Katherine Wu in The New York Times:

David Robson in The Guardian:

Over the past 10 years, numerous studies have shown that our obsession with happiness and high personal confidence may be making us less content with our lives, and less effective at reaching our actual goals. Indeed, we may often be happier when we stop focusing on happiness altogether.

Let’s first consider the counterintuitive ways that the conscious pursuit of happiness can influence our mood, starting with a study by Iris Mauss at the University of California, Berkeley. The participants were first asked to rate how much they agreed with a series of statements such as: “I value things in life only to the extent that they influence my personal happiness” and “I am concerned about my happiness even when I feel happy”. The people who scored highly should have been seizing each day for its last drop of joy, yet Mauss found they tended to be less satisfied with their everyday lives, and were more likely to have depressive symptoms even in times of relatively low stress.

Various factors may have caused that link, of course, but a second study suggested a strong causal connection.

More here.

Rachel Nuwer in Scientific American:

Spider legs seem to have minds of their own. According to findings published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, each leg functions as a semi-independent “computer,” with sensors that read the immediate environment and trigger movements accordingly. This autonomy helps the arachnids quickly spin perfect webs with minimal brain use. The study authors simulated surprisingly simple rules to govern this complex behavior—which could eventually be applied to robotics.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in his Substack Newsletter:

Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own social media platform that operates the way you think it should.

The founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants.

More here.

Jessica Stewart in My Modern Met:

Brothers JP and Mike Andrews were astonished the first time they sent their drone into the air. These initial flights revealed a world hidden in the skies, one that turned the seemingly mundane perspective at ground level into a thing of beauty when viewed from above. Inspired by what they saw, the brothers set out to travel the world and “to show how weird and wonderful the world can look from above.” With this, Abstract Aerial Art was born.

More here.

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season
…. of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
….He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
….He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
….Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
….Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
….The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
….There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
….There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
….Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
….And in which darkness it can best be proved.

by Eavan Boland 
from New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland
W.W. Norton

Rebekah Taussig in Time Magazine:

It was a night in mid-April that I fell asleep to the phrase this is too hard pinging through my brain, and they were the first words to cross my mind when I opened my eyes the next morning. I texted my sisters: “Remember the easy days when it was JUST a baby and cancer???” I pulled myself out of bed, plopped heavily into my wheelchair and stared in the mirror with my fingers splayed across my growing belly. That day we had to decide if my partner Micah would start a second round of chemotherapy treatments that would weaken his ability to fight against this new virus if he caught it, or forgo the treatment and change his odds against cancer. Our baby would arrive in a few weeks.

That spring, as my feet and belly swelled, my classes of high school students pivoted to virtual learning. I scrapped the original plans and assigned personal essays. “Let’s bear witness to the here and now,” I said. “One day, we might even read these essays to our grandchildren.” I wrote alongside them as we journaled every day, paying attention to the details—snippets of dialogue caught at the dinner tables we were now sitting around, the exact flavor of the cinnamon rolls we finally had time to bake, our bodies’ reactions to sitting in front of screens for eight-plus hours a day. Tiny flashes of human experience in the midst of a global pandemic.

As soon as we started drafting our notes into essays, though, the plump, specific moments we’d documented flattened under the task of shaping them, and I noticed many of us pulling in one of two directions. There were the essays that skimmed the surface of loss—I’m bored; I miss soccer practice; when will this be over? And there were the essays of relentless positivity—I’m finally getting to spend more time with my family; I’m learning to be grateful for what I have; I’ve had time to make so many cool crafts. The angsty drafts didn’t reach complete catharsis, the uplifting versions didn’t quite offer hope, and all of us struggled to stay present with our words.

I was no exception. As soon as I tried to weave meaning from the tidbits I’d been gathering, I watched my words splinter on the page.

More here.

From New Statesman:

After Donald Trump lost the US presidency last year, he retained the consolation prize of his Twitter account. Commentators debated how Mr Trump would seek to profit from the 88 million followers he had accumulated: a new TV career or another presidential bid? Yet on 8 January, he lost his cherished platform after he was permanently suspended by Twitter because of “the risk of further incitement of violence”. Two days earlier a rabble of Trump fanatics, conspiracy theorists and white supremacists had stormed the US Capitol, resulting in five deaths. In a video posted on Twitter, Mr Trump told the mob, “We love you” and later tweeted: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide victory is so viciously & unceremoniously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”

Twitter’s intervention was praised by some commentators but the timing was convenient: Mr Trump had only 11 days left in office when he was suspended. The social media site, which profited for years from the president’s incendiary tweets, thus minimised the risk of retaliatory action.

Mr Trump’s suspension raises more profound questions. By barring the president, Twitter acted as a publisher, making an editorial judgement about the content hosted on its platform. Yet it is precisely this status that the social media firms have long eschewed. Under Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act, they are unaccountable for the content that is published on their platforms. Though they have a duty to remove any posts that violate federal criminal laws, they cannot be sued for libel and are not regulated in the manner of publishers. That is surely wrong.

More here.

