Jason Hickel in The Guardian:

Earlier this year media outlets around the world announced that February had broken global temperature records by a shocking amount. March broke all the records too. In June, our screens were covered with surreal images of flooding in Paris, the Seine bursting its banks and flowing into the streets. In London, floods sent water pouring into the tube system right in theheart of Covent Garden. Roads in south-east London became rivers two metres deep.

With such extreme events becoming more commonplace, few deny climate change any longer. Finally, a consensus is crystallising around one all-important fact: fossil fuels are killing us. We need to switch to clean energy, and fast.

This growing awareness about the dangers of fossil fuels represents a crucial shift in our consciousness. But I can’t help but fear we’ve missed the point. As important as clean energy might be, the science is clear: it won’t save us from climate change.

Let’s imagine, just for argument’s sake, that we are able to get off fossil fuels and switch to 100% clean energy. There is no question this would be a vital step in the right direction, but even this best-case scenario wouldn’t be enough to avert climate catastrophe.

More here.

Michael Moore at his own website:

Friends:

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.”

Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.

I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this!

You need to exit that bubble right now.

More here.

Freddy Gray in The Spectator:

‘Whatever complicates the world more — I do,’ Donald Trump once said. If you can’t decipher what that means, don’t worry, that’s the point. ‘It’s always good to do things nice and complicated,’ he added, by way of explanation, ‘so that nobody can figure it out.’ That was 1996 and Trump was talking about business. But 20 years later, his approach to politics seems informed by the same perplexing mentality. Trump is the confusion candidate for President of the United States, and his platform is chaos. He promises to Make America Great Again. In reality, he’s Making America Madder Than Ever. Look at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this week, where Trump was finally confirmed as the party’s official nominee. It ought to have been the triumphant moment when The Donald was anointed as the Chosen One, ready to lead the conservative charge to the White House. Instead it felt like madness — democracy as a cosmic joke.

Lots of Americans fear that civilised society is breaking down, and it’s easy to see why. Fifteen police officers have been killed in the line of duty this month, including three in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, just before the convention started. Around 5,000 officers were drafted into Cleveland from across the country, and were left to roam the streets with little to do. This overbearing security operation might have made delegates feel safer. But it also added to the atmosphere of dysfunction and instability which helps Donald Trump put himself across as the saviour for troubled times. Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort said this week that he based his acceptance speech on Richard Nixon’s 1968 effort, in which Tricky Dicky reassured Americans that he could bring stability to the country after the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jnr and months of civil unrest.

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Daniel Gross in Nautilus:

In 2011, the Finnish Tourist Board released a series of photographs of lone figures in the wilderness, with the caption “Silence, Please.” An international “country branding” consultant, Simon Anholt, proposed the playful tagline “No talking, but action.” And a Finnish watch company, Rönkkö, launched its own new slogan: “Handmade in Finnish silence.” “We decided, instead of saying that it’s really empty and really quiet and nobody is talking about anything here, let’s embrace it and make it a good thing,” explains Eva Kiviranta, who manages social media for VisitFinland.com. Silence is a peculiar starting point for a marketing campaign. After all, you can’t weigh, record, or export it. You can’t eat it, collect it, or give it away. The Finland campaign raises the question of just what the tangible effects of silence really are. Science has begun to pipe up on the subject. In recent years researchers have highlighted the peculiar power of silence to calm our bodies, turn up the volume on our inner thoughts, and attune our connection to the world. Their findings begin where we might expect: with noise.

The word “noise” comes from a Latin root meaning either queasiness or pain. According to the historian Hillel Schwartz, there’s even a Mesopotamian legend in which the gods grow so angry at the clamor of earthly humans that they go on a killing spree. (City-dwellers with loud neighbors may empathize, though hopefully not too closely.) Dislike of noise has produced some of history’s most eager advocates of silence, as Schwartz explains in his book Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. In 1859, the British nurse and social reformer Florence Nightingale wrote, “Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on sick or well.” Every careless clatter or banal bit of banter, Nightingale argued, can be a source of alarm, distress, and loss of sleep for recovering patients. She even quoted a lecture that identified “sudden noises” as a cause of death among sick children.

More here.

