Dan Hitchens in Compact Magazine:

It’s OK,” the title of Bernie Sanders’ new book informs us, “to be angry about capitalism.” But of course, we already knew that. The background noise of our time is of resentment toward the neoliberal order—the insecurity it has foisted on the poor and increasingly on the middle class, the destruction it has wreaked on the environment, its hollowing-out of families, communities, and traditions. What we need isn’t permission to be angry, but a better comprehension of a system so complex that both admirers and critics struggle to get their heads around it.

That, I think, is why more and more readers—from big-name academics like Adam Tooze and Mariana Mazzucato to ordinary citizens trying to make sense of the world—are enthralled by the work of the economic geographer Brett Christophers, a professor at the University of Uppsala. Nobody could accuse Christophers of ignorantly ranting against a half-understood enemy: His books resemble vast excavation projects, in which the author drills through mile after mile of granite-like material—balance sheets, annual reports, parliamentary-committee minutes, documents from the National Infrastructure Commission, and at one point (he writes with a self-deprecating twinkle) a “fascinating if dry 2016 review of taxation of the UK water companies.”

From these subterranean expeditions, Christophers usually emerges with some outrageous claim that seems both shocking and appropriate to our disorienting era. In 2018, he published a book explaining that the largest privatization in modern British history had gone unnoticed. (See if you can guess: The answer is below.) Then, in 2020, Christophers’s Rentier Capitalism argued that the heart of the British economy wasn’t entrepreneurship or innovation or anything like that, but rent: that is, the ability to make money by controlling assets such as land or intellectual property in an uncompetitive environment. Christophers’ new book, meanwhile, states its audacious thesis in the title, Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World.

More here.

Allison Parshall in Quanta:

Optimization problems can be tricky, but they make the world work better. These kinds of questions, which strive for the best way of doing something, are absolutely everywhere. Your phone’s GPS calculates the shortest route to your destination. Travel websites search for the cheapest combination of flights that matches your itinerary. And machine learning applications, which learn by analyzing patterns in data, try to present the most accurate and humanlike answers to any given question.

For simple optimization problems, finding the best solution is just a matter of arithmetic. But the real-world questions that interest mathematicians and scientists are rarely simple. In 1847, the French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy was working on a suitably complicated example — astronomical calculations — when he pioneered a common method of optimization now known as gradient descent. Most machine learning programs today rely heavily on the technique, and other fields also use it to analyze data and solve engineering problems.

Mathematicians have been perfecting gradient descent for over 150 years, but last month, a study proved that a basic assumption about the technique may be wrong. “There were just several times where I was surprised, [like] my intuition is broken,” said Ben Grimmer, an applied mathematician at Johns Hopkins University and the study’s sole author. His counterintuitive results showed that gradient descent can work nearly three times faster if it breaks a long-accepted rule for how to find the best answer for a given question.

More here.

Daron Acemoglu, Gary Anderson, David Beede, Catherine Buffington, et. al., in VoxEU:

Rapid advances across a number of technologies, including generative AI, cloud computing and robotics, have raised the hope that productivity growth in the US and other industrialised countries can accelerate. They have also intensified public worries about job displacement and inequality.

Naturally, the macroeconomic effects of any technology will depend on the degree of its adoption. Labour market impacts may additionally depend on whether advanced technologies are being used for automation, displacing workers from the tasks they used to perform, or for other purposes, such as increasing the productivity of workers in tasks they are already performing or creating new tasks for them.

Despite much enthusiasm about these new technologies, many commentators are concerned that their adoption has been slow and uneven. Lack of systematic data on adoption patterns and how new technologies are being used in workplaces has been a major roadblock on developing a holistic picture of whether and how these technologies will impact the economy.

A small literature has used various sources of data on adoption of robotics technology (e.g. Acemoglu et al. 2020, Bonfiglioli et al. 2020, Koch et al. 2021), there are some recent European technology surveys, such as those studied in Genz et al. (2021) for Germany and Calvino et al. (2022) for Italy. But data on cloud computing, AI and other software systems have been more scant, especially in the US.

More here.

