https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORR1lRs5iyw&ab_channel=AudioJukebox

Adam Tooze over at his substack:

Sanctions are the chosen weapon of the West against Putin’s aggression.

Rather than starting small we have gone immediately to an attack on the central bank.

In response, the Russian central bank has effectively stopped capital flows our of Russia and nationalized foreign exchange earnings of major exporters. It now requires Russian firms to convert 80 percent of the dollar and euro earnings into rouble. This helps to bolster the rouble’s value and provides a flow of foreign exchange into the country.

The “well-respected” i.e. highly conservative leadership of the Bank of Russia immediately raised rates and adopted the full array of central bank interventions that one might expect, pumping liquidity into the banking system and easing capital requirements. Reading the central bank’s website is a surreal experience – post-2008 style “macroprudential buffers” in the service of stabilizing Putin’s home front.

The question now, is how severe do we expect the impact of sanctions to be. How rapidly will they act? How will they impact Russian society and how might they change it politics?

It is tempting to think about this in terms of the effects on exports, efficiency, long-term damage to economic growth etc. The outlook for Russia is surely grim. The sanctions will further worsen a growth-rate which, since Crimea, has already been depressed.

More here.

Nick Serpe talks to Nicholas Mulder, the author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War in Dissent:

Nick Serpe: Some form of economic warfare has been around since the origin of warfare itself—the siege, the blockade. What is distinctive about sanctions, and their place in the politics of war and peace?

Nicholas Mulder: The idea of applying pressure to civilian societies and economies has been around as a practice and an idea for a very long time, but it was traditionally seen as part of the repertoire of war. Sanctions lift that technique from the realm of wartime into peacetime. That’s why the birth of modern international institutions after the First World War is so important, because they really affected that switch.

Sanctions are also often confused with economic restrictions that have other kinds of political or economic purposes—things like tariffs and protectionism. We’re in an era of general increasing economic nationalism in the wake of the 2008 crash and the COVID-19 pandemic. Tariffs are a matter of domestic regulation and protecting one’s own market from foreign competition, but sanctions are about trying to influence and deprive other territories.

More here.

Maya Adereth and Neil Warner interview Michael Mann in Phenomenal World (image León Ferrari, People, 1983).

MAYA ADERETH: Tell us a bit about your intellectual trajectory.

MICHAEL MANN: I got into sociology almost by accident. I did an undergraduate degree in history at Oxford, and then trained as a social worker. That training included a course in sociology, which I fell in love with. I managed to get a PhD position at Oxford and started doing very concrete empirical research; I did my dissertation on a factory relocation from Birmingham to Banbury. After that I went to Cambridge and continued to do empirical work, I studied the experiences of a large sample of workers in the labor market of Peterborough. When I got my first teaching position at Essex University, I had to teach courses on subjects I knew nothing about, like sociological theory. I remember that in the interview they asked me if I could teach a course on the Enlightenment. I said of course, wondering vaguely what the Enlightenment was.

This set me off on a theoretical path, even as I continued to do empirical work.  I wrote an article, which I never published, comparing Marx and Weber’s theories of social stratification. My involvement in the campaign for Nuclear Disarmament persuaded me to add a fourth form of power, military power. That’s something that remained distinctive to my model—that there are four sources of social power, not three as identified by Weber or Althusserian Marxism’s three levels of social formation.

More here.

Francis Fukuyama in the Financial Times (photo by Harry Mitchell):

Liberalism is a doctrine, first enunciated in the 17th century, that seeks to control violence by lowering the sights of politics. It recognises that people will not agree on the most important things — such as which religion to follow — but that they need to tolerate fellow citizens with views different from their own.

It does this by respecting the equal rights and dignity of individuals, through a rule of law and constitutional government that checks and balances the powers of modern states. Among those rights are the rights to own property and to transact freely, which is why classical liberalism was strongly associated with high levels of economic growth and prosperity in the modern world. In addition, classical liberalism was typically associated with modern natural science, and the view that science could help us to understand and manipulate the external world to our own benefit.

Many of those foundations are now under attack. Populist conservatives intensely resent the open and diverse culture that thrives in liberal societies, and they long for a time when everyone professed the same religion and shared the same ethnicity. The liberal India of Gandhi and Nehru is being turned into an intolerant Hindu state by Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister; meanwhile in the US, white nationalism is openly celebrated within parts of the Republican party. Populists chafe at the restrictions imposed by law and constitutions: Donald Trump refused to accept the verdict of the 2020 election, and a violent mob tried to overturn it directly by storming the Capitol. Republicans, rather than condemning this power grab, have largely lined up behind Trump’s big lie.

More here.

