Means brought his familiarity with corporate pricing patterns to the distinctive problem of the postwar economy.

More here.

Pranab Bardhan in Boston Review:

Martin Wolf is one of the most influential economic journalists in the world today, and he is unhappy—to use his frequent metaphor in his new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism—that the traditional marriage between capitalism and democracy in rich countries is on the rocks.

Wolf thinks that “democratic capitalism” is the best system for fostering general welfare. But it has begun to fray, he argues, because capitalism has not been productive enough for high growth, and widening inequality has generated widespread misery and distrust in the basic institutions of liberal democracy. While plutocrats hoard wealth and dismantle policies meant to promote inclusive prosperity, a segment of the middle and working classes have revolted by embracing ethno-nationalist demagogues with seductive but ultimately vacuous promises, who in turn are destroying due process and political rights. Wolf thinks that restoring a general sense of citizenship, with shared interest and loyalty to the common good, is the only way out, but he is not very hopeful that the United States will remain democratic by the end of this decade.

There are valuable lessons to be drawn from Wolf’s rich and nuanced analysis, but overall the book has some serious weaknesses in both diagnosis and prescription. He tends to underemphasize the cultural factors fueling the rise of right-wing populism, and his proposals for reform are too timidly and thinly conceived. Along with economic precarity, it is cultural status anxiety and resentment that may best explain the embrace of anti-democratic figures in high-income countries. This is not a reason to condone economic inequality—on the contrary, we should do far more than Wolf proposes to combat it—but it is a reason to doubt that democracy will be saved so long as capitalism prospers and economic gains are somewhat more equitably distributed.

More here.

Susan Neiman in Unherd:

It is 85 years since the great bluesman Lead Belly coined the phrase “stay woke” in “Scottsboro Boys”, a song dedicated to nine black teenagers whose execution for rapes they never committed was only prevented by years of international protests and the American Communist Party. Staying alive to injustice — what could be wrong with that? Apparently, quite a lot. In a few short decades, woke was transformed from a term of praise to a term of abuse. Still, the fact that politicians ranging from Ron DeSantis to Rishi Sunak deploy “woke” as a battle cry should not prevent us from examining its assumptions. For not only liberals, but many Leftists and socialists like me are increasingly uneasy with the form it has taken.

The woke discourse today is confusing because it appeals to emotions traditional to the Left: empathy for the marginalised, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs can be righted. Those emotions, however, are derailed by a range of theoretical assumptions — usually expressed as self-evident truths — that ultimately undermine them.

Take a sentence the New York Times printed shortly after Biden’s election: “Despite Vice President Kamala D. Harris’s Indian roots, the Biden administration may prove less forgiving over Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda.” If you read that quickly, you may miss the theoretical assumption: political views are determined by ethnic backgrounds. If you know nothing about contemporary India, you may miss the fact that the fiercest critics of Modi’s violent nationalism are themselves Indian.

More here.

Malcom Kyeyune in Compact Magazine:

As the American Civil War was raging, the famous Prussian strategist Helmuth von Moltke is said to have dismissed the whole affair as “two armed mobs” facing off, with few strategic lessons for sophisticated continental theorists of warfare like himself. The saying is likely apocryphal, but it has stuck around for the simple reason that it conveyed a deeper reality of the time. As the world slouched toward the cataclysm of World War I, many smaller wars were being fought that, each in their own way, offered a prelude of what was to come in 1914. From the American War Between the States all the way to the Russo-Japanese War, plenty of lessons were there to be learned—but nobody was all that interested in them.

The time we live in now bears more than a passing resemblance to those years leading up to the Great War. More and more hints of what might be coming are served up each year, but it’s an open question who is seriously paying attention. One such demonstration came this month when both Saudi Arabia and Iran sent delegates to Beijing. There, the two countries took the first steps on the path to ending their rivalry, long one of the fixtures of the Middle Eastern geopolitical playboard, and agreed to normalize diplomatic relations. As they did so, they made no secret about who had made this huge breakthrough possible: Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping.

