by Ken MacVey

By many measures wealth inequality in the US and globally has increased significantly over the last several decades. The number of billionaires has increased at a staggering rate. Since 1987, Forbes has systematically verified and counted the global number of billionaires. In 1987, Forbes counted 140. Two decades later Forbes  tallied a little over 1000. It counted 2000 billionaires in 2017. In 2024 it counted 2,781, and in March this year it counted 3,028 billionaires (a 50% increase in the number of billionaires since 2017 and almost a 9% increase since 2024).

Wealth concentration has increased in the US in the last few decades as well according to the Federal Reserve.  It reported that the wealthiest  .1 percent (the top fraction of one percent)  has increased its share of national wealth from 8.67 % in 1989  to 14% in 2024.  The top one percent’s share has increased altogether, now accounting for 31% of US wealth.   At the same time, the bottom 50% accounted for only 3.5% of US wealth in 1989,and in 2024 that percent is down to 2.5%.

Thinktank Oxfam estimated in 2024  that the wealthiest one percent of the globe has as much wealth as 95 percent of humanity. It also predicts that in the next decade there will be five trillionaires.

To put this in personal context, if you had a million dollars and  spent one thousand dollars a day (and assuming no interest or other return on your million), you would use up the million in a little more than two and a half years. If you had a billion, at a thousand a day, you would use that up in about 2,700 years.  If you  had a trillion, you would use it up in about 2,700,000 years.  This is the result of the simple fact that a billion is a thousand times greater than one million, and a trillion is one thousand times greater than a billion. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

The first time many of us learn the word “no,” it’s not in the context of refusal—it’s in discipline. A toddler reaches for the stovetop: “No.” She throws a block: “No.” In these earliest exchanges, no is a limit set by someone else, a redirection of will. It’s a stop sign held by authority. Children learn it as a small jolt, a micro-disruption in their experiment with the world.

And yet, the day comes when that same word becomes ours to wield. We learn—slowly, awkwardly—that no can be a boundary, not just an order. That it can protect us, define us, even save us. But by then, the baggage has already attached itself. We’ve been trained to think of no as negative, obstructive, and, in many cases, socially costly.

This is the paradox at the heart of no: linguistically, it is a word of negation; psychologically, it is an act of self-definition. It shuts a door, but in doing so, it opens a space—often the first space where personal agency can breathe.

The English no comes to us from Old English nā, a compound of ne (“not”) and ā (“ever”). In its oldest form, it was absolute: not ever. No qualification, no wiggle room. Cognates in other languages—non in French, nein in German—carry the same bluntness.  Japanese, for instance, often avoids direct negation by substituting more face-saving constructions like chotto… (“it’s a bit…”) instead of a flat iie (“no”).

Across languages, direct negation can be perceived as impolite. In many cultures, to say no outright is to disrupt harmony. Anthropologists studying high-context communication (common in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) have noted that refusals are often couched in narrative, delay, or metaphor. The word no is there in spirit, but rarely in its bare form.

In English-speaking cultures, we don’t always avoid the word—but we soften it. I don’t think so. Maybe later. I’m not sure that works for me. This linguistic hedging reflects the social weight we’ve given no—especially when spoken by women or anyone in a subordinate position. A plain refusal risks being read as hostile. And so we learn to dress it in apologies, in smiles, in disclaimers. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

Recently I’ve noticed that a new wave of state-of-the-nation – or, more accurately, ‘state‑of‑the‑world’ – novels tend to arrive clad in yellow dust jackets while bearing short, even one‑word, titles. I’m thinking of books like Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, and Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface. Published in English within a year of each other, in 2023–2024, perhaps their look comes from the fashion moment yellow is having. Although the trending shade is a softer, creamier hue than the bright pop of the novels’ daffodil covers, the books’ appearance is on point for this moment in the mid-2020s. This cheerful styling helps make bookshops’ cash registers sing, appropriately enough, like canaries. In a not dissimilar way to Tadej Pogačar, who has just won the Tour de France in his yellow jersey, these books are some of the leading literary winners of the past half decade.

