Over at the Next System Project’s podcast:

This week, we’re talking about how Social Wealth Funds can play a role in empowering both individuals and communities in the economy. Joining us is Maryland House of Delegates member Gabriel Acevero, Vice President at the Insight Center for Community and Economic Development Jhumpa Bhattacharya, and President of the People’s Policy Project, Matt Bruenig.

The Next System Podcast is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, Stitcher Radio, Tune-In, and Spotify. You can also subscribe independently to our RSS feed here.

Also Peter Gowan in Jacobin on Rudolph Meidner, who once proposed one of the more ambitious proposals to broaden the distribution of wealth:

Rudolf Meidner, one of the primary architects of Sweden’s famed social-democratic model, once described private ownership as “a gun pointed at the temple of the labor movement.” He spent his career as a union economist trying to resolve the standoff in labor’s favor.

Meidner’s economic model — given form by an exceptionally strong Social Democratic Party (SAP) and labor movement — delivered sustained material gains to workers in the decades after World War II (and, because of robust growth, private business). Swedish workers enjoyed the fruits of an expanding welfare state while exercising unprecedented influence and control over a developed economy.

It was not enough — the gun remained in place, and by the 1970s, Meidner had concluded, along with the Swedish labor movement, that an alternative model of ownership was needed. “We want to deprive the owners of capital of the power which they wield,” Meidner explained.

All experience shows that influence and control is not enough — ownership plays a critical part. I refer to Marx and Wigforss: we cannot fundamentally transform society without also fundamentally changing ownership.

More here.

Steven Wishnia in The Indypendent:

BCDI [The Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative], a network of various Bronx community groups, was formed in 2011, after then-mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration proposed turning the disused armory into a shopping mall or a big-box store. Community residents opposed that, insisting that the jobs created should pay a “living wage” and arguing that the building would be better used as a school or a community center.

Their campaign brought together community organizations, labor unions, elected officials, and “socially oriented developers,” says Yorman Nuñez, director of the Just Urban Economies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Community Innovators Lab, which works closely with BCDI. They won a “halfway victory”: The mall plan was stopped and they got what BCDI calls “a landmark community benefits agreement,” but the building remains empty.

More here.

Robert Zaretsky in Foreign Affairs:

In early 1919, Germany risked becoming a failed state. Total war had morphed into a civil war that pitted revolutionaries against reactionaries, internationalists against nationalists, and civilians against soldiers. Munich was the bloodiest arena: over a few short months, the city was ruled by a Bavarian king, a socialist prime minister, and a Soviet republic. The first was overthrown, the second murdered, and supporters of the third slaughtered. “Everything is wretched, and everything is bloody,” Victor Klemperer, a professor at the University of Munich, wrote in his diary, “and you always want to laugh and cry at once.”

These events framed the much-anticipated lecture “Politics as a Vocation” that Klemperer’s colleague Max Weber gave that same year. One hundred years later, there are few better texts to serve as a guide for the increasingly wretched and violent events now unfolding in our own time and place. In particular, Weber’s discussion of the charismatic politician, as well as his distinction between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility, has perhaps even greater relevance in our own era than in his.

More here.

Rowan Williams in New Statesman:

This wonderful book might be read as a long meditation on WH Auden’s notorious throwaway comment in his elegy for WB Yeats: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” John Burnside’s first chapter engages directly with this maxim, patiently showing us what it does and does not mean in its context. Auden is not shrugging his shoulders and accepting a place for poetry at the neglected margins of social life. Rather he is making a stark distinction between the ways in which human beings try to “make things happen” – the feverish efforts at political and technological control – and the tough imperative to find ways of echoing “the music of what is” in word and gesture.

The language that “makes things happen” in this context is the language of the Twitter feed, the advertising pitch, the chanted slogan at the rally or party conference (more and more indistinguishable from the advertising and entertainment world), the oafish put-down in parliamentary “debate”, the incomprehensible burble of policy documents and “values statements”.