Laurie Penny in Welcome to the Screaming Room:

This is a story about how trolls took the wheel of the clown car of modern politics. It’s a story about the insider traders of the attention economy. It’s a story about fear and loathing and Donald Trump and you and me. It’s not a story about Milo Yiannopoulos, the professional alt-right provocateur who was just banned from Twitter permanently for sending racist abuse to actor Leslie Jones.

But it does start with Milo. So I should probably explain how we know each other and how, on a hot, weird night in Cleveland, I came to be riding in the backseat of his swank black trollmobile to the gayest neo-fascist rally at the RNC.

More here.

Esme Cribb in TPM Livewire:

New media writer Clay Shirky took to Twitter Friday afternoon to dismiss white liberals' response to Donald Trump as ineffective and self-indulgent – and to rally them to defeat Trump.

“Believe this: Trump could win,” Shirky tweeted. “We can help stop him, but that means giving up on a lot of comfortable illusions.”

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Joshua Sokol in Quanta:

When physicists announced in February that they had detected gravitational waves firsthand, the foundations of physics scarcely rattled. The signal exactly matched the expectations physicists had arrived at after a century of tinkering with Einstein’s theory of general relativity. “There is a question: Can you do fundamental physics with it? Can you do things beyond the standard model with it?” said Savas Dimopoulos, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University. “And most people think the answer to that is no.”

Asimina Arvanitaki is not one of those people. A theoretical physicist at Ontario’s Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics, Arvanitaki has been dreaming up ways to use black holes to explore nature’s fundamental particles and forces since 2010, when she published a paper with Dimopoulos, her mentor from graduate school, and others. Together, they sketched out a “string axiverse,” a pantheon of as yet undiscovered, weakly interacting particles. Axions such as these have long been a favored candidate to explain dark matter and other mysteries.

In the intervening years, Arvanitaki and her colleagues have developed the idea through successive papers. But February’s announcement marked a turning point, where it all started to seem possible to test these ideas. Studying gravitational waves from the newfound population of merging black holes would allow physicists to search for those axions, since the axions would bind to black holes in what Arvanitaki describes as a “black hole atom.”

More here.

Kate Douglas in Evonomics:

Using a mathematical model of price fluctuations, for example, Bell has shown that prestige bias – our tendency to copy successful or prestigious individuals – influences pricing and investor behaviour in a way that creates or exacerbates market bubbles.

We also adapt our decisions according to the situation, which in turn changes the situations faced by others, and so on. The stability or otherwise of financial markets, for instance, depends to a great extent on traders, whose strategies vary according to what they expect to be most profitable at any one time. “The economy should be considered as a complex adaptive system in which the agents constantly react to, influence and are influenced by the other individuals in the economy,” says Kirman.

This is where biologists might help. Some researchers are used to exploring the nature and functions of complex interactions between networks of individuals as part of their attempts to understand swarms of locusts, termite colonies or entire ecosystems. Their work has provided insights into how information spreads within groups and how that influences consensus decision-making, says Iain Couzin from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Konstanz, Germany – insights that could potentially improve our understanding of financial markets.

Take the popular notion of the “wisdom of the crowd” – the belief that large groups of people can make smart decisions even when poorly informed, because individual errors of judgement based on imperfect information tend to cancel out. In orthodox economics, the wisdom of the crowd helps to determine the prices of assets and ensure that markets function efficiently. “This is often misplaced,” says Couzin, who studies collective behaviour in animals from locusts to fish and baboons.

By creating a computer model based on how these animals make consensus decisions, Couzin and his colleagues showed last year that the wisdom of the crowd works only under certain conditions – and that contrary to popular belief, small groups with access to many sources of information tend to make the best decisions.

That’s because the individual decisions that make up the consensus are based on two types of environmental cue: those to which the entire group are exposed – known as high-correlation cues – and those that only some individuals see, or low-correlation cues. Couzin found that in larger groups, the information known by all members drowns out that which only a few individuals noticed.