More significantly, this branding evokes both the social menace of the yellowjacket wasp and the macabre suspense of the TV thriller with the same waspish name. Such books carry the visual sting of a cautionary tale, even though the trio of novels are also often very funny. Their spines flash like hazard tape or symbols for radioactive waste and chemical toxins. The promise, or threat, is for narratives smarting with ecological or technological dread and familial devastation. Texts like The Bee Sting, Butter, and Yellowface are comic, edgy, and hyper-current. The literary exemplars tacitly, and probably unconsciously, recall the work of Jordan Peele. This African American film director makes movies about social division with one- or two-word titles: Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Nope (2022). The novels, meanwhile, articulate our collective anxiety about global warming, gender and race relations, and a loss of trust in originality, truth, leaders, and institutions. In the terse titles The Bee Sting, Butter, and Yellowface the world feels compressed into a single, loaded word or phrase. The yellow jacket motif unites them: colourful and alluring on the shelf, yet signalling danger and the risk of a lethal heartbeat. Across these novels, the unmooring of climate time intersects with fractured family chronologies, as personal histories accumulate like toxic detritus.  Read more »

by Nils Peterson

Thesis: There’s the physical you sitting somewhere reading this, breathing the sweet air of the now you are in. Everything else of the you that is you is memory. Well, as we know, memory is a trickster, wily as Coyote in Native American stories. Notebooks help. Here’s a bit from one of mine and some thoughts about it what it all means.

a lost world

morning  bright sun  good jazz  soprano sax
above smoky piano on the record player  happy
wife gone off to do happy things  the world
either a flowering of daughters or filled with
daughters flowering  I eat some less-fat
mozzarella  tasteless but in a good tasting way
drink some spearmint tea  too much coffee
already  and tidy up the house  not much  but
enough  nothing to write about today  nothing
that I want to read quite enough to read
enough to sit here resting my hands on the firm
regular grain of an oak table while sun pours
warm golden honey on my back  once in awhile
I stir enough to jot something down

Well, that world was lost till I picked up an old notebook and found it, the poem (well, maybe just jottings) and the world.

We lose a world each day when we go to sleep. No, every hour we lose a hundred – a perfect quantum of a world lasting a micro second until a second quantum pushes it aside. No, not a hundred, not even a million. More. We must lose a galaxy each time we set off in sleep.

But each moment sends out a Voyager, a miniature spacecraft carrying artifacts from the Planet Now to a circling earth of the far-off solar system called Then. But memory is a counter-energy, an Enterprise flying from then to now. And then there are notebooks. Some might think of their co-author as a sly Captain Piccard, or, maybe, Coyote.

Another way – it’s nice to have memories tucked away in the cupboards of your inner house to pull out so you give the past a shake now and again like looking at a snow-globe in summer and trying to remember what cold felt like.

Here’s the next note in the notebook I quoted from above: “I put on Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble playing “Parce Mihi Domine” and the smell of incense fills the room. This is not a metaphor. It is what I smell and I need to know why.”

Must I believe that I really smelled incense? I think I must, yet I can see Coyote out of the corner of my eye. Read more »

by David Beer

There was a prevailing idea, George Orwell wrote in a 1946 essay on the Common Toad, ‘that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.’ It was only a couple of years before his surveillance society classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The aside in Orwell’s short essay captured a sense of pressure to keep-up with the technological changes of the time, a pressure to not fall behind and to not look outdated. We are feeling such pressures magnified again by the vast coverage and seemingly dramatic expansion of artificial intelligence. To not use AI, to dislike AI, to seek to limit AI, might, in Orwell’s terms, be seen to be slightly ridiculous. 

There is a pressure to turn to AI to be ever smarter, more predictive, anticipatory, ahead-of-the-game, knowing, hyper-efficient and so on. There is, as Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell have put it, a ‘smartness mandate’. We are expected to be integrating AI into how we think, work and do things. This is partly because appearing to be algorithmic and AI savvy is equated with seeming switched-on. 

A more AI focused future can seem an inevitability. It is just too slick and the possibilities are too great for it to be held back. There is an imagined future already set out for us, an imagined ‘silicon future’ John Cheney-Lippold has recently argued, in which the future seems to already be planned out and so somehow precedes our present. At the same time this AI future is not as predictable as it might seem, when we factor in the unrest over training data access, the convoluted financial underpinnings of the AI itself, and the profoundly uncertain economic and geopolitical circumstances. Read more »

A climbing variety of roses intruding into the covered outdoor deck at the Hotel Löwenhof in Vahrn, South Tyrol. According to ChatGPT this variety is called Ballerina.