More here.

Madoc Cairns at The Guardian:

On Saturday 13 December 1958, the People’s Republic of China declared war on a bird. Mobilisation was total: 600 million enlisted for the fight. Their target was a tiny songbird, between five and six inches long: the Eurasian tree sparrow. It might seem like overkill, writes Stephen Moss in his history of human-avian relations, but in the eyes of China’s leaders the sparrows more than deserved it. An estimated 1.5m tonnes of grain disappeared down the gullets of said feathered gourmets each year. China was short on food – and short on patience. Peace was never an option.

Such extreme enmity, Moss reassures readers, is historically an exception, not a rule. Not that there’s much of a rule to be found in our millennia of coexistence – apart from how consistently we get birds wrong. Scavenging habits – and a certain native glamour – helped ravens coast into human mythologies as helpful companions across neolithic Eurasia.

more here.

Sexsmith the Dentist

Do you think that odes and sermons,
And ringing of church bells,
And the blood of old men and young men,
Martyred for the truth they saw
With eyes made bright by faith in God,
Accomplished the world’s great reformations?
Do you think that the Battle Hymn of the Republic
Would have been heard if the chattel slave
Had crowned the dominant dollar,
In spite of Whitney’s cotton gin,
And steam and rolling mills and iron
And telegraphs and white free labor?
Do you think that Daisy Fraser
Had been put out and driven out
If the canning works had never needed
Her little house and lot?
Or do you think the poker room
of Jonnie Taylor, or Burchard’s bar
Had been closed up if the money lost
And spent for beer had not been turned,
By closing them, to Thomas Rhodes
For larger sales of shoes and blankets,
And children’s cloaks and gold-oak cradles?
Why, a moral truth is a hollow truth
Which must be propped with gold.

by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology
Collier Books 1962

JC Hallman in Datebook:

Tompkins produced two fine books in the 1990s, “West of Everything” and “A Life in School,” but she more or less retired after that — until now, re-emerging with another impassioned missive that concerns itself with shadows and dualities and the self. “Reading Through the Night” is a perfect book for anyone who believes literature should amount to more than diversion and fodder for term papers. The recent trend in better writing about reading generally falls into two camps: books that tell the story of a writer’s relationship with another writer, and books that chronicle one’s reading life. Tompkins does both.

It begins when she receives an unexpected gift: Paul Theroux’s “Sir Vidia’s Shadow,” the author’s account of his tumultuous friendship with Nobel Prize–winner V.S. Naipaul, who died in August. Even more unexpected is Tompkins’s reaction to the book, which she is sure she will dislike. Rather, she is mysteriously enthralled, in no small part because Tompkins, a long-time champion of women and education, begins to spot bits of herself peeking out from the story of a feud between writers whose misogyny and racism and disdain for teaching is well known. How can that be? It’s so unsettling that Tompkins sets out on a kind of quest — reading the writers’ other books — to figure out what made “Sir Vidia’s Shadow” resonate so strongly with her and to begin to ask whether, contrary to critical vogue, finding oneself in books is exactly what reading should really be about.

More here.

Nicole Flattery in The Guardian:

In every argument, debate or article about the rise of the modern celebrity, one name always reappears: Andy Warhol. Do you know who first documented the minutiae of their life? Andy Warhol. Do you know who coined the phrase “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”? Andy Warhol. How did it happen? He made it happen. Warhol, the original narcissist; Warhol, the genius; Warhol, the void. He is responsible for the TikTok dancers, the Instagram models hogging the infinity pools, the needy comedians, the intense desire for recognition we are confronted with daily. It’s an awful lot for one notoriously frail man to carry.

I think the main reason why Warhol is blamed for our disposable celebrity culture is because of the superstars. The superstars were Warhol’s set, plucked from relative obscurity to star in his films, circle him and make him interesting, because Warhol’s only real god was work. Some of the superstars were talented; some were not. Some were beautiful; some were bizarre, and that was even better. Some were forgettable but some – and this is crucial – had something special. Charisma, charm, electricity, a presence that defied description.