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Rachel Aviv in The New Yorker:

Martha Nussbaum was preparing to give a lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, in April, 1992, when she learned that her mother was dying in a hospital in Philadelphia. She couldn’t get a flight until the next day. That evening, Nussbaum, one of the foremost philosophers in America, gave her scheduled lecture, on the nature of emotions. “I thought, It’s inhuman—I shouldn’t be able to do this,” she said later. Then she thought, Well, of course I should do this. I mean, here I am. Why should I not do it? The audience is there, and they want to have the lecture

…Nussbaum is drawn to the idea that creative urgency—and the commitment to be good—derives from the awareness that we harbor aggression toward the people we love. A sixty-nine-year-old professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago (with appointments in classics, political science, Southern Asian studies, and the divinity school), Nussbaum has published twenty-four books and five hundred and nine papers and received fifty-seven honorary degrees. In 2014, she became the second woman to give the John Locke Lectures, at Oxford, the most eminent lecture series in philosophy. Last year, she received the Inamori Ethics Prize, an award for ethical leaders who improve the condition of mankind. A few weeks ago, she won five hundred thousand dollars as the recipient of the Kyoto Prize, the most prestigious award offered in fields not eligible for a Nobel, joining a small group of philosophers that includes Karl Popper and Jürgen Habermas. Honors and prizes remind her of potato chips; she enjoys them but is wary of becoming sated, like one of Aristotle’s “dumb grazing animals.” Her conception of a good life requires striving for a difficult goal, and, if she notices herself feeling too satisfied, she begins to feel discontent. Nussbaum is monumentally confident, intellectually and physically. She is beautiful, in a taut, flinty way, and carries herself like a queen. Her voice is high-pitched and dramatic, and she often seems delighted by the performance of being herself. Her work, which draws on her training in classics but also on anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and a number of other fields, searches for the conditions for eudaimonia, a Greek word that describes a complete and flourishing life. At a time of insecurity for the humanities, Nussbaum’s work champions—and embodies—the reach of the humanistic endeavor. Nancy Sherman, a moral philosopher at Georgetown, told me, “Martha changed the face of philosophy by using literary skills to describe the very minutiae of a lived experience.”

More here.

Walter Biggins at The Quarterly Conversation:

Because our lives move in straight lines but our perceptions do not, we are forever trying to squeeze the latter’s unruliness into the former’s rigor. This, perhaps, explains why memoirs so often have the clean story arcs, senses of closure, and thematic consistencies that our lives never, ever have. Memoirs are lies; autobiographies are lies with footnotes. Somewhere in those footnotes, though, in those interstices clarifying and digressing from the main tales, lies glimmer of the real.

In The Child Poet, Homero Aridjis gives us such gleaming footnotes and green shoots of offhand mystery that we’re reminded that it’s not necessarily bad to be told lies, so long as the teller realizes that he is indeed lying. As Albert Camus said, fictions are lies that tell the truth. Through Aridjis’s memoir, the Mexican writer eschews the straight line and the tidy summation, opting instead for dark flashes and dream logic. The tale he tells of his childhood and adolescence isn’t, in the end, a tale at all but rather a series of vignettes. Some are lush with physical detail, while others are spare. Some vignettes are told at a remove even though it’s clear that Aridjis was present for the events. Others are visceral, immediate snapshots, even though they are hearsay; the memoirist captures the aura of events for which he wasn’t there.

But then other moments feel like a bit of both, in that they are conveyed with such tactile fervor that it’s easy to forget—and maybe he wants you to forget—that he couldn’t possibly remember the event being described, though he was undoubtedly present.

more here.

Francesca Wade at The Financial Times:

In a central scene in David Means’s debut novel, a dead Vietnam veteran delivers a powerful stream of consciousness directly into the mind of his former girlfriend. The horror of war, he explains with bitter resentment, cannot be “caught, bottled up, and taken back to the States”; there’s no fear that can be performed for the camera, no pain that can be massaged into a dispatch that will “make some kind of sense”. Yet after all they’ve gone through, Billy Thompson points out, the dead do not live to tell their own stories: “anything said by them is the pure fiction of the living and nothing more”.

Hystopia is the title of a novel within the novel, the full text of which is bookended by a series of editor’s and author’s notes, alongside fragmentary comments on the manuscript from various acquaintances of the purported author, Eugene Allen, an isolated 22-year-old veteran who has committed suicide. We’re warned from the outset that we may be at the mercy of an unreliable narrator: Allen suffered from a disease whose symptoms often include “delusional historical memories”.

more here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at Misfit Press:

Among the displays of assault rifles at the Mikhail Kalashnikov Museum in Izhevsk is a small lawnmower Kalashnikov designed to push about the grounds of his summer cottage. It is said that Mikhail Kalashnikov loved to care for his grass. Kalashnikov gave the lawnmower the same sensible qualities he gave the gun that bears his name. The lawnmower is light, simple, cheap to construct and easy to hold—something a child could use.