As Auden says, poetry is “a way of happening”. It takes the passage of time, the reality of loss, the absorption in a sharpened kind of seeing or hearing, and makes all these into speech that can survive (as Auden also insists) and help others survive. Its task of “turning noise into music” is thus irreducibly political, a sustained resistance to commodified, generalised language and the appalling reductions of human possibility that this brings with it. Far from being a decorative adjunct to social or public life, it represents the possibilities to which all intelligent and humane social life should point. “Poetry saves the world every day.”

More here.

Stephen Corry in Counterpunch:

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truths, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned. The revolt of individualism came because the tradition had become degraded, or rather because a spurious copy had been accepted in its stead.

– W.B. Yeats^[1]

Who’s the “father” of environmentalism? Now that the human impact on nature is getting more attention than ever, it’s a question worth asking. Is it, for example, the Prussian naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, as his biographer thinks?^[2] He was born in 1769, 250 years ago and isn’t big in the English-speaking world despite having more species named after him than anyone else in history. It’s not just species: A river, lake, bay, forest, and mountain ranges bear his name in the U.S. where few now know who he was. It’s different in Germany: Posterity has ensured “Humboldt” is plastered on streets, schools, universities, institutes and shops all over the country. Put “Humboldt” into Google Earth with any German city to see the effect.^[3]

Germans laud their famous sons. (They are, of course, almost all sons!) This long predates Hitler-worship,^[4] as one of the oddest of European monuments testifies. Called “Walhalla,“ it’s a faux Greek temple, built by Bavarian King Ludwig I in the 1830s to house busts of famous Germans. Humboldt is in there together with his even more famous friend, Goethe. The two are as prominent to Germans as Darwin (who Humboldt met) and Shakespeare are in England. Big daddies just don’t come any bigger. So what did Humboldt actually father and should it matter now?

More here.

At Tower Peak

Every tan rolling meadow will turn into housing
Freeways are clogged all day
Academies packed with scholars writing papers
City people lean and dark
This land most real
As its western-tending golden slopes
And bird-entangled central valley swamps
Sea-lion, urchin coasts
Southerly salmon-probes
Into the aromatic almost-Mexican hills
Along a range of granite peaks
The names forgotten,
An eastward running river that ends out in desert
The chipping ground-squirrels in the tumbled blocks
The gloss of glacier ghost on slab
Where we wake refreshed from ten hours sleep
After a long day’s walking
Packing burdens to the snow
Wake to the same old world of no names,
No things, new as ever, rock and water,
Cool dawn birdcalls, high jet contrails.
A day or two or million, breathing
A few steps back from what goes down
In the current realm.
A kind of ice age, spreading, filling valleys
Shaving soils, paving fields, you can walk in it Live in it,
drive through it then
It melts away
For whatever sprouts
After the age of
Frozen hearts. Flesh-carved rock
And gusts on the summit,
Smoke from forest fires is white,
The haze above the distant valley like a dusk.
It’s just one world, this spine of rock and streams
And snow, and the wash of gravels, silts
Sands, bunchgrasses, saltbrush, bee-fields,
Twenty million human people, downstream, here below.

by Gary Snyder
from The Writer’s Almanac, NPR

Jim Farber in The Guardian:

“HU!! HU!! HU!!,” yelled the crowd, at escalating volume, for a full 20 minutes before the Hu kicked off their recent concert at the Brooklyn venue, Warsaw. The fans who packed the place, many of whom were decked out in de rigueur heavy metal gear of black T-shirts and leather, thrust their fists into the air in rhythm to their chants, which grew to a roar the moment the band appeared.

