Elham Saeidinezhad in Phenomenal World:

We live in a period of unparalleled financial complexity, and, as the history of recent decades has demonstrated, unparalleled financial risk. The recurring crises which plague the global economy have brought theorists of systemic instability to the fore. Key among them has been Hyman Minsky, whose framework for understanding financial market fragility takes a cyclical form. In his model, an excessive credit expansion (“displacement”) fuels a speculative bubble (“mania” ) and causes “financial distress,” leading to credit contraction and the bursting of the bubble (“panic” ).

The appeal of Minsky’s model lies, in part, in its “structural” perspective. In contrast to the general tendency to disregard financial market practices, Minsky leveraged institutional and legal structures of the financial markets to develop his views. A classic example is his interpretation of the 1980s debt crisis—unlike orthodox theories of profit determination based on productivity and market power, Minsky linked firms’ performance to the developments of the financial market. Specifically, he focused on the 1980s merger and acquisition mania and the structure of junk bonds. Whereas neoclassical theories priced cash flows based on profitability, Minsky analyzed them as claims on firms’ tangible assets, which were often used as collateral for junk bond loans. In the ‘80s, financial distress thus enabled issuers to refrain from making payments, generating a liquidity crisis that neoclassical frameworks could not understand.

More here.

Lee Harris in The American Prospect:

In the spring of 2011, heavy rainfall swelled the Mississippi River to record levels, flooding trailer parks and pushing up gas prices as refineries and fuel terminals along the waterway closed. Surveying the wreckage, Heather McTeer Toney, then mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, found a crucial partner in Mars, Inc., the international conglomerate that makes M&M’s and pet food.

Mars operates an 80-acre rice farm in Greenville—its largest factory in the world. The company sent senior officials and shared its in-house risk assessment with Toney, which helped her plan the city’s police and fire response, design street upgrades, identify points of weakness in the wastewater and levee systems, and work with the Army Corps of Engineers.

“Today, we would call that climate risk,” Toney told the Prospect, but at the time it was “just protecting infrastructure.”

Local officials, civil engineers, and homeowners describe a growing need for information on exposure to the risks of extreme weather. In the past five years, demand has exploded. But not all cities have an anchor business as willing to share as Mars, and many might prefer not to depend on private industry for public planning.

Financial markets and private companies, meanwhile, are in an “arms race” for climate intelligence. Some firms have announced decarbonization plans, while others are pledging to double down on fossil fuels. Regulators, struggling to keep up, have asked for more disclosure.

Private climate risk modelers have been the beneficiaries of this gold rush. Their guidance falls into two buckets: physical risk, or material exposure of assets to hazards, or transition risk, which includes fallout from policy changes, impact on the financial system, and reputation.

More here.

Charlie Tyson in Jewish Currents:

KARL MARX’S GIFT FOR SATIRE is often underestimated. In his chapter on the working day in Capital, he recounts the death of a 20-year-old dressmaker named Mary Anne Walkley who was “exploited by a lady with the pleasant name of Elise.” After working for 26 1/2 hours straight in a cramped, poorly ventilated room, Walkley suddenly expired, “without, to the astonishment of Madame Elise, having finished off the bit of finery she was working on.” Zola at his most acidic could hardly do better.

Marx peppers the text of Capital with such blackly comic moments. Quoting a factory manager who justifies the 15-hour workday he requires by noting that his machine is always stopped for dinner, Marx comments in a parenthetical: “What generosity!” Describing the adulteration of bread resulting from the capitalist takeover of the baking industry, he reflects: “Englishmen, with their good command of the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist . . . is destined to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow.” But these pious Brits did not know that their bread would include “cobwebs, dead cockroaches,” and sand, among “other agreeable mineral ingredients.”

If the socialist writer Paul Lafargue, the husband of Marx’s daughter Laura, could not rival his father-in-law’s brilliance or scholarship, he took up the economist’s satirical streak with great enthusiasm, writing humorous sketches, essays, stories, and speeches.