Marc David Baer at The Guardian:

On the southern steppe of Ukraine in 512BCE, the envoy of Scythian King Idanthyrsus delivered a frog, a mouse, a bird and several arrows to Darius, mighty king of Persia. Then, without saying a word, he departed. Darius was confident the nomadic Scythians were pledging their allegiance. But his adviser understood the intended meaning. Unless the invading Persians turned into frogs and dived into the water, became mice and dug underground, or turned into birds and flew away, they would be riddled with deadly arrows as trespassers in the nomads’ land. Darius withdrew his soldiers.

For two millennia gigantic imperial armies were unable to defeat much smaller numbers of elusive horse archers who utilised tactics of surprise, feigned retreat and ambush rather than engaging in set-piece battles. In this book, which flows as fast as the nomads’ horses galloped, emeritus professor of ancient history Kenneth Harl chronicles the empires that roamed across the Eurasian steppe from ancient times to the death of Tamerlane at the beginning of the 15th century.

more here.

Molly Young at the NY Times:

Has any man in history loved anything as much as Orson Squire Fowler loved the octagon? Fowler, born in Cohocton, N.Y., in 1809, published a book in 1848 arguing that all houses should be eight-sided. He influenced a (failed) utopian community in Kansas called Octagon City, delivered an estimated 350 public orations on octagon supremacy and built himself a 60-room octagonal palace in upstate New York.

His enthusiasm was not merely contagious but downright virulent. In the decades following the publication of “The Octagon House: A Home for All,” octagonal homes “broke out in New York State like a rash,” as an article in this newspaper put it. So too in the Midwest, which briefly became a hotbed of Fowler-incited dwellings. His résumé is that of a classic 19th-century polymath. Fowler was a sexologist, hydrotherapy proponent, amateur architect, publisher (including of Walt Whitman), phrenologist (chronistically, if unfortunately) and eclectic lecturer who evangelized on behalf of vegetarianism, women’s suffrage, prison reform, dancing and mesmerism.

more here.

Chris Richards in The Washington Post:

Farzana Shaikh in Time:

Few will have missed the bitter irony of a court ruling against Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, who was found guilty of corruption, sentenced to three years in prison, and barred from contesting elections for five years. For however his legacy is judged in years to come, Khan will be remembered above all for his single-minded crusade to root out “corruption” from the political fabric of Pakistan. The ruling against Khan was not unexpected. Since his removal from office following a no-confidence motion in April 2022, as well as his increasingly confrontational posture with the military (which he blamed for his downfall), many believed it was only a matter of time before Khan lost his freedom completely.

With Pakistan’s ruling coalition imminently poised to step down and make way for a caretaker government, Khan’s incarceration was seen as the last bit of unfinished business ahead of general elections. These should be held within 90 days but could come as late as Spring 2024, following a decision on August 5, 2023 by the Council of Common Interests (responsible for overseeing relations between Pakistan’s federating units) to approve the demarcation of new constituencies based on the latest census data—a skillful maneuvering tactic by Pakistan’s all-powerful military, which is desperate to use the time to dampen Khan’s soaring popularity.

More here.

From Fabrik:

Here/After The Art is an attempt to elevate a discussion and research the future of art as it has never been done before. We ask creators to produce NFTs that make predictions on the future of art. This project invites diversity across continents and creative disciplines. For example, in addition to visual artists we will also reach out to renowned filmmakers, musicians, and designers to create a vibrant mix of personalities who have a voice in what art has been, is, and especially what it will be. We recognise and appreciate that all this takes place in the age of emerging technologies including AI, NFT, and in the new spaces such as web3, metaverse and the decentralisation of culture.

More here.

Jonathan Losos in The Conversation:

The African wildcat is the ancestor of our beloved household pets. And despite changing very little, their descendants have become among the world’s two most popular companion animals. (Numbers are fuzzy, but the global population of cats and dogs approaches a billion for each.)

Clearly, the few evolutionary changes the domestic cat has made have been the right ones to wangle their way into people’s hearts and homes. How did they do it? I explored this question in my book “The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa.”

More here.

Tara Isabella Burton in The New Atlantis:

Reality is different these days. It isn’t just that we have the tools to experience reality differently, or augment reality, by affixing a Meta Quest headset or an Apple Vision Pro to our skulls. It isn’t just that we have the ability to quantify reality, through smartwatches and heart rate monitors and step counters and sleep trackers, or that we have the ability to manipulate people’s perceptions of reality, through social media filters so ubiquitous that there is now a whole cottage industry of plastic surgery devoted to making people’s fleshly faces match the selfies they post on Instagram. Nor is it just the fact that our social world includes the conversations we have with virtual personal assistants like Siri and Alexa, whose soothing voices greet us when we come home, or remind us of the weather.