Alexandra Jacobs at the New York Times:

The actor, writer and consummate New Yawker Harvey Fierstein is assuredly a man of many talents. Who knew needlework was one of them?

In his new memoir, “I Was Better Last Night” — the title refers to a theater performer’s perennial lament, but with aptly sexualized undertones — Fierstein writes of his “passion for crochet.” In the lean years before his play “Torch Song Trilogy” hit Manhattan like a ton of graffitied bricks in 1981, he embroidered clothes for chic boutiques and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Detoxing from Southern Comfort, his “longest love affair,” Fierstein took up quilting, hoping eventually to contribute to the famous AIDS memorial project, but also recognizing the hobby’s general practicality: “Quilts have two sides, doubling the chance you’ll find something you can live with.”

more here.

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh at Artforum:

FEATURING HIS SELF MADE SAILOR’S HAT until his last days, Lawrence Weiner never tired of reminding us that WE ARE SHIPS AT SEA NOT DUCKS ON A POND, apparently sharing Otto Neurath’s moral imperative. The necessity of citing Weiner verbatim in the very first sentence (and in nearly every paragraph) of this homage already signals the extent to which his work contested—if not disqualified—the legitimacy of critical and historical ekphrasis. Every single one of his statements aimed at dismantling linguistic conventions (of plasticity, of poetry, of metaphor, of metaphysical thinking) and disputed the conciliatory potential of cultural practices. In a 1969 interview, Leo Castelli, an early admirer of Weiner who became his dealer after the artist parted ways with Seth Siegelaub, presciently identified the work—both literally and figuratively—as “the writing on the wall,” rightfully sensing the terminal radicality of its innate anti-aesthetic.

more here.

Amber Dance in Smithsonian:

Bones: They hold us upright, protect our innards, allow us to move our limbs and generally keep us from collapsing into a fleshy puddle on the floor. When we’re young, they grow with us and easily heal from playground fractures. When we’re old, they tend to weaken, and may break after a fall or even require mechanical replacement. If that structural role was all that bones did for us, it would be plenty.

But it’s not. Our bones also provide a handy storage site for calcium and phosphorus, minerals essential for nerves and cells to work properly. And each day their spongy interior, the marrow, churns out hundreds of billions of blood cells — which carry oxygen, fight infections and clot the blood in wounds — as well as other cells that make up cartilage and fat. Even that’s not all they do. Over the past couple of decades, scientists have discovered that bones are participants in complex chemical conversations with other parts of the body, including the kidneys and the brain; fat and muscle tissue; and even the microbes in our bellies.

It’s as if you suddenly found out that the studs and rafters in your house were communicating with your toaster.

More here.

Jeffrey Toobin in The New York Times:

It’s a rare Washington memoir that makes you gasp in the very second sentence. Here’s the first sentence from William P. Barr’s “One Damn Thing After Another,” an account of his two turns as attorney general: “The first day of December 2020, almost a month after the presidential election, was gray and rainy.” Indeed it was. Here’s the second: “That afternoon, the president, struggling to come to terms with the election result, had heard I was at the White House. …” Uh, “struggling to come to terms with”? Not exactly. How about “struggling to overturn the election he just lost” or “struggling to subvert the will of the voters”? Maybe “struggling to undermine American democracy.”

Such opening vignettes serve a venerable purpose in the Washington memoir genre: to show the hero speaking truth to power. Barr had just told a reporter that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” This enraged the president. “You must hate Trump,” Trump told Barr. “You would only do this if you hate Trump.” But Barr stood his ground. He repeated that his team had found no fraud in the election results. (This is because there was none.) By the end of the book, Barr uses the election controversy as a vehicle for a novel interpretation of the Trump presidency: Everything was great until Election Day, 2020. As Barr puts it, “In the final months of his administration, Trump cared only about one thing: himself. Country and principle took second place.” For Barr, it was as if this great president experienced a sudden personality transplant. “After the election,” Barr writes, “he was beyond restraint. He would only listen to a few sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear. Reasoning with him was hopeless.”

More here.

License to Kill

Man thinks ’cause he rules the earth he can do with it as he please
And if things don’t change soon, he will
Oh, man has invented his doom
First step was touching the moon

Now, there’s a woman on my block
She just sit there as the night grows still
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Now, they take him and they teach him and they groom him for life
And they set him on a path where he’s bound to get ill
Then they bury him with stars
Sell his body like they do used cars

Now, there’s a woman on my block
She just sit there facin’ the hill
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Now, he’s hell-bent for destruction, he’s afraid and confused
And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill
All he believes are his eyes
And his eyes, they just tell him lies

But there’s a woman on my block
Sitting there in a cold chill
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Ya may be a noisemaker, spirit maker
Heartbreaker, backbreaker
Leave no stone unturned
May be an actor in a plot
That might be all that you got
’Til your error you clearly learn

Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool
And when he sees his reflection, he’s fulfilled
Oh, man is opposed to fair play
He wants it all and he wants it his way

Now, there’s a woman on my block
She just sit there as the night grows still
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Bob Dylan
© 1983 by Special Rider Music

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

Let’s talk about this tweet:

The backstory: Steven Pinker wrote a book about rationality. The book concludes it is good. People should learn how to be more rational, and then we will have fewer problems.