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Jodi Dean in LA Review of Books:

AT A RALLY in 2019, California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon announced, “When you hear about folks talking about the new economy, the gig economy, the innovation economy, it’s fucking feudalism all over again.” Rendon was there to support legislation classifying most gig workers as employees rather than independent contractors. Assembly Bill 5 was intended to bring gig workers under the protection of existing California labor laws, and the bill passed. But the following year, California voters chose feudalism: they approved Proposition 22, a ballot measure heavily funded by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart, that would exempt app-based drivers from the labor protections that Assembly Bill 5 tried to secure. In March 2023, a state appellate court upheld Prop 22. By making exceptions for the big transportation and delivery apps, by saying that employment laws do not apply to them, California is entrenching the labor relations—the feudalism—that Rendon warned against.

California has long been at the neofeudal vanguard. Sea Ranch, the northern coastal community founded in the 1960s, ushered in the walled settlements and private enclaves that would come to dominate the US housing landscape. California has more private security businesses than any other state (close to double that of Florida, its closest competitor). It also has more charter schools—that is, schools exempted from some state and district laws. California is at the ideological forefront of movements that seek to protect capitalism from democracy, that model communities on corporations, and that idealize the European Middle Ages. While warnings about the unfreedom and deprivation facing a society of servants come at us from all sides, Silicon Valley tech-lords and venture-capitalist libertarians are dreaming up experiments for seceding from, carving up, and perforating nation-states into a neofeudal patchwork of authority and jurisdiction.

More here.

Michael Levin in IAI News:

One of the most useful metaphors for driving scientific and engineering progress has been that of the “machine.”  But in light of our increased understanding of biology, evolution, intelligence, and engineering we must re-examine the life-as-machine metaphor with fair, up-to-date definitions. Such a process is allowing us to see that living things are in fact remarkable, agential, morally-important machines, writes Michael Levin.

The difference between living beings and machines was once apparent. Machines came from a factory and were designed by the real creatives – humans (or in the case of simple machines, such as levers, by crows), who understood exactly how they work. They were boring and predictable – they did the same thing over and over again, they did not adapt to new challenges, and they showed no evidence of having preferences or an inner perspective. Thus, we felt on safe moral ground to do whatever we wanted with them – disassemble them for example. Living beings were the exact opposite in every way. They were created, with great competency but no comprehension, by other living things. On a longer time scale, they appeared as a result of a blind search process (evolution), from an originally abiotic state, becoming infinitely clever in their handling of their environment and of novel challenges and opportunities.

More here.

James Gallagher in BBC:

Be Bored

For the sake of cleansing seconds
stare at something still.
Free from feeling filled
hum the sound of the sun descending
sitting in its final ribbons.
Watch what leaves shake
in the unseen breeze.
Feel your own fingers.

Let time be soil for time.
Let hunger set in

by Sean Kerney
from Press Magazine, Fall 2014

Karl Vick in Time:

Salman Rushdie is back at his desk, savoring the acclaim for his most recent work and bending to the next—his account of the attack that nearly killed him last summer on a stage in Chautauqua, N.Y.

“If it’s a book, it’s not going to be a particularly long book,” he tells TIME. “Might be a couple hundred pages, so I’m hoping that I could do it in a year or so. But I’m not beating myself up about it. I’m just getting it right.”

Rushdie, who was stabbed more than 10 times, describes his recovery from the Aug. 12, 2022 attack with the kind of measured care that has kept him in the land of the living. “Slowly does it,” he says. A tinted lens hides his right eye, which no longer sees. “The knife went quite deep in. The knife went as far as the optic nerve.” He also lost the use, for a time, of his left hand, but that’s coming back. His longtime therapist has helped with “nightmares, and that sort of thing,” he says.

More here.  [Includes a short video.]