More here.

Michael Le Page in New Scientist:

Balls of human brain cells grown in a dish, known as organoids, have been linked to computers and used to solve mathematical equations. The work is an early step towards using living brain tissue as a form of artificial intelligence, but this goal may raise ethical questions in the future, researchers say.

In a paper posted online before peer review, Feng Guo at Indiana University Bloomington and his colleagues say they have created “living AI hardware that harnesses the computation power of 3D biological neural networks in a brain organoid”. The paper states that “Brainoware”, as the researchers call it, can learn from training data and that experiments show it could have real-world applications.

Computer-based AI is getting very good at certain tasks, but this progress is being achieved by creating ever bigger and more energy-intensive AI systems, and training them on ever bigger data sets. For instance, the AlphaGo system that first beat humans at the game Go was trained on 160,000 games, more than any person could play in a lifetime.

Human brains use only around 20 watts of power, and people need to play far fewer games to become good. So some researchers think the way forward is biocomputing – using living brain cells as AIs.

More here.

Alex Raskolnikov in the Boston Review:

“Those in the 1 percent are walking off with the riches, but in doing so they have provided nothing but anxiety and insecurity to the 99 percent,” explained Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in his 2012 book The Price of Inequality. The “main fault line in the American society is . . . between the 1 percent and everybody else,” insisted celebrated economists Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in their book The Triumph of Injustice, published amid the 2020 presidential campaign. Dramatic wealth tax proposals by Democratic presidential candidates Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, chair of the tax-writing committee Senator Ron Wyden, and even an income taxation plan by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do not come close to hiking taxes on anyone below the 1 percent threshold. The same is true of the suggestions by numerous tax academics considering how to tax the rich.

But there are plenty of reasons to expand the conversation about higher taxes to some of those in the 99 percent—specifically those with incomes in the 90th to 99th percentile. Let us call them the affluent.

More here.

Anne Fadiman at Harper’s Magazine:

Until last summer, we had a dead frog in our freezer. When Bunky died, George and I thought we should wait to bury him till both our grown children were home, so we put him in a Ziploc bag and propped him on his side on a shallow shelf in the freezer door, just above the icemaker. Bunky was flat and compact and, very soon, as rigid as a cell phone. He fit perfectly. I’d always wondered what KitchenAid intended that shelf for—it was too narrow for any food I could think of—but now we knew. It was intended to hold a frog.

There are two kinds of pets—the ones you choose and the ones that happen to you. Bunky belonged to the second category. He entered our family in the haphazard fashion of pets of that ilk: tadpole kit (cubical plastic “habitat” with domed top, like nave of Hagia Sophia, sans tadpole but accompanied by redeemable coupon), left by educational-toy-oriented grandmother for granddaughter under Christmas tree; kit sidelined for years on toy shelf; kit discovered by granddaughter’s preschool-age little brother; tadpole coveted; tadpole coupon redeemed by parents; tadpole shipped to New York City from Florida in Styrofoam container; tadpole universally admired for transparent skin (visibly beating heart!) and awesome metamorphosis (weird whiskers! hind legs! front legs! no more tail!); froglet admired somewhat less; adult frog mostly ignored, except by visiting small boys, who, if they didn’t have frogs themselves, paused to pay brief homage before moving on to Legos, and by owner’s father, who, despite initial intentions to teach son responsibility through pet care, ended up feeding frog (Stage Two Food Nuggets, meted out with tiny yellow Stage Two Food Serving Spoon dainty enough for fairy) and, once frog graduated from Hagia Sophia, cleaning aquarium, first two-gallon plastic, then four-gallon glass (challenging, because frog, coated with gelatinous goo, required apprehension and temporary relocation while aquarium was emptied, refilled, and doctored with dechlorinating crystals, and damn, was he slippery).

more here.

