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purported to create a “regulatory budget” scheme that prohibited agencies from issuing a new rule unless they first repealed two existing rules and ensured that the resulting cost savings offset any costs the new rule might impose.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.

Meenakshi Prabhune in The Scientist:

Once upon a time, circa 2700 BC in China, empress Xi Ling Shi was enjoying her afternoon tea under a mulberry tree, when a silkworm cocoon fell from the tree into her tea. She noticed that on contact with the hot beverage, the cocoon unraveled into a long silky thread. This happy accident inspired her to acquire these threads in abundance and fashion them into an elegant fabric.

So goes the legend, according to the writings of Confucius, about the discovery of silk and the development of sericulture in ancient China. Although archaeological evidence from Chinese ruins dates the presence of silk to 8500 years ago, hinting that the royal discovery story was spun just like the silk fabric, one part of the legend rings true.¹ The Chinese royals played a pivotal role in popularizing silk as a symbol of status and wealth. By 130 BC, emperors in the Ancient Civilizations across the world desired to be clad in silken garments, paving the Silk Road that opened trade routes from China to the West. While silk maintained its high-society status over the next thousands of years, the demand for easy-to-use materials grew among mass consumers. In the early 20^th century, textile developers applied their new-found technological prowess to make synthetic materials: petrochemical-based polymer blended textiles with improved durability, strength, and convenience. Today, the textile industry is witnessing a new kind of synthetic revolution, one that paradoxically advocates bringing back natural materials. Synthetic biologists are using natural systems to produce materials with enhanced features to usher in an era of sustainable fashion.

More here.

It’s the little things

It’s the Little Things
the sparrow’s tender head
the dead possum on the road
the pungent smell of the fresh creek
in the summer when heat rises
to the bridge that spans its width
and if you should come to me
wondering and daring
I would not show you a good time
we would sit and watch
our breaths, silence, death approaching
so slowly, it would feel
like the ecstasy of making love

John Self in The Guardian:

Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?” opens Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s second novel, irresistibly. Sure we do! She is, after all, the laureate of upended lives, as her smash-hit 2019 debut Fleishman Is in Trouble showed.

There follows a 30-page account – inspired by real events but twisted into fictional counterparts – of the abduction in 1980 of the “kidnappably rich” Carl Fletcher, patriarch of one of the wealthiest families on Long Island. (The family’s money comes from a packaging factory they own in the prosperous town of Middle Rock.) A kidnapping is a story that comes with inbuilt tension (“We have your Zionist scum husband”) and colour, as the locals are rendered “speechless” by the news – though “none of them could stop talking about it”.

Carl survives his ordeal, so where’s the terrible ending? Like revenge, some things are best served cold, and the bulk of this chunky book goes down a generation to the children of Carl and his wife, Ruth.

More here.

Tracy Northup in Physics Magazine:

For centuries, physicists have exploited momentum conservation as a powerful means to analyze dynamical processes, from billiard-ball collisions to galaxy formation to subatomic particle creation in accelerators. David Moore and his research team at Yale University have now put this approach to work in a new setting: they used momentum conservation to determine when a radioactive atom emitted a single helium nucleus, known as an alpha particle (Fig. 1) [1]. The demonstration suggests that—with further improvements—researchers might be able to use this technique to detect other nuclear-decay products, such as neutrinos and hypothetical dark-matter particles (see also Special Feature: Sensing a Nuclear Kick on a Speck of Dust).

The basic idea is simple: if the radioactive atom is embedded in a larger object, then an outgoing decay product will exert a backreaction on that object, causing it to recoil in the opposite direction. But is it really possible to detect the recoil kick from a particle as small as a helium nucleus?

More here.

Interview with Mia Bird at Asterisk:

Asterisk: You’re responsible for managing one of the most comprehensive data sets of criminal outcomes for various criminal justice systems in California. It includes 12 counties and 60% of the state population. How did you put this resource together, and what kinds of outcomes you are tracking with it?

Mia: So we need to go back a bit. For decades, California was increasing its prison population and building new prisons to accommodate this growth. In 2006, the state reached a peak prison population of 173,000 inmates, which meant prisons were operating at over 170% of their design capacity. As a result, the state began to face lawsuits focused on its inability to provide adequate health care under such crowded conditions. One of the first steps the state took was to address revocations to prison through legislation that rewarded counties for reducing the number of people who fail probation and are sent to prison.

More here.

Calvin Po at The Spectator:

In 1916 the Bank of England committed what Nikolaus Pevsner was to call the greatest architectural crime to befall London in the 20th century. It decided to demolish much of its own building, designed by the great Georgian neoclassical architect John Soane.

Soane’s lost masterpiece is the subject of the latest series from the essential architecture podcast About Buildings and Cities. The podcast, started in 2016 by presenters Luke Jones and George Gingell as a hobby, has slowly become a fan-funded staple for architects, offering a re-evaluation of the received wisdoms about the canon and some affable banter along the way.

Soane worked on the Bank of England for almost 50 years. And the job provides the keystone to a sweeping look at the arc of his career. Even while still in training Soane had a thirst to prove himself with ‘banger megalomaniac student projects’, namely his over-elaborate ‘Triumphal Bridge’, which showed off his mastery of the classical idiom. Then there’s the familiar hustling: as a bricklayer’s son he juggled scholarships, jobs and opportunistic freelance commissions to fund his education and Grand Tour.

more here.