Kalashnikov didn’t regret inventing the Kalashnikov rifle. “I invented it for the protection of the Motherland,” he said. Still, he once mused that he would like to have been known as a man who helped farmers and gardeners. “I wanted to invent an engine that could run forever,” Kalashnikov once said. “I could have developed a new train, had I stayed in the railway.” But this was not to be.

Mikhail Kalashnikov was born in the rural locality of Kurya, the 17th child of peasants. When Kalashnikov was still a boy, his family’s property was confiscated and they were deported to Western Siberia. The farming was hard there, but harder was the shame of being exiled from the Soviet workers’ paradise. Kalashnikov was a sickly child and though his studies didn’t take him past secondary school, the future inventor dreamed of being a poet. After finishing the seventh grade, young Kalashnikov gathered his poetry books and worked as a technician on the Turkestan-Siberian railway, until he was conscripted into the Red Army in 1938. He worked with tanks and, in his spare time, tinkered with small arms. In 1941, Kalashnikov was wounded in battle. There, in the hospital, suffering from war wounds and shellshock, Kalashnikov had his vision. “I decided to build a gun of my own which could stand up to the Germans,” he would later say.

more here.

The Chase

They say the chase ends where the earth is put together
by two halves, but no matter —because that is you
at thirty, perhaps forty:
corpus callosum of the brain,
two loaves opening and closing like a book.

Your arms spring out and lungs push and pull
rinsing the midnight air—
no matter, because you are there, chasing
the child of wonder and hope
through cities confined in smog.

You missile through firs, through mouths dusted
with mathematical chalk.
You follow the muddy-water spillways peppered with
bacterial spore.

Not the shadow that greets itself in the dark
but the utter collision of evaporating rain
leads you on.
Not the lightning’s sketch but the black puzzle of night,
as you appear and disappear among people,
chasing he who knows your name
but won’t tell.
.

by Victor Martinez
from Paper Dance -55 Latino Poets
Persea Books, 1994
.

Jason Zengerle in The New York Times:

It’s an axiom of American politics that presidents become more popular once they are ex-presidents. Admittedly, George W. Bush had nowhere to go but up. With two months left in his second term, Bush’s approval rating sat at an abysmal 25 percent, just one point higher than Richard Nixon’s during Watergate. On the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, when a Marine helicopter ferried the outgoing president away from the United States Capitol, many in the crowd serenaded him with chants of “Bye-bye Bush!” and “Go home to Texas!” Then the predictable happened. Bush’s absence from public life made Americans’ hearts for him grow fonder. Out of the spotlight, he busied himself painting oil portraits of family pets and world leaders; when he did dip his toe into political waters, it was for laudable and uncontroversial causes like fighting AIDS and malaria in Africa. His poll numbers began their inexorable climb. By June of last year, Bush’s favorability rating was 52 percent — higher than Obama’s at the time. His younger brother, Jeb, started his ill-fated 2016 presidential run with the declaration, “I am my own man.” But by the end of Jeb’s run, he was appearing alongside Dubya at rallies. Although Jeb’s fraternal Hail Mary ultimately fell short, his older brother’s re-emergence on the campaign trail only served to confirm that, fewer than eight years after being hounded from the White House, George W. Bush had become a less polarizing, fairly popular, at times even lovable figure.

Readers of the presidential historian Jean Edward Smith’s mammoth new biography, “Bush,” will surely be cured of this political amnesia. Smith — who has written biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower — is unsparing in his verdict on our 43rd president. “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush,” Smith writes in the first sentence of the preface. And then he gets harsh. In Smith’s clipped retelling of his subject’s early years, Bush was an unaccomplished, callow son of privilege who cashed in on his family’s connections for everything from his admission to Yale to his avoidance of Vietnam. Quoting Bush’s tautological explanation of his wasted youth — “When I was young and irresponsible, I behaved young and irresponsibly” — Smith concludes, “That pretty well says it all.” Being Texas governor “was scarcely a full-time job,” and his 2000 victory in the presidential race owed as much to the ineptness of his Democratic opponent, Al Gore — who “came across as wooden and self-­important” — as it did to Bush’s “ease on the campaign trail.” None of this prepared Bush for the gravity of the responsibilities he would face as president, Smith argues, and time and again Bush failed to meet the challenges of the office.