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by Christopher Hall

Sometime towards the end of March in 2016, I exited a movie theater in a white-hot rage. I don’t think my common reactions to bad movies are out of the ordinary – anything bemusement to doubts about the collaborative potential of the human race. (Some movies force you to confront the bald truth that dozens of people were involved in making an abomination, and yet none seemed able to put a stop to it.) But this movie had been a personal insult. Like a child enraged that their parent had “told the story wrong,” I was livid at Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Yet I was, at the time, a middle-aged man; now, 9 years later, I’m still middle-aged (more or less), still mad, and I’m still trying to understand why.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the movie’s pedigree. The director, Zack Snyder, was clearly a fan of Frank Miller’s 1986 series The Dark Knight Returns, a tale in which an older Batman returns to action in a grim, still crime-ridden Gotham, and which features Superman as a Cold War projection of Reaganite power. I am likewise a fan of that series (although Miller’s Batman: Year One is much better), and of the other series which inaugurated a moment of potential emergence out of the rubric of popular culture for comic books, Alan Moore’s Watchmen – also adapted by Snyder. But it didn’t take long for that emergence to largely trickle out into caricature. The 1990’s were full of supposedly realistic comic books which did little else but glorify cartoonish violence. Sadistic Batmen and evil Supermen proliferated (some, like The Boys’s Homelander, have stuck around). In the 2000’s and 2010’s there were signs of recovery, and thus Snyder’s movie – one in which there is little to differentiate Batman from the thugs he pummels, in which Superman doesn’t smile once and displays an emotional range that rarely deviates from put-upon superiority – was a throwback. After the Bush years and the GWOT, the Great Recession, at the moment in the twilight of the Obama era where we were all justified in asking what exactly his guileless Hope had accomplished, here was a movie that took two icons of justice and transformed them into naked expressions of directionless, pointless power. I realise now, as I did not then (I, along with mostly everybody else, was still at the point where I didn’t take him seriously), that the moment was even more inapt; less than a year earlier, Donald Trump had taken his ride down the escalator.

This reflection is occasioned, naturally, by James Gunn’s new movie Superman. I’ve seen it and have to concur with the general consensus: it’s pretty good. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Ed Simon

Nobody ever told me that half-way through Jonathan Franzen’s door-stopper modern classic The Corrections that a sentient, talking, foul-mouthed turd appears. I’d have entered into rectifying this cultural lacuna of a quarter-of-a-century in a slightly different frame of mind had I expected Franzen’s sprawling family epic with its ironic Midwestern detachment as effectively featuring the equivalent of South Park’s Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo who appears to dementia-and-Parkinson-addled Alfred Lambert aboard a Maritime Canadian cruise ship, spreading its brown effluence and general bad vibes all across his white sheets of the cabin and then the white tiles of the lavatory. The turd is a hallucination (and he appears again), but it underscores just how much odder The Corrections is than the general literary conservatism projected onto (and sometimes declared) by Franzen would indicate. The author – frequently as castigated as any contemporary writer who hasn’t earned cancellation can be – seemingly desires the comparison to a Dickens or even a Zola, but The Corrections reads more like a less-experimental version of the writing of his friend and competitor David Foster Wallace, from the (annoying) blanked out proper names of corporations and organizations to the detailed explications of high finance or psychotropic pharmaceuticals. “Life…. had a kind of velvet luster,” writes Franzen. “You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal;” an apt summation of reading The Corrections itself.

Even twenty-five years after its publication, it’s hard to separate The Corrections from the circumstances of its creation. You might be familiar with the Oprah kerfuffle as regards his most well-regarded book, while the publication date of September 1^st, 2001 was arguably the most fortuitous bit of luck for a cultural release since the Strokes’ dropping of Is This It? five days earlier. Like many wunderkinds of his generation, there was and is a kind of schadenfreude in trying to bring the (obviously talented) Franzen down a bit, where one blogger’s appraisal of his being the “worst great writer” working today is somehow even meaner than Dale Peck’s hatchet-job appraisal of Rick Moody. Read more »

Rania Matar. Samira, Jnah, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021.

Archival pigment print.

From the portrait collection of the ICA, Boston.

More here and here.

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by Tim Sommers

In October of 1987, 18-month-old Jessica McClure Morales – forever after to be known as “Baby Jessica” – fell into a well in her aunt’s backyard in Midland Texas. She was lodged 22 feet down in the 8 inch well casing with one leg bent above her head. Over the next 58 hours an ever-expanding crew of rescuers worked to free her, eventually deciding to drill an entirely new, parallel shaft with a cross-cut into the well where Jessica was jammed.

Unfortunately, they soon realized that the well was surrounded on all sides by solid rock. Jack hammers barely dented it. If they could drill at all, it would not be quickly. A mining engineer showed up on the scene with a solution in the form of a new technology: waterjet cutting. Throughout the process of creating a parallel shaft, the rescuers could hear Baby Jessica singing the “Winne-the-Poo” song.

