Yascha Mounk and Sohrab Ahmari at Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: You have a really interesting new book called Tyranny, Inc. One might think that when a conservative intellectual writes about “Tyranny, Inc.,” they’re writing about Harvard or Brookings. But you’re writing about the big corporations in the United States. What do you mean by “Tyranny, Inc.?”

Sohrab Ahmari: This is not a tirade against “woke capital.” It’s really a critique of the workings of unhindered capitalism as such. And it comes not from a kind of conservative cultural place in the sense that corporations are pushing gender ideology and so forth. But rather, on a much more fundamental level, it’s an attempt to show how our supposedly non-coercive market societies are in fact suffused with coercion. But that this coercion is taken to be in a “private sphere,” it’s in the marketplace, or the workplace, and, therefore, it’s not treated as being justiciable or being subjected to democratic give and take. We are forced to acquiesce to coercion that is sometimes so systematic and so unjust that I argue it amounts to what I call private tyranny.

More here.

Sam Sodomsky at Pitchfork:

Nearly every step of O’Connor’s career brought trouble. While making her debut album, 1987’s The Lion and the Cobra, she scrapped an entire session and had to pay the remaining debt on her own; she became pregnant with her first child before its release and was horrified by the label’s suggestion to get an abortion. There was, of course, the 1992 Saturday Night Live debacle, where she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II and asked viewers to “fight the real enemy,” essentially torching a pop career she never wanted. Two weeks later, she was booed while performing at a Bob Dylan tribute show, abandoning her song midway through to scream an a capella Bob Marley cover and run offstage, crying into the arms of Kris Kristofferson.

You could fill a book with these stories, and in most cases, you would come away from it feeling more disdain for the music industry and more tenderness—and respect—for O’Connor. Over the past decade, it seemed as though her legacy was being refurbished and rewritten by a more sympathetic audience. Kathleen Hanna wrote about how O’Connor’s music helped her feel like she “existed in the larger world”; Phoebe Bridgers covered one of her greatest protest songs; Fiona Apple shared a delightful video rocking out to O’Connor’s Lion and the Cobra single “Mandinka” with her dog.

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David Edgerton at Literary Review:

There was a time when commodity histories were everywhere. They tended to focus on consumption and trade over very long distances. Ulbe Bosma’s The World of Sugar is much more than this sort of book. It is one of the most accomplished longue durée case studies in the history of capitalism that we have, concerned not just with trade and consumption but with production also. At every turn it subverts both critiques and celebrations of capitalism, and our understanding of much else besides. It is an extraordinary achievement.

It is, for a start, a genuinely global history. Bosma discusses all the sugar-growing places of the world, from Cuba and Java, the largest exporters of the early 20th century, to Taiwan and the Tucumán region of Argentina. He points to Eastern countries as the greatest producers and consumers of sugar up to the late 19th century. But global does not simply mean ‘exotic’. This is a history not just of cane sugar but also of beet sugar, an equally important form of traded sugar over the last hundred years.

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Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian:

It must be a while ago now since Chris Bryant has had to write a sermon. But the former curate turned Labour MP, middle-ranking minister and latterly chair of the parliamentary committee that helps determine the fate of MPs who have sinned, doesn’t seem to have lost the knack. His account of what is rotten in the state of politics is neither lofty – if anything Bryant goes out of his way to confess to what he sees as his own failings, including a tendency to be “impulsive, sanctimonious and pompous” – nor overmoralising, but remains gently steadfast in the belief that parliament in general and this one in particular has lost its way. Code of Conduct is an attempt to guide it back to something like the straight and narrow.

He is, of course, entering a crowded literary field. Almost half the publishing industry seems to have had a shot now at detailing how the Boris Johnson era descended into such squalor; the lies, the chaos, the unedifying scrabble around for someone else to pay for his interior designers, and the willingness to overlook all manner of dubious behaviour in his ministers and aides. Even more ink has been spilt on the way Brexit has twisted politics out of shape, with its litany of false promises setting up leave voters for inevitable disillusionment. The queasy charade that is the modern honours system or the culture of abuse and threats that puts good people off standing for parliament are equally well-worn subjects, and in that sense Bryant is comparatively late to the party. But he brings with him more than two decades’ experience as a parliamentarian, a nonpartisan approach that helps him look beyond the failings of individuals to the system itself, and a raft of often small but practical suggestions for cleaning out the stables.

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Mark Golden in Phys.Org:

Stanford University scientists have invented a new kind of paint that can keep homes and other buildings cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, significantly reducing energy use, costs, and greenhouse gas emissions.

…Current low-emissivity paints usually have a metallic silver or gray color, the aesthetics of which limit their use. The newly invented paints have two layers applied separately: an infrared reflective bottom layer using aluminum flakes and an ultrathin, infrared transparent upper layer using inorganic nanoparticles that comes in a wide range of colors. The infrared spectrum of sunlight causes 49% of natural heating of the planet when it is absorbed by surfaces. For keeping heat out, the paint can be applied to exterior walls and roofs. Most of this infrared light passes through the color layer of the new paints, reflects off the lower layer, and passes back out as light, not being absorbed by the building materials as heat. To keep heat inside, the paints are applied to interior walls, where again, the lower layer reflects the infrared waves that transfer energy across space and are invisible to the human eye.

More here.

Nina’s Blues

Your body, hard vowels
In a soft dress, is still.

What you can’t know
is that after you died
All the black poets
In New York City
Took a deep breath,
And breathed you out;
Dark corners of small clubs,
The silence you left twitching

On the floors of the gigs
You turned your back on,
The balled-up fists of notes
Flung, angry from a keyboard.