Howard Gardner, well-known wrong person, sort of criticized the book. The criticism was facile, a bunch of stuff like “rationality is important, but relationships are also important, so there”.

Pinker’s counterargument is dubious: Gardner’s essay avoids rationality pretty carefully. But even aside from that, it feels like Pinker is cheating, or missing the point, or being annoying. Gardner can’t be arguing that rationality is completely useless in 100% of situations. And if there’s any situation at all where you’re allowed to use rationality, surely it would be in annoying Internet arguments with Steven Pinker.

More here.

Simon Waxman in the Boston Review:

In announcing that Russia would intensify its eight of years aggression against Ukraine in the interests of “denazification” and protecting oppressed Russian speakers (read: pro-Moscow separatists), Vladimir Putin has offered the thinnest pretext for cross-border war since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. And yet, the official position of the United States is that Russia is undermining a rule-based global order that supposedly has prevailed since the close of World War II.

Of course, Putin’s true goal is not humanitarian. It has more to do with suppressing a democracy in Russia’s sphere of influence—a democracy whose mere presence makes his own tyranny the more obvious and distasteful at home. The invasion of Ukraine must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. But we cannot at the same time ignore the duplicity of the United States and its allies, not least because that duplicity is a key element of Putin’s propaganda. Putin lies about many things, but he is right when he says that the West holds Russia to standards to which it doesn’t itself abide—a grievance that Russians appear widely to share and that imbues his own unjust and illegal war with a patina of legitimacy.

More here.

Arthur C Brooks in The Atlantic:

Silicon valley has a famously youth-dominated culture and economy. According to Business Insider, most employees in the tech industry are in their late 20s. At eBay, for example, the median employee age was 32 in 2017—and eBay is in the older half of the top tech companies. This is a problem for these businesses. Fairly or unfairly, many tech companies with disproportionately young employees and leaders have gone from a shining example of how entrepreneurial capitalism can improve our lives to something that seems unhealthy and even sinister over the past several years. As one tech writer put it, “the world fell out of love with Silicon Valley.”

With each controversy about harmful products, anticompetitive practices, and “bro culture,” my older friends in business look on in amazement at errors they find obvious. And therein lies a solution to the problem: As I argue in my book From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, companies need to hire more older people into the ranks of their leadership. To foster innovation and success that lasts, America needs more than innovation; it needs wisdom.

More here.

Joanna Thompson in Scientific American:

When a Venus flytrap snaps its fleshy lobes around an unsuspecting insect, it’s game over for the prey. The plant’s unusual habit of snacking on animals has captured the imagination of people ranging from Charles Darwin to playwright Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken (the latter two created the 1982 musical Little Shop of Horrors, which stars a human-eating plant). Now, in an experiment that might seem straight out of a pulp science-fiction novel, scientists have harnessed the flytrap’s power for themselves: they have developed a method to trigger its trap using soft, semi-organic artificial neurons.

“The overarching goal of our research is to try to develop devices that can mimic the functioning of building blocks in our body,” says study co-author Simone Fabiano, an organic nanoelectronics researcher at Linköping University in Sweden. The Venus flytrap provides an efficient testing ground for an interface between living creatures and electronics that, Fabiano and his team hope, may one day lead to fully integrated biosensors for monitoring human health—or a better interface for people to control advanced prostheses with their nerves. The results were published in Nature Communications last week.

More here.

Cal Flyn at VQR:

Jade Doskow’s extraordinary photographs of Freshkills Park, a “wilderness area” created on the site of Staten Island’s notorious landfill, offer us a new, unsettling approach to the pastoral in the twenty-first century. In this jarringly beautiful sequence of images, she presents us with a discomfiting environmental vision that interrogates what it means to be wild in a human-impacted world.

Initially opened as a stopgap measure in 1948, the Fresh Kills Landfill quickly swelled to become the world’s largest garbage dump. By the 1990s, it was the sole receptacle for all of New York City’s residential waste. At its peak, the landfill filled 2,200 acres—an area about three times the size of Central Park. Steaming garbage towered in heaps twenty stories high.

more here.