Yoshua Bengio at his own website:

There is no guarantee that someone in the foreseeable future won’t develop dangerous autonomous AI systems with behaviors that deviate from human goals and values. The short and medium term risks –manipulation of public opinion for political purposes, especially through disinformation– are easy to predict, unlike the longer term risks –AI systems that are harmful despite the programmers’ objectives,– and I think it is important to study both.

With the arrival of ChatGPT, we have witnessed a shift in the attitudes of companies, for whom the challenge of commercial competition has increased tenfold. There is a real risk that they will rush into developing these giant AI systems, leaving behind good habits of transparency and open science they have developed over the past decade of AI research.

There is an urgent need to regulate these systems by aiming for more transparency and oversight of AI systems to protect society. I believe, as many do, that the risks and uncertainty have reached such a level that it requires an acceleration also in the development of our governance mechanisms.

More here.

Hummingbird

One day in a lifetime
I saw one with wings
a pipesmoke blur
shaped like half a kiss
and its raspberry-stone
heart winked fast
in a thumbnail of a breast.

In that blink it
was around a briar
and out of sight, but
I caught a flash
of its brain
where flowers swing
udders of sweet cider;
and we pass as thunderclouds or,
dangers like death, earthquake, and war,
ignored because it’s no use worrying ….

By him I mean. Responsibility
Against the threat of termination
by war or other things
is given us as by a deity.

by Milton Acorn
from:  Dig Up My Heart: Selected Poems 1952-83
McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1983. p.62.

Curtis White in Lapham’s Quarterly:

This issue of Lapham’s Quarterly bravely addresses the hotly contested word freedom. It is hotly contested in part because what the word means has never been clear, a fact that has not seemed to lessen its importance for us. It is a word in which we have invested enormous amounts of energy without producing much in the way of illumination. And yet freedom cannot be dismissed simply on semantic grounds—“just another word,” as Kris Kristofferson sang—because what is at its heart may very well answer the question “What does it mean to be human?”

In our own moment, progressive activists resist what they see as the opposite of freedom: slavery. Modern slavery takes the forms of work and debt, of legislation limiting a woman’s authority over her own body, of racist segregation, and of the prison-industrial complex, to name but a few examples. Our world is not so different from the one described by 
Belinda, a woman enslaved for fifty years in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, where “lawless domination sits enthroned, pouring bloody outrage and cruelty on all who dare to be free.”

The voice of economic privilege uses the idea of freedom in order to claim the right to deploy property to its own rich advantage. Making matters worse, others on the political right have weaponized freedom to advance a long list of grievances about what they believe has been wrongly taken from them. Some of these grievances are legitimate; neoliberalism has indeed denied many people the work that once gave them economic independence and a sense of self-worth. But that legitimate complaint has gotten tangled with terrible things, especially the perception of those on the right talking freedom that they have been “replaced” by racial minorities, liberated women, and the LGBTQ community. So they set out to “own the libs” and reclaim their lost freedoms through the public display of their resentments (aka rioting), with guns on their hips if they so choose (and they usually do). This is freedom as understood in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Ignorance is strength.”

More here.

Rachael Gorman in The Scientist:

Skin shields our bodies from the world’s dangers, but sometimes, with a nick or a bump, that barrier is breached. That’s when pain- and itch-sensing nociceptor neurons jump to action, transmitting threat signals to the central nervous system, while dendritic cells eliminate pathogens by secreting cytokines and coordinating local inflammation, while also playing a role in adaptive immunity.

But this work is not done in isolation: Dendritic cells (DCs) and nociceptors are entangled in a powerful partnership, and a new study published March 31 in Science describes three unique ways these intertwined cells communicate to fine-tune the fight against invaders.