The imposing-looking members of the Hu sported leather too, only theirs bore the elaborate patterns and symbols of their homeland, Mongolia. And instead of singing in English, they sang exclusively in their native tongue, delivered in the ancient art of khoomei, or throat singing. In the same vein, their instruments mixed the slashing electric guitars and pounding drums of the west with the richness of the morin khuur (a two-stringed, horse-head fiddle), the tinniness of the tuvshuur (a Mongolian guitar) and the quaver of the tumor khuur (a jaw harp). The beat they kept didn’t so much punch, a la western metal, as gallop, a reference to the horses prized by the nomadic tribes of the band’s ancestors. With so bracing a combination of sights and sounds, the Hu have been forging a highly improbable connection between the complexities of traditional Mongolian music and the 10-ton force of western metal. Think: Genghis Khan ransacking Judas Priest.

More here.

Brian Resnick in Vox:

Scientists at Google on Wednesday declared, via a paper in the journal Nature, that they’d done something extraordinary. In building a quantum computer that solved an incredibly hard problem in 200 seconds — a problem the world’s fastest supercomputer would take 10,000 years to solve — they’d achieved “quantum supremacy.” That is: Google’s quantum computer did something that no conventional computer could reasonably do.

Computer scientists have seen quantum supremacy — the moment when a quantum computer could perform an action a conventional computer couldn’t — as an elusive, important milestone for their field. There are many research groups working on quantum computers and applications, but it appears Google has beaten its rivals to this milestone.

According to John Preskill, the Caltech particle physicist who coined the term “quantum supremacy,” Google’s quantum computer “is something new in the exploration of nature. These systems are doing things that are unprecedented.”

More here.

Suketu Mehta in Scroll.in:

These days, a great many people in the rich countries complain loudly about migration from the poor ones. But the game was rigged: First, the rich countries colonised us and stole our treasure and prevented us from building our industries. After plundering us for centuries, they left, having drawn up maps in ways that ensured permanent strife between our communities. Then they brought us to their countries as “guest workers” – as if they knew what the word “guest” meant in our cultures – but discouraged us from bringing our families.

Having built up their economies with our raw materials and our labour, they asked us to go back and were surprised when we did not. They stole our minerals and corrupted our governments so that their corporations could continue stealing our resources; they fouled the air above us and the waters around us, making our farms barren, our oceans lifeless; and they were aghast when the poorest among us arrived at their borders, not to steal but to work, to clean their shit, and to sleep with their men.

Still, they needed us. They needed us to fix their computers and heal their sick and teach their kids, so they took our best and brightest, those who had been educated at the greatest expense of the struggling states they came from, and seduced us again to work for them. Now, again they ask us not to come, desperate and starving though they have rendered us, because the richest among them need a scapegoat. This is how the game is rigged today.

More here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

I cannot think of a contemporary piece that has attracted as much of a cult following as Haas’s mesmerizing, disorienting, and utterly moving in vain. It begins with a swirl of sound in which the cascading runs suggest a sense of falling, yet as these lines rise in pitch, there’s a feeling of upward motion, too—the musical equivalent, as many commentators have noted, of M. C. Escher’s staircase, descending and ascending all at once. Soon after a hair-raising crescendo, the listener is plunged into another realm, in which microtonality seems at war with conventional tuning. The sounds pulse like flashes of light through an abiding darkness, which is not only metaphorical but also literal, for in a live performance, the house lights gradually dim and are then cut. (Unable to see either their music stands or the conductor, the performers must play extended sequences of very complex music from memory.) Out of this darkness, a new world of sound emerges, something elemental—familiar but strange—with the textures and harmonies undergoing subtle transformations. Just when it seems as if some redemptive moment will arrive, the music becomes frustratingly dizzying once again. Indeed, listening to in vain can feel like being trapped in an anxiety dream from which you almost manage to escape, but ultimately cannot.

more here.

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

Stubbs was, however, an interpreter as well as an observer. His pictures reveal his fascination with relationships; between owners and their horses and hounds, between servants and masters, between animals themselves. And they show his very modern conviction that animals have emotions similar to and every bit as potent as our own. The eyes of his creatures are full of feeling and frequently stare back at the viewer with disconcerting intensity. You need only to look at the eye of his horse being devoured by a lion, a motif he returned to again and again, to be made uncomfortable as a witness to its agony. In a remarkable late work of 1800 showing the Earl of Clarendon’s gamekeeper with his dog about to dispatch a doe, man and doomed animal look out of the painting, making the viewer complicit in the coup de grâce. Other near contemporaries such as James Ward and Théodore Géricault gave their animals emotions, but without the same fellow feeling.

more here.

