Rachel Dec in LA Review of Books:

IN 2022, AS THE labor market thrived, a noticeable gap emerged between traditional economic indicators (which seemed good) and the lived experiences of Americans (which seemed not). Kyla Scanlon, a young and wildly popular economics commentator (with over 175,000 subscribers on TikTok) coined the term “vibecession” to define the phenomenon. Her newsletter on the topic blew up, and “vibecession” commentary has since permeated nearly all parts of the media ecosystem, with repeated usage in Bloomberg and The New York Times.

As of 2024, it seems we’re still in a vibecession. Despite positive news regarding the labor market, consumer confidence remains relatively low, even as inflation is slowing. As David Kelly, chief global strategist at J. P. Morgan Asset Management, recently wrote, “even if the economy is humming along because of the income and spending of the most affluent households, most families could still feel that they were languishing.” In this complex, unpredictable, and unequal postpandemic economy, do economic indicators still hold meaning for everyday Americans?

This is a question Kyla Scanlon seeks to answer in her debut book, In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work (2024). She sets out to explain most of the economic and financial systems of the United States, with a particular focus on the impact of the pandemic—and she accomplishes that task well. Among a wide range of topics, she manages to squeeze in explanations of classical economics, degrowth, the labor market, the housing market, the stock market, the bond market, cryptocurrencies, fiscal policy, monetary policy, and her signature “vibe economy” paradigm (which views popular feelings as “vibes” that shape consumer sentiment, which then influences economic outcomes).

More here.

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Benjamin Bratton in Noema:

At an OpenAI retreat not long ago, Ilya Sutskever, until recently the company’s chief scientist, commissioned a local artist to build a wooden effigy representing “unaligned” AI. He then set it on fire to symbolize “OpenAI’s commitment to its founding principles.” This curious ceremony was perhaps meant to preemptively cleanse the company’s work from the specter of artificial intelligence that is not directly expressive of “human values.” Just a few months later, the topic became an existential crisis for the company and its board when CEO Sam Altman was betrayed by one of his disciples, crucified and then resurrected three days later. Was this “alignment” with “human values”? If not, what was going on?

At the end of last year, Fei-Fei Li, the director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute, published “The Worlds I See,” a book the Financial Times called “a powerful plea for keeping humanity at the center of our latest technological transformation.” To her credit, she did not ritualistically immolate any symbols of non-anthropocentric technologies, but taken together with Sutskever’s odd ritual, these two events are notable milestones in the wider human reaction to a technology that is upsetting to our self-image.

“Alignment” toward “human-centered AI” are just words representing our hopes and fears related to how AI feels like it is out of control — but also to the idea that complex technologies were never under human control to begin with. For reasons more political than perceptive, some insist that “AI” is not even “real,” that it is just math or just an ideological construction of capitalism turning itself into a naturalized fact. Some critics are clearly very angry at the all-too-real prospects of pervasive machine intelligence.

More here.

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Tim Barker in Sidecar:

In 1952 and 1968, unpopular Democratic incumbents renounced their claims to reelection, in both cases against a backdrop of low unemployment and brutal, pointless wars. But despite such parallels, Joe Biden now reminds one more of Richard Nixon than of Truman or LBJ. In March 1968 – reeling from the Tet Offensive, a gold crisis, and Eugene McCarthy’s near-upset in New Hampshire, LBJ complained that ‘the establishment bastards have bailed out’. Yet he didn’t resist. Faced with a similar set of problems, Nixon ordered his men to break into the Brookings Institution (though not, as he briefly considered, to firebomb the think tank). Biden hasn’t bombed anyone in this country yet. But after his disastrous debate performance on 27 June, he has engaged in a level of intra-elite conflict – with certain donors, large sections of his own party, and above all, the media – which the country has not witnessed since 1974.

To a degree which is hard to exaggerate, the media reaction to the debate was swift and unanimous. Shock and panic were understandable, since the clearest implication of the debate was that Trump was now heavily favoured to win in November. Mixed with this were expressions of personal betrayal from people who, by their own account, had looked away from earlier signs of mental decline because they trusted the assurances issued privately by Biden’s camp.

More here.

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Theme for English B

James Goodwin in the Boston Review:

The week after taking office in 2017, Donald Trump announced his administration’s signature policy on the administrative state—the constellation of agencies, institutions, and procedures that Congress has created to help the president implement the laws it passes—when he signed Executive Order 13771. The directive purported to create a “regulatory budget” scheme that prohibited agencies from issuing a new rule unless they first repealed two existing rules and ensured that the resulting cost savings offset any costs the new rule might impose.

The effort failed. While federal agencies reduced their regulatory output during the Trump administration, they made little lasting progress in repealing existing rules. The Administrative Procedure Act, which governs much of how the administrative state operates, makes it hard to do so. Most of the Trump administration’s repeal attempts were met with rejection by federal courts for failing to abide by basic procedural requirements.

Still, Executive Order 13771 perfectly encapsulated conservative thinking about regulatory policy at the time. The goal was to bring about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as former Trump advisor Steve Bannon famously put it.

More here.

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Proper Stone

What shall I give my children? who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying that they are quasi, contraband
Because unfinished, graven by hand
Less than angelic, admirable for sure.
My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.
But I lack access to my proper stone.
And plenitude of plan shall not suffice
Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone
To ratify my little halves who bear
Across an autumn freezing everywhere.

by Gwendolyn Brooks
from The Children of the Poor

Barbara Spindel in The Christian Science Monitor:

Before the automobile, cities were powered by horses. These urban equines ferried passengers in streetcars and carriages; they pulled fire engines and ambulances. They delivered everything from milk and ice to mail. They hauled the coal for locomotive and steam engines.

As Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy explain in “Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came To Feel the Way They Do About Animals,” horses were often overworked – and brutally punished by their owners when they did not perform.

After being repelled by the violence of a bullfight in Spain in 1848, diplomat Henry Bergh was awakened to the suffering of animals; upon his return to the United States, he committed himself to advocating on their behalf. Bergh founded the nation’s first animal welfare organization, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in New York in 1866. He helped pass state anti-cruelty laws that gave him and his ASPCA agents enforcement powers, a role he relished. Top-hatted, tall, and with an aristocratic bearing, he patrolled the streets of New York, confronting the mostly working-class men he saw flogging their horses. “Can’t beat my own horse?” responded one driver incredulously when Bergh commanded him to stop. “You’re mad!”

More here.

Emily Cataneo in Undark:

IT’S 1922. You’re a scientist presented with a hundred youths who, you’re told, will grow up to lead conventional adult lives — with one exception. In 40 years, one of the one hundred is going to become impulsive and criminal. You run blood tests on the subjects and discover nothing that indicates that one of them will go off the rails in four decades. And yet sure enough, 40 years later, one bad egg has started shoplifting and threatening strangers. With no physical evidence to explain his behavior, you conclude that this man has chosen to act out of his own free will.

Now, imagine the same experiment starting in 2022. This time, you use the blood samples to sequence everyone’s genome. In one, you find a mutation that codes for something called tau protein in the brain and you realize that this individual will not become a criminal in 40 years out of choice, but rather due to dementia. It turns out he did not shoplift out of free will, but because of physical forces beyond his control.

Now, take the experiment a step further. If a man opens fire in an elementary school and kills scores of children and teachers, should he be held responsible?

More here.

Belinda McKeon at Literary Hub:

What kind of world is this? That’s the question prompted over and over by Joseph O’Neill’s new novel Godwin, a novel which is ostensibly about soccer, and the soccer industry, but is really about nothing less than the value of a human life. Godwin is a West African teenager whose talent with a football is, in the words of the character who views it on a bootleg video file, “perceptually alien.” When this boy plays, it seems as though “a hidden dimension of human movement, of the relationship between gravity and physiology, is being revealed.” That video file makes many promises, and all of them have to do with money, and all of them have to do with the relationship between power and vulnerability.

In his narrator, Mark Wolfe, a technical writer from Pittsburgh who finds himself drawn into the search for Godwin via his hustler brother, O’Neill has created a character of marvelous and often maddening complexity: Wolfe is at once an everyman and an idiot, an introvert and an opportunist, at whom the reader wants to scream sit down, be happy with your lot, but who will never listen.

More here.

Vijaya Ramachandran, Juzel Lloyd, and Seaver Wang at the Breakthrough Journal:

Amongst the many energy-hungry technologies supporting modern society, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a major driver of energy demand. Data centers—the physical infrastructure enabling AI—are becoming larger, multiplying, and consuming more energy. Environmental organizations such as Greenpeace are concerned that this will jeopardize decarbonization efforts and halt progress in the fight against climate change. AI can track melting icebergs or map deforestation, all the while consuming excessive amounts of carbon-intensive energy. But a closer look at the data shows that fears of AI’s insatiable appetite for energy may be unwarranted.

If we take reports at face value, we might conclude that AI-induced climate stress is all but inevitable. Niklas Sundberg, a board member of the nonprofit SustainableIT.org claims that a single query on ChatGPT generates 100 times the amount of carbon as a Google search.

More here.

Lindsay Crouse and Kevin Oliver in the New York Times:

When Henderson got to Yale on the G.I. Bill, he was shocked by the differences between him and his classmates. As he explains in the video above, he learned it was popular for his classmates to hold strong, seemingly progressive views about many of the concerns that shaped his life — drugs, marriage, crime. But they were largely insulated from the consequences of their views. Henderson found that these ideas came to serve as status symbols for the privileged while they, ironically, kept the working class down. He came to call these ideas luxury beliefs.

Henderson went on to get his Ph.D. at Cambridge and wrote a book about his experiences, “Troubled: A Memoir of Family, Foster Care, and Social Class.” In the video, Henderson argues that these out-of-touch views are all around us, widening our class divide and fueling our fractious politics. And he envisions another way.

More here.

Meghan Daum in Substack:

Alice Munro, considered one of the greatest short-story writers of modern times, was a monster.

The world learned this on Sunday, within moments of the Toronto Star hitting “publish” on an essay by Munro’s daughter, Andrea Skinner. The title of the essay, in full SEO bloom, tells you everything you need to know: “My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him.”

In stark yet elegant prose, Skinner describes years of abuse at the hands of Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, who assaulted her when she was 9 and went on to spend years committing lewd behavior against her and other children. Shortly after the first assault, Skinner told her stepmother about it, who told her father, who decided not to tell Munro. A few years later, when family friends told Munro that Fremlin had exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter, Fremlin denied it and Munro took no action. When Munro asked Fremlin if he had done the same to her own daughter, his answer was along the lines of “She’s not my type.”

If Fremlin’s behavior is nauseating in its cruelty and arrogance, Munro’s denials and narcissism are a shock to the conscience.

More here.