When the shaft and cross-tunnel were complete, the rescuers considered sending in a roofer, Ron Short, who had been born without a collarbone and could collapse his shoulders to get through tight spaces. But in the end, it was EMT Robert O’Donnell who crawled down and freed Jessica from her pinned position and then passed her back through the cross-cut to EMT Steve Forbes. Forbes then passed Baby Jessica to firefighters who carried her to an ambulance.

It’s basically impossible to discern, at this point, how much was spent on the rescue of Baby Jessica, but we do know that a trust fund was set up at the time that received 1.2 million dollars in donations, which is approximately equivalent to 3 million dollars today. At least on one estimate, 3 million dollars donated to fight malaria today would save 750 lives, 749 more than 1.

Was the rescue of Baby Jessica unique? Specific to a certain time or place? Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

A few hours’ drive north of my home is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Hanford, Washington. LIGO was designed and built to detect gravitational waves. When the LIGO project was started in the 1980s, gravitational waves were a purely theoretical phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

General relativity says that gravity should be understood as the deformation of the geometry of spacetime. If, say, two massive objects, like a pair of black holes, should collide, then this should cause waves to ripple across the universe. With enough care, we just might be able to detect these waves.

This is just the sort of large-scale, curiosity-driven, speculative research that depends on the support of far-sighted government funding agencies [1]. Over the course of several decades, the United States’ National Science Foundation funded many hundreds of researchers to make the pipe dream of gravitational wave detection a reality. In 2015, they succeeded. In my lifetime, we’ve gone from gravitational waves being purely theoretical, to detecting them, to being able to listen to them on our home computer. All thanks to decades of work by numerous researchers funded by the NSF and their home universities.

It so happens that one of those researchers was a friend of mine, Rauha Rakola. We did our undergraduate and graduate degrees at the same universities, me in math and him in physics. Rauha’s PhD thesis developed some of the theoretical and computational physics needed for gravitational wave detection. It took more than a decade from his thesis until gravitational waves were first detected — research is not for the impatient!

If we stopped after detecting a gravitational wave, that would be an impressive feat of engineering and physics, and an important contribution to our understanding of general relativity and the fundamental nature of the universe. But human curiosity and ambition know no bounds. Just as you could imagine using the size and shape of waves lapping at your feet to learn about a large ship that passed by (or an earthquake on a distant continent), we should be able to use gravitational waves to learn something about distant objects. The success of LIGO spawned the new field of gravitational-wave astronomy. Read more »

Brevity

What I need a good poem,
a poem lifespan-short, a poem
I can shoe-horn between instants,
a poem that, in a pinch, says so much
I’ll understand the long and short of it
by the depth of calluses building on my brain.

But that’s not happening —count ’em,
I’m already up to eight lines, so it’s
too late for brevity.

What I want is a poem that says something
without rolling on forever, Amazon-like,
swaying to rhythms of topographical switchbacks
and eddies of rivers and streams, or swirls into
another cul-de-sac of human error.

Yes, I can see now that this won’t end here
in brute summation like a dead fish
wrapped in newsprint plopped on the desk
of a collaborator, warning of impending,
but once-avoidable, consequence.

No, it’ll go on until all nouns, verbs, conjugations,
and (especially) absolute clauses, have been spent.

It’ll go on till this mine of memory and metaphor,
no more complete than the store of meanings
and explications dragged inside-out by ripping flows of
pregnant clauses scribbled in blood & bone that have
led to others, and others, and others and poured from buckets
into the tides of the sea-bound flood of recollecting multitudes
of sisters and brothers, and fathers and mothers as time
tips its hat and evaporates in the heat of life.

Jim Culleny
7/1/18  & 25

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by Hari Balasubramanian

In the long and evolving list of cognitive biases, the ‘frequency illusion’ feels most familiar: I’ve experienced it so many times that it seems almost ordinary. This is roughly how it works. First, you encounter something – an unusual word like ‘topology’, or the title of a new book or a movie – that makes you stop and notice. Then, in the days after, the same word or title crops up again and again in unrelated places, making it seem more frequent than it is (hence the name). A friend brings it up unprompted, or you unexpectedly see it at a museum exhibit. It’s not only about words or titles, of course: anything in your conscious experience – a sound, an image, a fragrance – that makes an impression can be a point of entry. Buy a new car and in the weeks that follow, you will likely start noticing others driving the same model.