You won’t be able to hear us
Try to etch what rose
Off your eyes, from your throat.

Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty,
Through our dark fingertips.
We drum rest
We drum thank you
We drum stay.

by Cornelius Eady

Nina Simone

Mitchell Consky at The Walrus:

Last June, four boys bonded inside a summer camp cabin.

After throwing loose shirts into cubbies and spreading sleeping bags onto sandy mattresses, a game of tag around the bunk beds quickly evolved into “the floor is lava.”

Concealed within the laughter, however, was a link these four boys, all between the ages of five and seven, didn’t yet know about: each of them had lost a father. And I, their camp counsellor for the weekend, had lost mine too.

But “lost” wasn’t the right word.

As my co-counsellors and I learned from our training a few weeks earlier, being specific with language was imperative at grief camp. It was better to avoid any euphemisms like “passed away” and “lost,” as they could inadvertently add confusion to the despair. In a child’s mind, when something is lost, it can also be found. Our fathers would not be found.

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Mark Harris in Undark:

Who hasn’t gazed at a murmuration of thousands of starlings wheeling rhythmically above their roost at dusk, and not wondered at the majesty and mystery of natural systems? For the Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi, merely marveling at nature wasn’t enough. In the early 1990s, he embarked on a decades-long project to install high-end commercial cameras on the rooftops of Rome, timed with millisecond-precision to capture and track every bird in the flock in three dimensions.

In this brief, crisply written memoir, “In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems,” Parisi takes the reader on a journey through his scientific life in the realm of complex, disordered systems, from fundamental particles to migratory birds. He argues that science’s struggle to understand and master the universe’s complexity, and especially to communicate it to an ever-more skeptical public, holds the key to humanity’s future well-being.

More here.

Colin Bradley in Aeon:

On the one hand, the promise of a liberal society is of a society of equals – of people who are equally entitled and empowered to make decisions about their own lives, and who are equal participants in the collective governance of that society. Liberalism professes to achieve this by protecting liberties. Some of these are personal liberties. I get to decide how to style my hair, which religion to profess, what I say or don’t say, which groups I join, and what I do with my own property. Some of these liberties are political: I should have the same chance as anyone else to influence the direction of our society and government by voting, joining political parties, marching and demonstrating, standing for office, writing op-eds, or organising support for causes or candidates.

On the other hand, liberalism is usually uttered in the same breath as capitalism. Capitalism is a social system characterised by the fact that private persons (or legal entities like corporations) own the means of production.

More here.

Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist:

Driverless cars have the green light to operate as paid ride-hailing services in San Francisco after the companies Waymo and Cruise won approval from California state regulators. But the decision comes amidst pushback from city officials and residents over the cars creating traffic jams and interfering with the work of firefighters and police officers.

The roll-out of driverless cars in San Francisco has had a bumpy start. Viral videos have shown them creating traffic problems or ignoring firefighter and police commands during emergencies, while local activists have halted them by placing traffic safety cones on their bonnets (hoods) to trick vehicle sensors.

More here.

Return

The sun’s warm against the slats of the granary,
a puddle of ice in the shadow of the steps;
a bluetick hound lopes
across the winter wheat —
fresh green, cold green.
The windmill, long out of use,
screeches and twists in the wind.
A spring day too loud for talk
when bones tire of their flesh
and want something better.

by Jim Harrison
from The Shape of the Day
Copper Canyon Press, 1998

Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker:

The Bible is a foundational text in Western literature, ignored at an aspiring writer’s hazard, and when I was younger I had the ambition to read it cover to cover. After breezing through the early stories and slogging through the religious laws, which were at least of sociological interest, I chose to cut myself some slack with Kings and Chronicles, whose lists of patriarchs and their many sons seemed no more necessary to read than a phonebook. With judicious skimming, I made it to the end of Job. But then came the Psalms, and there my ambition foundered. Although a few of the Psalms are memorable (“The Lord is my shepherd”), in the main they’re incredibly repetitive. Again and again the refrain: Life is challenging but God is good. To enjoy the Psalms, to appreciate the nuances of devotion they register, you had to be a believer. You had to love God, which I didn’t. And so I set the book aside.

Only later, when I came to love birds, did I see that my problem with the Psalms hadn’t simply been my lack of belief. A deeper problem was their genre. From the joy I experience, daily, in seeing the goldfinches in my birdbath, or in hearing an agitated wren behind my back fence, I can imagine the joy that a believer finds in God. Joy can be as strong as Everclear or as mild as Coors Light, but it’s never not joy: a blossoming in the heart, a yes to the world, a yes to being alive in it. And so I would expect to be a person on whom a psalm to birds, a written celebration of their glory, has the same kind of effect that a Biblical psalm has on a believer.

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Emilie Lucchesi in Discover:

After a retired speech-language pathologist had a stroke, he struggled to articulate his thoughts, even though he knew what he wanted to say. His wife didn’t understand the source of his difficulties until a clinician showed her a video that explained what her husband wished he could tell her: His stroke caused apraxia. Apraxia is a term used to describe a list of neurological disorders that impact speech, movement or gestures. Clinicians have observed apraxia for centuries, but they still don’t agree on which symptoms belong to which disorder type, and controversy persists. 

What Is Apraxia?

Apraxia is a term used to describe a series of conditions that make it difficult or impossible for a person to perform a desired movement or gesture. Depending on the person, apraxia can mean they struggle to make facial expressions in response to vocal commands. 

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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.