Back in the early 2010s, clinicians observed that people with the autoimmune inflammatory skin condition psoriasis who also happen to have nerve damage don’t suffer from the condition’s hallmark skin lesions in the injured area. When the nerve heals, however, the lesions return. Lorena Riol-Blanco and Ulrich von Andrian, immunology researchers at Harvard University, were intrigued, and in 2014, their team discovered for the first time that DCs interact with nociceptors. They found that this relationship is necessary for an inflammatory response: DCs sit on nociceptor axons and require a signal from them to make the cytokine interleukin (IL)-23, which is the master driver of psoriasis skin inflammation. The precise nature of this relationship, however, eluded them. “We didn’t know what’s the language that’s being spoken there,” von Andrian tells The Scientist. Answering “the question ’How exactly does it actually work?’ was a five-year process.”

More here.

Joe Zadeh at Noema:

Most of humanity now lives in cities made possible by concrete. The majority of buildings, from skyscrapers to social housing, are made of concrete or contain large amounts of it. Even buildings made from steel, stone, brick or timber are almost always resting on concrete foundations and are sometimes masking an unseen concrete frame. Inside, concrete is ceilings and floors. Outside, it is bridges and sidewalks, piers and parking lots, roads and tunnels and airport landing strips and subway systems. It is water pipes, sewers and storm drains. It is electricity: dams and power plants and the foundations of wind turbines. Concrete is the wall between Israel and Palestine and the Berlin Wall and most other walls. It is “almost anything,” wrote the architect Sarah Nichols in an essay this year, “almost anywhere.”

Concrete is modern, yet ancient. There’s a sense in which it was born in the bowels of volcanoes, formulated by the eruptions of the Earth.

more here.

Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

Nowadays the title reads not only as tepid and banal but as distinctly unrepresentative of the ensuing narrative’s principal themes and contours. In fairness, when the onetime Austro-Hungarian actress and subsequently Hollywood scenarist Salka Viertel first began auditioning the phrase “the kindness of strangers” for the title of her memoir in progress, back in the mid-1950s, as her recent biographer Donna Rifkind has pointed out, the words were not nearly as hackneyed as they are today. (The sensational play A Streetcar Named Desire, from which they sprang, was only a few years old, having premiered in 1947; the film had only been released in 1951; and the primary chestnut to have emerged from the latter was Stanley’s bloodcurdling scream of “Stella! Stellllaaaa!” and not so much Blanche’s breathy Southern belle protestations of having always reliii-ed on the kindness of strangers.) Salka’s husband, the internationally acclaimed theater director Berthold Viertel, had been translating their friend Tennessee Williams’s plays for some years already and staging them all over Europe, and perhaps Salka savored the nod in the young playwright’s direction. Such selfless generosity, indeed such kindness on her own part, would have been just like her.

more here.

David Gauvey Herbert in New York Magazine:

Walter was tall and gaunt with a hard-to-place, vaguely English accent. He favored Kools and Chardonnay, and he was never photographed in anything but a dark suit, a tiny smile often curling at the corner of his mouth. His public profile was about to explode. A publisher was finalizing a book about the Vidocq Society, The Murder Room, which detailed Walter’s casework on four continents and claimed that at Scotland Yard he was known as “the living Sherlock Holmes.”

More here.

Sarah Rose Sharp at Hyperallergic:

Nothing really prepares one for the experience of entering the Huckleberry Explorer’s Club (HEC), a small museum in a duplex in Detroit’s burgeoning Core City neighborhood whose ground floor houses a general store full of secondhand oddities for sale at throwaway prices…. One of the items on display is a wedding ring that Golberg discovered inside a desk she found on a street in Brooklyn. An inscription on the ring reads, “Steven and Julie” with the date February 12, 1988.

“I just felt so moved by this object, thinking through all of the different possible scenarios as to how that ring got to be inside the desk; it felt like this object had so much aura around it,” Golberg said. “More and more as I started, these sorts of things came into my life, and it wasn’t just about the things themselves or the picture [she took], but the relationship between two of us. It was kind of like I was marrying this moment.”

Golberg began marking her objects with little tags that offer context, dates, or adjacent experiences.

more here.