Gig Ryan at The Sydney Review of Books:

So much has been written on the Heide group of artists, Nolan, Tucker, Hester, and their patrons John and Sunday Reed that it is hard to imagine anything more could be added. π.ο.’s Heide however, though holding this group of communalism, camaraderie, and free love as its centre, radiates backwards to the history that precedes the Reeds’ utopian endeavour, and continues into its aftermath. One epigraph from Oscar Wilde signals Heide’s intent: ‘The only duty we have to history is to rewrite it.’ Artists tumble out in artistic lineage from Buvelot to the Heidelberg School to Heide, along with numerous glancing biographies of influential patrons and politicians, William Barak, Ned Kelly, Albert Namatjira, Patrick White, Billy Hyde, Eliza Fraser, and many others. Through these intersecting histories, Heide also depicts the struggle between the conservation of the past and revolt against it, as epitomised in the Ern Malley hoax, with Angry Penguins magazine briefly funded by the Reeds, and the recurring compromises that swing between capital and art; ‘Only an Artist, can break out of / a straight-jacket.’. But it is his poetic technique that most energetically enacts these struggles, forging a dense amalgam in which past and present continually invade each other. Where π.ο.’s earlier Fitzroy: The Biography catalogued portraits of famous, notorious, and lesser known characters, Heide commences with ‘Terra Australis’ that cryptically lampoons its title, then to Cook’s voyage, and gradually progresses to the establishment of the State Library and the National Gallery of Victoria in 1850s colonial Melbourne, and eventually to the artists hammering to enter or exit those institutions. Escapee William Buckley and explorers Leichhardt and Burke and Wills are also among these seekers of the new: ‘On the horizon: / 23 horses, 19 men, and 26 camels on / a slow walk across / a blank slate.’ This imaginary ‘blank slate’ is equivalent to the unpolished metropolis without its establishments of arts and learning, and these doomed or heralded figures parallel the relentless pursuit of art.

more here.

Yakov Feygin in Phenomenal World:

“An effective way to write the history of the last thirty years of the twentieth century,” economist Albert Hirschman wrote in 1985, “may well be to focus on the distinctive reactions of various countries to the identical issue of worldwide inflation.” Writing just as the global “great inflation” of the 1970s was abating, Hirschman couldn’t have foreseen how right he was. As Claudia Sahm recently wrote in the New York Times, fear of the great inflation of the 1970s still dominates the thinking of the Federal Reserve, even as its recent messages indicate changing winds. (In recent comments, Larry Summers’s warning that two-thousand-dollar checks would cause the economy to run too “hot” and generate inflation betrayed an almost generational blindness on the topic.)

Economists lack a good understanding of what causes inflation. In introductory macroeconomics curricula, the mantra of Milton Friedman remains central: “inflation is always a monetary phenomenon.” By this, Friedman meant that excessive price growth happens when a state loosens the supply of money, thus over-expanding the monetary base. But recent research has brought this popular doctrine into question. While expanding the money supply seems to be a necessary condition for uncontrolled inflation to occur, it is not sufficient: increases of the monetary base have occurred without any inflationary episodes, and inflationary episodes have happened with only very small increases in monetary base.

Contra Friedman, Hirschman suggested that uncontrolled inflation is primarily a political phenomenon that occurs when groups compete over resources. The rapid increase of the price level is a signal that the state can no longer control this competition. What exactly happened in the waning decades of the twentieth century, and why do the ghosts of inflation still haunt our economic and political reality?

Hyman Minsky’s writings on the collapse of the so-called golden age of capitalism offer some insight by forcing us to engage with how distributive struggles have driven the inflationary and deflationary cycles of the past fifty years.

More here.

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite interviews Katrina Forrester over at Renewal:

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (FSB): The first part of your book, In the Shadow of Justice (Princeton 2019), goes back to the 1950s, when the basic parameters of Rawls’s theory of justice were, you argue, set. As a historian of Britain, I was fascinated by how much the British Labour Party’s revisionists shaped Rawls in the 1950s – you suggest, in fact, that his theory brought ‘philosophical order to the ideas of the Labour revisionists’ (p25). But because it was so fundamentally formed in this period, Rawlsianism was premised on continuing high levels of growth and public buy-in for welfare programmes, two things that Labour revisionists took for granted but which would become much less secure in the years after the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971. In the following decades, as you show, a cohort of Rawlsian political philosophers, defending his work from attacks on left and right, firmed up and elaborated Rawls’s already immensely ambitious theory into a kind of juggernaut: huge, with a vast, rigid structure, very slow to turn around, but immensely powerful. Rawlsianism didn’t just come to dominate liberal political philosophy, it essentially defined liberal egalitarianism. Other philosophers had to work in its shadow. You want, in your book, to ‘denaturalize and defamiliarize’ the canons of liberal egalitarianism (p275). What’s the practical payoff from doing this?

