Paul Collier at Project Syndicate:
The world needs a new economics for neglected places – for those who have fallen behind others in the same country, whether it be a rich one or a poor one. The place in question might be a community, a town, or a region: Muslims in France, Rotherham in Northern England, or Colombia’s Atlantic-Caribbean coastal region.
In my last book, Left Behind, I show why such places, once hit by an adverse shock, spiral down unless the shock is mitigated by supportive and timely finance guided by local contextual knowledge. Those in the United Kingdom may recognize this as a critique of the highly centralized, short-horizon, economic micromanagement exemplified by the Treasury; but the consequences should serve as a warning to other countries, too. Through detailed analyses of instances of renewal, I hope to show how both local leadership and bottom-up social movements can be effective in transforming broken places.
The problem, contrary to what Milton Friedman argued (and what the UK’s Treasury assumes), is that financial markets reallocate capital from shock-hit places to those that are unaffected. The smartest money flees from adversity toward success, and it is soon followed by other investors.
More here.
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This past summer, I was surprised to encounter a face I knew in two most unexpected places. The first was in a photo montage accompanying an article written by Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo in the wake of J.D. Vance becoming the Vice Presidential nominee, entitled “A Journey Through the Authoritarian Right.” Arranged in the collage among images of a ripped man with lasers shooting from his eyes, of anti-democracy blogger Curtis Yarvin, and of Peter Thiel rubbing Benjamins between his thumb and forefinger, was my former professor and friend from Stanford University, René Girard. I was in France at the time; mere hours after reading Kovensky’s piece, I saw through the window of a taxi René’s face again—this time in the form of a larger-than-life decal on a light rail car in Avignon, where as it happens he is one of a dozen local heroes permanently celebrated on the new transit system. What do the medieval, culturally-rich, Provençal city of Avignon and the American authoritarian right have in common? Both claim a bond with this influential philosopher and member of L’Académie Française, who died in 2015. Only one of the claims is legitimate. The misappropriation of Girard’s ideas by the American right is not just a matter of academic concern; it has significant implications for our political discourse and society.
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At the blow of a whistle, each dog, one at a time, was let out onto the grounds and on its doggy way, snuffling the grooves and crevices of the obstacle course in the hunt for a swab doused in an herbal essential oil. The dogs moved evenly, steady as magnetic north, until they appealed to their handlers with glances that functioned like code. This dogsperanto—a language of punctuation marks, canine body cues in expressions of “?” or “!”—met human encouragement in a surrealist covenant between trainer and trainee. Woof begat nod, nod begat pursuit. The lagotto came to a halt at a traffic cone.
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Between 17 January 2023 and 19 August 2024, María Branyas Morera, of Spain, was officially the 
AI holds immense potential to advance human wellbeing, yet its current trajectory presents unprecedented dangers. AI could soon far surpass human capabilities and escalate risks such as engineered pandemics, widespread disinformation, large-scale manipulation of individuals including children, national and international security concerns, mass unemployment, and systematic human rights violations.
In a 1996 interview with The Paris Review, the reporter and novelist John Gregory Dunne was asked why he chose to classify his 1974 book, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, as fiction as opposed to journalism. The book recounts six months Dunne spent alone in Vegas, taking a break from his marriage. Dunne, the narrator and protagonist of the book, spends most of it in a severe depression contemplating the possibility of divorce, eating junk food in his rental, and hanging out with a bunch of Vegas archetypes: the sex worker, the private investigator, the failed comic. Dunne tells the interviewer that although he was contracted at the time to write a nonfiction book, he opted to call the finished product a novel “since I made most of it up.” He offers as an example a scene in which he meets the sex worker, Artha, at a casino at five in the morning. He’s not there to gamble money; his brand of gambling takes the form of talking to strangers while in the grip of insomnia. During his conversation with Artha, he discovers some obviously bad poetry she has written on the back of a keno ticket, which he reproduces for the reader. It’s true, Dunne tells the interviewer, that while in Vegas he met a sex worker who wrote poetry. But the poems that appear in the book were written as a joke by his wife, Joan Didion.
This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with biographer Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, a book three decades in the making. The episode follows James Baldwin on his transatlantic commutes, introducing listeners to four formative—and transformative—friendships with “crazy outsiders” that sustained Baldwin and that organize this new biography. We meet painter Beauford Delaney, the “spiritual father” and artistic mentor Baldwin found in Greenwich Village. In post-war Paris, we meet Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss émigré who would become Baldwin’s lover, muse, and lifelong friend. We meet Engin Cezzar, the “blood brother” who created for Baldwin a home in Istanbul. Finally, Boggs introduces us to Yoran Cazac, the French painter with whom Baldwin collaborated on his “child’s story for adults,” Little Man, Little Man, which Boggs helped bring back into print. Along the way, Boggs and Hohn dwell on the meaning of love in Baldwin’s life and work, and on his yearning for a home “by the side of the mountain, on the edge of the sea.” Hohn and Boggs also spend time with Otto Friedrich, who befriended Baldwin during his Paris years and would become Lewis Lapham’s editor and mentor. The episode concludes with a selection of entries about Baldwin from the journal Friedrich kept in 1949.
If the 264 million students enrolled in higher education around the globe were a country, it would be the fifth most populous in the world. Some 53% of its citizens would identify as women and most would be located in Asia. Residents would speak and study in hundreds of languages, but English would dominate. This nation of learners would also be one of the fastest growing. Since 2000, the number of university students around the world has more than doubled, and the number that cross borders to learn has roughly tripled, to almost seven million. Aided by the Internet, conferences, shared curricula and collaborations, the world of higher education has become more tightly linked.
When it comes to caffeine, we often speak about ‘needing our fix’ but I’ve yet to hear of an intervention staged for the friend who drinks three double espressos before noon. In fact, when it comes to caffeine, we rarely worry about things like tolerance, dosage or long-term effects in the same way we do for other substances. We don’t speak in terms of use, misuse and psychoactivity. But caffeine, like other drugs, directly 
AI models have already been used to generate DNA sequences,