David Schurman Wallace at The Baffler:

Krasznahorkai is a perplexing figure in today’s literary landscape: he is, in internet parlance, committed to his bit. The Hungarian author cultivates an air of mystery (he “lives in reclusiveness,” according to one biographical note) and has been known to give cryptic answers in his occasional interviews (“Wherever I happen to disappear, it is neither into silence nor into darkness,” he told Asymptote Journal). A literary heir to Kafka, Beckett, and Dostoyevsky, for him the existence of God and the nature of infinity are subjects that are not too large. Krasznahorkai is known for long, labyrinthine sentences that painstakingly excavate every fleck of a subject’s consciousness, rolling across multiple pages with precious little white space. In the tradition of Mallarmé, he has said that he always wanted to write one unified book, and Wenckheim, reportedly the author’s last, seeks to tie together three previous novels: Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, and War & War, unifying them into one great work. Accordingly, Wenckheim takes up the ideas of these earlier books and enlarges them: the absurd is more absurd, the incomprehensible more incomprehensible than ever.

more here.

Casey Cep in The New Yorker:

There were ideas long before there were light bulbs. But, of all the ideas that have ever turned into inventions, only the light bulb became a symbol of ideas. Earlier innovations had literalized the experience of “seeing the light,” but no one went around talking about torchlight moments or sketching candles into cartoon thought bubbles. What made the light bulb such an irresistible image for ideas was not just the invention but its inventor.

Thomas Edison was already well known by the time he perfected the long-burning incandescent light bulb, but he was photographed next to one of them so often that the public came to associate the bulbs with invention itself. That made sense, by a kind of transitive property of ingenuity: during his lifetime, Edison patented a record-setting one thousand and ninety-three different inventions. On a single day in 1888, he wrote down a hundred and twelve ideas; averaged across his adult life, he patented something roughly every eleven days. There was the light bulb and the phonograph, of course, but also the kinetoscope, the dictating machine, the alkaline battery, and the electric meter. Plus: a sap extractor, a talking doll, the world’s largest rock crusher, an electric pen, a fruit preserver, and a tornado-proof house.

More here.

Elizabeth Pennisi in Science:

In 2014, when Ian Miller and Tyler Lyson first visited Corral Bluffs, a fossil site 100 kilometers south of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science where they work, Lyson was not impressed by the few vertebrate fossils he saw. But on a return trip later that year, he split open small boulders called concretions—and found dozens of skulls. Now, he, Miller, and their colleagues have combined the site’s trove of plant and animal fossils with a detailed chronology of the rock layers to tell a momentous story: how life recovered from the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Plants and animals came back much faster than thought, with plants spurring mammals to diversify, the team reports today in Science. “They get almost the whole picture, which is quite exciting,” says functional anatomist Amy Chew of Brown University. “This high-resolution integrated record really tells us what’s going on.” When the asteroid slammed into Earth, it wiped out 75% of living species, including any mammal much larger than a rat. Half the plant species died out. With the great dinosaurs gone, mammals expanded, and the new study traces that process in exquisite detail. Most fossil sites from after the impact have gaps, but sediment accumulated nearly continuously for 1 million years on the flood plain that is now the Corral Bluffs site. So the site preserves a full record of ancient life and the environment.

Such sites can be hard to date. But Miller, a paleobotanist, and his colleagues collected 37,000 grains of pollen and spores, which revealed a clear marker of the asteroid impact: a surge in the growth of ferns, which thrive in disturbed environments.

More here.