All of these, of course, play some role in the seismic reimaging of our selves, and our world, that the Internet — in particular, smartphone-enabled online culture — has engendered. But the shift we’re experiencing is bigger, and more totalizing, than any single phenomenon.

More here.

have you eaten yet

…………………………the mystery of your lungs
…………………………the spaceship of your yes
the ethereal of your puns
……….. the eternal of your sexts
……… the chic vivacity
of your spiritual & political & sensual rage
….. the tiny
………… extremely
……. efficient post office
………… of your least wild dreams
…………… the enormous
…..  hocus of your trembling pocus
……. the dirt of your muse
the deity of your musk
………………….. why
………………………. haven’t you eaten yet
…… this daily
………………….. breath of yours
come eat
….. this chest magic       brain planet
……………………….. this mischief
………………. & power
…………………………………………… this anger
…………………………………………… good anger
…………………………………………… your anger
……………………. from which you sing your most joyful
……………………….. deepest no

by Chen Chen

from Split This Rock

Peter E. Gordon at The Nation:

No audio recordings of Walter Benjamin have survived. His voice was once described as beautiful, even melodious—just the sort of voice that would have been suitable for the new medium of radio broadcasting that spread across Germany in the 1920s. If one could pay the fee for a wireless receiver, Benjamin could be heard in the late afternoons or early evenings, often during what was called “Youth Hour.” His topics ranged widely, from a brass works outside Berlin to a fish market in Naples. In one broadcast, he lavished his attention on an antiquarian bookstore with aisles like labyrinths, whose walls were adorned with drawings of enchanted forests and castles. For others, he related “True Dog Stories” or perplexed his young listeners with brain teasers and riddles. He also wrote, and even acted in, a variety of radio plays that satirized the history of German literature or plunged into surrealist fantasy. One such play introduced a lunar creature named Labu who bore the august title “President of the Moon Committee for Earth Research.”

more here.

David Hill at The Baffler:

LASTING FOR THREE STRAIGHT DAYS, the grand opening of Caesars Palace in August of 1966 was a spectacle unlike any the city of Las Vegas had ever seen. The owners of the casino, a brash Southern hotelier and gambler named Jay Sarno and his straight-laced partner Stan Mallin, dropped over a million dollars on food and booze, doling out fifty thousand glasses of champagne and two tons of filet mignon to their fourteen hundred guests. Nearly every high-rolling gambler and bookmaker in America, as well as a veritable who’s-who of celebrities, were in attendance. John Wayne, Johnny Carson, Maureen O’Hara, Eydie Gorme—even Grant Sawyer, the governor of Nevada, was on hand. The guest of honor, however, was someone who didn’t drink, didn’t gamble, and didn’t much care for lasciviousness or ostentatious displays of wealth. Yet here he was in the middle of a three-day bacchanal christening a $24 million Roman palace, the most expensive casino ever built up to that point in history, anywhere. His name was Jimmy Hoffa, and he was the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the 1.7 million-member trucking and transportation union.

more here.

Iris Kulbatski in The Scientist:

Humans are bioelectrical beings. The collections of cells that make up tissues and organs communicate using the language of voltages and electric fields. This electrical code is produced by specialized ion channels and proteins imbedded in cell membranes. Bioelectricity also directs embryonic development. Long before the growing brain reaches maturity, stem cells are abuzz with activity, engaging in bioelectrical conversations.¹ This network chatter coordinates the self-organization of tissues and gives physical shape to the human body, including the brain—a concept that was first popularized by Harold Saxton Burr in 1935.² Although controversial at the time, modern technology eventually showed the prescience of Burr’s idea, providing a basis for exploring the intrinsic regenerative potential of the human body.^3,4

Recently, Paul George, an assistant professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University, and his team applied insights from the field of developmental bioelectricity to regenerate the brain. “People respond very differently to strokes—younger patients recover a lot better than older patients. We asked whether we could recreate that younger environment,” George said. “A lot of cues help with the formation of the nervous system, including electrical, chemical, and physical cues.” Optimizing these conditions can help transplanted stem cells survive, integrate with local brain cells, and stimulate the body’s own repair mechanisms.

More here.