Dylan Riley in Sidecar:
The failure of the Silicon Valley Bank and its knock-on effects such as the bailout of Credit Suisse has elicited the usual flurry of social-psychologizing in the ‘quality press’. On a recent New York Times podcast, the former Treasury official Morgan Ricks reached new heights of pseudo-profundity by claiming that the problem was ‘panic itself’ – and that it could be resolved simply by extending a blanket guarantee to all depositors.
Such an account of the crisis provides no concrete explanation of what happened. The precise causes of the bank’s collapse are, of course, debatable; yet the basic structural context and its main lessons seem clear. SVB, which is supposed to serve what is widely viewed as the most dynamic and innovative sector of the global economy, ‘tech’, had parked a huge quantity of its deposits in low-yield – but supposedly safe – government-backed securities and low-interest bonds. When the Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates, the value of these bonds declined, setting off a classic bank run as depositors scrambled to withdraw their money. Was the panic facilitated by social media or other means of digital communication that encouraged herd behaviour? Who knows, and who cares? The crucial point is that the bank was overwhelmed by the massive growth in deposits from its tech clients – and neither it nor they could find anything worthwhile to invest in.
In short, the SVB collapse is a beautiful, almost paradigmatic, demonstration of the fundamental structural problem of contemporary capitalism: a hyper-competitive system, clogged with excess capacity and savings, with no obvious outlets to soak them up. It must be emphasized that the current vogue for ‘industrial policy’ – quite pronounced in both the Biden and Macron governments inter alia – will do nothing to address this underlying issue.
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The effect of Ernaux’s diary is to make this clear: These are the places where life happens, where the social orders are made apparent and reinforced, where societies are “built.” Her local big-box store is the site of ideas, feelings and consequential interactions, where the politics of class, race, gender and privilege get played out — along with more private fantasies and reveries.
Bruno Schulz was a gnomish, cockeyed Polonophone Jew whose writing gave sophisticated expression to the wondrous vagary and uncertainty and foreboding of childhood, without forcing it to — actually, without letting it — grow up. His two volumes of fiction — the sum total of his surviving work save a few scraps that, given Schulz’s focus on youth, one hesitates to call juvenilia — are rife with how small it can feel to be small; they are claustral with the creeping tensions and melancholy of adult domesticity, and slyly attentive to the vulnerability of boredom that can, suddenly, crashingly, turn one’s head to sex.
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Sending threatening text messages to a female colleague. Making fun of another woman by mimicking her on the air. Asking a co-anchor if, perhaps, she was having trouble remembering a statistic in the newscast because she had “mommy brain.” These are just a few of the allegations — many of them captured on camera for the world to see — leveled at CNN anchor Don Lemon in 
It is a warm, clear spring morning and Ai Weiwei is giving me a tour of the huge new studio he is building about an hour’s drive from Lisbon. There is not another house in sight, just the flat green landscape of the Alentejo, and a big blue sky dotted with darting swallows. The studio, explains the artist, is a replica of his old one in Shanghai, which was finished in 2011 only to be almost immediately 
A celebrated experiment in 1801 showed that light passing through two thin slits interferes with itself, forming a characteristic striped pattern on the wall behind. Now, physicists have shown that a similar effect can arise with two slits in time rather than space: a single mirror that rapidly turns on and off causes interference in a laser pulse, making it change colour.
An Upper East Sider with advanced degrees playing Wordle over espresso; a suburban teenager pairing Call of Duty: Warzone with bong rips before work: both play, arguably, for the same reasons. Each delights in low-stakes release. Each enjoys the sense of completing a task (spelling words, killing enemies) that feels vaguely moral, and which the player might take pride in, even if virtually and for an audience composed only of themselves. What is different is only that the New York Times and other enlightened organs have now found ways to market trivial, dependence-inducing digital game products (already wildly lucrative in other settings) to the gentry. And the Times is hardly alone.
The first signs that the mood was brightening among the corps of reporters called to cover one of the gravest threats humanity has ever faced appeared in the summer of 2021. “Climate change is not a pass/fail course,” Sarah Kaplan wrote in the Washington Post on August 9. “There is no chance that the world will avoid the effects of warming—we’re already experiencing them—but neither is there any point at which we are doomed.” Writing in the Guardian a few days later, Rebecca Solnit highlighted a paragraph from a recent report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that said carbon-dioxide removal technology could theoretically “reverse . . . some aspects of climate change.” Though she admitted this was “a long shot” that would require “heroic effort, unprecedented cooperation, and visionary commitment,” Solnit nevertheless concluded, “It is possible to do. And we know how to do it.”
This attempt to imbue his texts with greater realism by rejecting the reality of his own literary vocation has been part of Cărtărescu’s methodology since the dark days of Ceauşescu’s pseudo-communist regime. In earlier works, this denial had taken the form of the verbatim publishing of his own journals and the attendant claim that he doesn’t live his life but rather “constructed” it. But Cărtărescu also gives his novel a gritty sense of realism through its setting as well as its bitter views of its protagonist. The Bucharest of Solenoid has the curious air of a building constructed according to Hitler and Albert Speer’s Theorie vom Ruinwert: namely with the aim of having it look better as it ages than when new-made. For decay is everywhere in the Bucharest of the counter-Cărtărescu. His city is an urban environment seemingly purpose-built to express impermanence and decay, one in which moldering old mercantile houses and newly built yet already decaying apartment buildings are rendered phantasmagorical by the nameless narrator’s wanderings through their chipped and spalling chambers. Repeatedly and elegiacally, the counter-Cărtărescu hymns the city of his birth as “the saddest city,” and just as the precision of his writing imbues a dream with great realism, so too does the crumbling nature of his hometown offer us fragments of material beauty—perhaps the very ones necessary to shore us up against our current ruination.
What is life? Like most great questions, this one is easy to ask but difficult to answer. Scientists have been trying for centuries, and philosophers have done so for millennia. Today our knowledge is so advanced that we can precisely manipulate life’s building blocks—DNA, RNA and proteins—to build biological machines and engineer new genomes. Yet despite all we know, no universal consensus currently exists on life’s fundamental definition.
“Call me Ishmael.” This has to be one of the most famous opening sentences in all of literature, and I’m embarrassed to say that — until quite recently — I didn’t get beyond it. “Moby-Dick” was, for me, one of those books that languished in the guilt-inducing category of “things you should have read a long time ago,” and I just never got around to it. Plus, I am a mathematician. And despite my interest in literature, my intellectual priorities did not include 400-page novels about whales — or so I thought. That all changed one day when I overheard a mathematician friend mention that “Moby-Dick” contains a reference to cycloids.
North by Northwest isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The title sequence in which the stark lines of a Madison Avenue office building are “woven” together could be the construction of Cary in his suit right there—he gets knitted into his suit before his adventure can begin.