Magnitude and Bond

More than anything, I need this boy
so close to my ears, his questions

electric as honeybees in an acreage
of goldenrod and aster. And time where

we are, slow sugar in the veins
of white pine, rubbery mushrooms

cloistered at their feet. His tawny
listening at the water’s edge, shy

antlers in pooling green light, while
we consider fox prints etched in clay.

I need little black boys to be able to be
little black boys, whole salt water galaxies

in cotton and loudness—not fixed
in stunned suspension, episodes on hot

asphalt, waiting in the dazzling absence
of apology. I need this kid to stay mighty

and coltish, thundering alongside
other black kids, their wrestle and whoop,

the brightness of it—I need for the world
to bear it. And until it will, may the trees

kneel closer, while we sit in mineral hush,
together. May the boy whose dark eyes

are an echo of my father’s dark eyes,
and his father’s dark eyes, reach

with cupped hands into the braided
current. The boy, restless and lanky, the boy

for whom each moment endlessly opens,
for the attention he invests in the beetle’s

lacquered armor, each furrowed seed
or heartbeat, the boy who once told me

the world gives you second chances, the boy
tugging my arm, saying look, saying now.

by Terez Dutton
from the Academy of American Poets, 2019

David V. Johnson in the APA Blog:

Last April, Princeton University economists and married partners Anne Case and  Sir Angus Deaton delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford University. The title of their talks, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” is also the provisional name of their forthcoming book, to be published in 2020.

The couple’s research has focused on disturbing mortality data for a specific demographic: white non-Hispanic Americans without college degrees. This century, they have been dying at alarming rates from what Case and Deaton call “deaths of despair,” which cover suicide, alcohol-related disease, and drug overdoses (primarily driven by opioids). These deaths have, along with US obesity, heart disease, and cancer rates, contributed to a shocking recent decline in US life expectancy for three straight years—something which hasn’t happened since World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The rates for “deaths of despair” are not as high for college-educated whites or for other racial minorities, and there are many potential economic and sociological reasons for this.

Case and Deaton’s research raises important questions for the US political economy and the legacy of neoliberalism. But I am more interested in the framing of the mortality statistics as “deaths of despair.”

More here.

John Horgan in Scientific American:

A dozen years ago I flew to Europe to speak at a conference on science’s limits. The meeting’s organizer greeted me with a tirade about James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix, who had just stated publicly that blacks are less intelligent than whites. “All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours,” Watson told a journalist, “whereas all the testing says not really.”

At first I thought my host, a world-famous intellectual whose work I admired, was condemning Watson. But no, he was condemning Watson’s critics, whom he saw as cowards attacking a courageous truth-teller. I wish I could say I was shocked by my host’s rant, but I have had many encounters like this over the decades. Just as scientists and other intellectuals often reveal in private that they believe in the paranormal, so many disclose that they believe in the innate inferiority of certain groups.

That 2007 incident came back to me as I read Superior: The Return of Race Science by British journalist Angela Saini (who is coming to my school Nov. 4, see Postscript). Superior is a thoroughly researched, brilliantly written and deeply disturbing book.

More here.

Jonathan Lethem in the New York Review of Books:

Edward Snowden, late in the pages of his memoir, Permanent Record, describes his sensation at being personally introduced to XKEYSCORE, the NSA’s ultimate tool of intimate, individual electronic surveillance. Among the NSA’s technological tools (some of which Snowden aided in perfecting), XKEYSCORE was, according to Snowden, “the most invasive…if only because [the NSA agents are] closest to the user—that is, the closest to the person being surveilled.” For nearly three hundred pages, the memoir has built to this scene, foreshadowed in the preface, in which the whistleblower-in-the-making sees behind the curtain:

I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who’d ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Among those people were about 320 million of my fellow American citizens, who in the regular conduct of their everyday lives were being surveilled in gross contravention of not just the Constitution of the United States, but the basic values of any free society.

The steady approach to Snowden’s come-to-Jesus encounter with XKEYSCORE is as meticulous as the incremental unveiling of the terror of Cthulhu in an H.P. Lovecraft tale.

More here.