The most wonderful thing about this illusion is that with each seemingly unplanned encounter there’s a thrill of recognition, a feeling that the universe is signaling to you. The rationalists among us, however, will point to a more mundane explanation: that our cognitive processes have simply been primed to notice or identify the word, image, or sound among all sensory experiences. The illusion works in concert with two other biases: selective attention, the act of focusing on certain things while excluding others; and confirmation bias, the tendency to seek evidence that supports one’s beliefs while overlooking evidence to the contrary.

The recognition that these are only tricks of the mind can be somewhat deflating. But the processes that decide what we pay attention to and what we ignore remain mysterious. Something can be frequent in my everyday experience – say, a fire hydrant that I walk past each day – yet I may not notice it at all for years. Or I might be only vaguely aware of the hydrant’s presence, as if it lives in the background of my conscious experience. Then one day, I ‘stumble’ upon it, as if I am seeing it for the first time. Details such as its shape, color, and peeling paint register in a way they never had before. From that point on, I will naturally notice fire hydrants elsewhere. But I am seeing what was already commonplace; the frequency is not an illusion.

So the more intriguing question is: Why do things that we overlook all the time, things that are hiding in plain sight, suddenly catch our attention one fine day? And what is it about our cognitive processes that filters out certain stimuli and emphasizes others? Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

I’ve come to believe that any aspect of nature, large or small, will reward patient, open-ended attention. I’ve been photographing the sky for three years. Here I describe some of the things that I’ve come to appreciate about it.

The sky is full of color and light. It’s blue, of course, and children drawing the sky tend to leave it at that. When you look closely, though, you can see so many shades of blue, so many variations in the light. I could write at great length about the incredible colors of sunrise and sunset, or the marvels of light and shadow in the golden hour, or the varieties of lightning. But even in a clear sky at midday, the color varies across the sky. Twilight has its own shades of blue.

Clouds have innumerable colors, ranging from pure white through many subtle grays to almost black. They sometimes cast shadows on each other or on the sky. Water droplets and ice crystals in the sky can cause colorful or even startling effects such as rainbows, sun dogs, and sun pillars. And at night, in addition to the moon, there are planets, comets, meteors—less brilliant, more subtle, and infinitely engaging.

The sky is always in motion. One of the first things I noticed when I began to photograph the sky daily was that it changes hour by hour, if not moment by moment. I’ve known for a long time that clouds move, of course; I remember being thrilled by that fact as a child. But it wasn’t until I began photographing the sky daily that I finally began to notice how variable it is. If I see clouds that I’d like to photograph, I need to do it right now. On a stormy day, clouds may race through the sky. When the moon is above the horizon, it can be especially easy to see clouds as they alternately reveal and conceal the moon.

Certainly there are sunny days with few clouds. On other days, especially in winter, the clouds can seem like a heavy featureless blanket from dawn to dusk. Even then, in both cases, the sky’s appearance often shifts subtly throughout the day. Read more »

by Alizah Holstein

Once upon a time, summer meant windows thrown open, midnight breezes, the cooing of doves at dawn. Now, though, the panes have fallen. My family has at long last joined the approximately ninety percent of American households with access to air conditioning. Statistically speaking, it’s possible we had already joined that number: for the past four years, window units have cooled two of our three bedrooms when necessary. But the kitchen remained hot, the dining room sticky, the third-floor offices all but unusable for four or five months of the year.

I will not mince words: after years of resisting systemic cooling, I concede it’s a profound relief. I’m comfortable, sleeping well, and feeling productive. Just days into our new arrangement, I already regard my life as divided into two distinct eras: BCE (Before Conditioning Era) and CE (Conditioning Era). In the period from 50 BCE, when I was born, to approximately 20 BCE, summer temperatures in New England and the mid-Atlantic were often hot but rarely unbearable. But from 20 BCE on, summer days, and even autumn ones, have grown hotter and more humid. Now even nights can be tough to bear. When I sauntered out at 7:45 one morning last month to walk my dog, the temperature was 80 degrees Fahrenheit with 92% humidity—a combination one might resent even at the height of day. But of course, it was just the start of it.

And yet for all its pleasures, I partake in this new era with some misgivings. In part my hesitation is personal because some things I enjoy about summer are inevitably now less noticeable to me: a sudden gust of wind; the smell of grass; the sounds of children playing outside. As for my own kids, I don’t want them to grow up oblivious to the outside world as they move between one anodyne climate-controlled indoor space and another. Nor do I believe it’s in their best interest to come to expect comfort at all times. But I worry that I, too, might come to expect it. Read more »