Albert Camus at the Paris Review:

Their fondness for animals. A multistory pet shop: canaries on the second floor, great apes at the top. A couple of years ago, a man was arrested on Fifth Avenue for driving a giraffe around in his truck. He explained that his giraffe didn’t get enough air out in the suburbs where he kept it and that he’d found this to be a good way to get it some air. In Central Park, a lady brought a gazelle to graze. To the court, she explained that the gazelle was a person. “Yet it doesn’t speak,” the judge said. “Oh, yes, it speaks the language of lovingkindness.” Five­-dollar fine. There’s also the three-­kilometer tunnel under the Hudson and the impressive bridge to New Jersey.

After the talk, a drink with Schiffrin and Dolorès Vanetti— who speaks the purest slang I’ve ever heard—and with others, too. Madame Schiffrin asks if I was ever an actor.

more here.

Mitch Leslie in Science:

Stephanie Blendermann, 65, had good reason to worry about heart disease. Three of her sisters died in their 40s or early 50s from heart attacks, and her father needed surgery to bypass clogged arteries. She also suffered from an autoimmune disorder that results in chronic inflammation and boosts the odds of developing cardiovascular illnesses. “I have an interesting medical chart,” says Blendermann, a real estate agent in Prior Lake, Minnesota.

Yet Blendermann’s routine lab results weren’t alarming. At checkups, her low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad,” cholesterol hovered around the 100 milligrams-per-deciliter cutoff for normal values, and her total cholesterol—the good and bad versions combined—remained in the recommended range. “I thought I was cruising along just fine,” she says.

But because Blendermann’s risk was unclear, in late 2021 her doctor decided to refer her to cardiologist Vlad Vasile at the Mayo Clinic. To pin down her susceptibility to atherosclerosis, Vasile prescribed a test for substances Blendermann had never heard of: lipids called ceramides. Long overlooked, they are emerging as powerful alternatives to standard markers of heart disease risk such as LDL cholesterol. Blendermann’s score was moderately high, suggesting that compared with a person with a low score, she was more than twice as likely to suffer a cardiovascular event such as a heart attack. “It woke us up big time,” she says. “The ceramides told me the bigger story.” She began to take cholesterol-lowering drugs and overhauled her diet and exercise regime.

More here.

Griffy the Cooper

The cooper should know about tubs.
But I learned about life as well,
And you who loiter around these graves
Think you know life.
You think your eye sweeps about a wide horizon
,…… perhaps,
In truth you are only looking around the interior
……. of your tub.
You cannot lift yourself to its rim
And see the outer world of things,
And at the same time see yourself.
You are submerged in the tub of yourself —
Taboos and rules and appearances,
And the staves of your tub.
Break them and dispel the witchcraft
Of thinking your tub is life!
And that you know life!

by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology
Collier Books, 1962

From Quanta Magazine:

By genetically instructing cells to perform tasks that they wouldn’t in nature, synthetic biologists can learn deep secrets about how life works. Steven Strogatz discusses the potential of this young field with researcher Michael Elowitz.

What is synthetic biology and what are scientists trying to do with it? Simply put, we could say that synthetic biology is a fusion of biology, especially molecular biology, and engineering. The distinctive thing about it is that it treats cells as programmable devices. It’s a kind of tinker toy approach that builds circuits, but not out of wires and switches like we’re used to, but rather out of biological components, like proteins and genes. Programming cells in this way isn’t really all that different from programming computers, except that the programming language isn’t Python, or C++. It’s the language of biology, the language of DNA, with the goal of making proteins that will interact with each other in some clever ways.

The potential medical applications of synthetic biology are huge. But also, the approach holds promise for illuminating how life works at the deepest level. It’s one thing to strip cells apart to see how they work. That’s the classic approach to molecular biology. But it’s another thing to tinker with cells to try to get them to perform new tricks, which is something that my guest, Michael Elowitz, does. For example, a while back, he engineered cells to blink on and off like Christmas lights.

More here.