More here.

John McMahon reviews Samuel Bowles's The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens, in The Boston Review:

From sin taxes to the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, from tax rebates for buying an electric car to performance-based school funding, governments extensively deploy material incentives to regulate citizens’ behaviors. The idea is straightforward: economic costs and benefits shape people’s choices, so changing those costs and benefits can change their actions.

This approach is intuitively appealing in our age, as it uses an enlightened mix of encouragement and coercion to advance public goals. But it works only if people act rationally in their own self-interest and respond accordingly to alterations in cost-benefit calculations. This may not seem much of an “if”; the notion that we all maximize our own good has been the basis of a long strain of economic thinking stretching back at least to Adam Smith, who asserted, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” But is this really an accurate depiction of our behavior? And what is the significance of individual or collective political agency in a world of government-by-incentives?

Samuel Bowles’s new book The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens provides a lucid and comprehensive answer to the first of these questions. Synthesizing findings from experimental and behavioral economics, psychology, and anthropology over the last two decades, Bowles convincingly argues that people do not act on the basis of amoral self-interest alone. Rather, we regularly proceed from “ethical and other-regarding motivations.” Furthermore, these “social preferences,” as Bowles call them, can be crowded out and eventually eroded by policies that rely exclusively on manipulating material self-interest. He then moves these lessons from social science research into the realm of both policymaking and political theory, contending that the proper role of government is to construct a “policy paradigm of synergy between incentives and constraints, on the one hand, and ethical and other-regarding motivations, on the other.”

Bowles doesn’t explore the second question, which is about political agency. This is a striking omission because he emphasizes the need for public policy and governance to cultivate good citizens. Yet there is no place in his recommendations for the active citizen practicing democracy through political participation, protest, and social movements. The book is haunted by the absence of active responses to government-instituted incentives and policies.

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Paul Krugman reviews Mervyn King's The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy, in the NYRB:

These days, of course, the pound sterling is much less widely used than the dollar, the euro, or even the yen or the yuan, and the Bank of England is correspondingly overshadowed in many ways by its much younger counterparts abroad. Yet the bank still punches above its weight in troubled times. In part that’s because London remains a great financial center. But it’s also thanks to the Bank of England’s intellectual adventurousness.

It was a big departure for the Federal Reserve—which has historically been run by bankers rather than academics—when Ben Bernanke, a distinguished monetary economist, was appointed as chairman in 2006. But Mervyn King, a former professor at the London School of Economics, was already running the Bank of England. And it was these two professors who guided the English-speaking world’s biggest economies through the recent financial crisis.

Now King, like Bernanke, has written a book inspired by his experiences. But it’s not at all the book one might have expected. It’s not a play-by-play of the crisis, or a tell-all, or a personal memoir. In fact, King not-so-subtly mocks the authors of such books, which “share the same invisible subtitle: ‘how I saved the world.’”

King’s book is, instead, devoted to “economic ideas.” It is rich in wide-ranging historical detail, with many stories I didn’t know—the desperate shortage of banknotes at the outbreak of World War I, the remarkable emergence of the “Swiss dinar” (old Iraqi notes printed from Swiss plates) in Kurdistan. But it is mainly an extended meditation on monetary theory and the methodology of economics.

And a fascinating meditation it is. As I’ll explain shortly, King takes sides in a long-running dispute between mainstream economic analysis and a more or less radical fringe that rejects the mainstream’s methods—and comes down on the side of the radical fringe. The policy implications of his methodological radicalism aren’t as clear or, I’d argue, as persuasive as one might like, but he definitely challenges policy as well as research orthodoxy.

You don’t have to agree with everything King says—and I don’t—to be impressed by his willingness to let his freak flag fly. His assertion that we haven’t done nearly enough to head off the next financial crisis will, I think, receive wide assent; I don’t know anyone who thinks, for example, that the US financial reforms enacted in 2010 were sufficient. But his assertion that the whole intellectual frame we’ve been using is more or less irreparably flawed is a brave position that should produce a lot of soul-searching among both economists and policy officials.

More here.