Katrina Forrester (KF): It can be hard to see the assumptions that underpin a particular way of thinking, and to see the different choices that go into making up the conceptual frameworks that we take for granted and that are coded as ‘intuitive’. Among political philosophers, liberal egalitarianism has been a dominant way of thinking about politics, society and ethics, for decades. Though its origins in the political philosophy of John Rawls are constantly revisited, sometimes in a quasi-scriptural way, its political origins are less often interrogated. I wanted to ask what we see if we take liberal egalitarianism as a historical phenomenon to be explained. If it is recast as one of the twentieth century’s languages of liberalism, a framework that is one among many, then we might be better placed to ask if it’s a language and a framework we want to use.

More here.

Houman Barekat in LA Review of Books:

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I got a terrible fright. I was on my smartphone, rereading my old WhatsApp exchanges with a friend who had died in a car accident a year earlier, when suddenly the screen flickered and the friend came “online.” Presumably a relative had possession of the phone and was going through it; maybe they were looking to retrieve some specific piece of information, or perhaps they simply wanted to revisit their loved one’s online life — just as one might peruse a photo album or a trove of letters. There was a simple explanation, but I was nonetheless spooked: it was unnerving to see the account spring to life, because we tend to think of social media profiles as being inextricably entwined with their owner’s personhood — an extension, almost, of their physical selves.

What is the moral and legal status of a person’s digital avatar and its accumulated data? Is it merely property like any other, or does it occupy its own special category? In 2018, Germany’s Federal Court of Justice ruled that the parents of a 15-year-old girl who died after falling under a train had the right, under inheritance law, to access her Facebook account. The parents, who believed their daughter may have intended to kill herself, wanted to read her online correspondence to establish whether she was being bullied at the time of her death. This brought them into conflict with Facebook’s strict privacy policy, which permits only the most limited access for relatives of deceased users: they can either “memorialize” the profiles or delete them outright. Overturning the decision of an appeals court that had found in Facebook’s favor, the country’s highest court held that such digital data should be treated no differently than a person’s private diaries, passing to their legal heirs after death.

Intuitively this feels right, especially in the circumstances of that particular case. But merely having access to an account is one thing; using it to post new content in the name of the deceased person is another.

More here.

Mike Konczal in Boston Review:

The workplace has been a central battleground in the debate over freedom. On the clock, bosses tell us how to act and what to do, even around basic bodily functions: workers can be told when they can use the bathroom. Bosses also exert a significant amount of control over our personal lives, dictating limits on speech and our political actions. Governments can imprison us for breaking their rules; bosses can fire us, depriving us of the basic resources we need to live. Unlike our democratic form of public government, the workplace subjects us to, in the words of philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, a kind of private government, with no presumption of fairness, accountability, or even regularity—a despotic state in miniature. Leaving our job is no check on this despotic tendency. People know this, which is why for centuries American workers have demanded more than the power to quit. As much as fair wages and safe working conditions, workers have also demanded safeguards over their time.

There have always been workers who demanded limits on working hours to accommodate everything else that they needed time for. They understood that if they didn’t have free time, they couldn’t have the kinds of relationships and commitments they needed to lead free and full lives. This is a story almost as old as the United States itself. In May 1835 a group of carpenters, masons, and stonecutters in Boston wrote and released the “Ten-Hour Circular,” a short document demanding a ten-hour workday. “The God of the Universe has given us time, health, and strength. We utterly deny the right of any man to dictate to us how much of it we shall sell.” The circular’s description of the system as “odious, cruel, unjust, and tyrannical” and of bosses forcing a worker “to exhaust his physical and mental powers by excessive toil, until he has no desire but to eat and sleep, and in many cases he has no power to do either” resonated with workers, especially those new to waged labor. Citizens left in a worn-out state of exhaustion could not be “friends to the country or the Rights of Man,” nor could they meet their “duties to perform as American Citizens and members of society.”

More here.

“From the depths of ignorance ill winds blow.”
…………………………………….. —Amerigo Lowe

Idiot Wind —excerpts

Someone’s got it in for me
They’re planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out quick
But when they will I can only guess

People see me all the time
And they just can’t remember how to act
Their minds are filled with big ideas
Images and distorted facts

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the back roads headin’ south
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, It’s a wonder that
you still know how to breathe

You hurt the ones that I love best
And cover up the truth with lies
One day you’ll be in the ditch
Flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle

Idiot wind, blowing through the flowers on your tomb
Blowing through the curtains in your room
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

Read more »

Emily Matchar in Smithsonian:

Like school, work conferences and visiting your grandparents, this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has been virtual-only. So instead of gathering in hangar-sized Las Vegas expo halls, those wishing to check out the year’s crop of tech and gadget debuts can simply tune in online. Some of these technologies will never catch on. Others may one day be as ubiquitous as the Xbox, satellite radio and 3D printers, all of which made their grand entrances at CES. While it’s hard to predict which items will stick around, we’ve picked nine of the most useful-seeming, most surprising and most fun inventions for a possible peek into our future.

Bluetooth Masks

What would have looked utterly alien just a year ago now seems completely practical. Binatone’s MaskFone is a N95 mask wired for sound. Wearers can use its Bluetooth function to make calls, request a song from their own music library, or issue commands to voice assistants like Alexa. Simply take the electronics out to wash the fabric mask. Tech and social media commentator Lance Ulanoff tweeted “How did someone not come up with this sooner?”

More here.