Adam Tooze in Foreign Policy:

As [Mark] Carney laid it out back in 2015, three types of risk could strike the financial system: losses in the insurance system, climate change liability, and the problem of stranded assets.

The insurance system is the economy’s shock absorber. Its role is to spread the impact of losses from those immediately affected to those with the wherewithal to bear the shock. In good times, the insurers earn handsome returns for accepting this risk. They cover their own liabilities by taking out reinsurance, further spreading the losses.

It is a highly effective system and enormous in scale. Property and casualty insurance (as distinct from life and health insurance) generates global premiums in excess of $1.5 trillion a year. The business is profitable so long as the risks remain within familiar limits and largely uncorrelated with each other. But that is precisely what climate change has called into question. As Carney put it in 2015, as a result of climate change, “the tail risks of today” will be “the catastrophic norms of the future.” Since the 1980s, the scale of weather-related insurance losses has risen fivefold to about $55 billion a year. Uninsured losses are twice as much again.

In theory, the costs due to this shift in risk profiles should be capable of being contained within the insurance sector itself. But as the fate of AIG made painfully apparent in 2008, insurance firms are key nodes in the global financial system. The money accumulated by the insurers is reinvested in money markets, banks, and other funds. Nine major insurers are listed as globally systemically important by the Financial Stability Board. They are too big to fail.

More here. Also see this response by Tooze to the Bundesbank’s reaction to his piece.

Isaac Stanley in openDemocracy:

My Government is committed to establishing the United Kingdom as a world-leader in scientific capability and space technology.” Amidst the pomp and circumstance, and the defiant Brexit-related soundbites, careful observers of the Queen’s speech would have noted the persistence of two more substantive themes.

On the one hand, the speech contained flashes of techno-nationalism, with commitments to establish the UK as a “world-leader in scientific capability and space technology.” On the other, it dutifully nodded to the spectre of the ‘left behind’, with its mention of “ambitions for unleashing regional potential in England”.

The government briefing paper accompanying the speech emphasises the novelty of its commitments, most notably to “to significantly boost R&D funding” and to set up a UK equivalent of the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). But its basic juxtaposition of elements – high-tech R&D as the key to boosting productivity and reviving flagging regions – has been a running theme since May’s leadership. The government’s existing ‘Industrial Strategy White Paper’ already maintains that “if we succeed, we will create an economy which works for everyone.”

But in its current shape, the Industrial Strategy, even with more recent additions, can only fail to achieve this objective. Its overwhelming focus is on frontier sectors, to the neglect of vast swathes of the ‘low-value’ economy.

More here.

Jeffrey Fleishman in the LA Times:

Edited by Dohra Ahmad, the book [The Penguin Book of Migration Literature] explores the lives of people in motion: a slave in a ship’s hull, an unaware young woman venturing from Ukraine to the United Kingdom and Indian-born Deepak Unnikrishnan, whose chapter from “Temporary People” lists the faces of migrants: “Lorry Driver. Shopping Mall Cashier. Carpet Seller. Hitman. Junkie. Flunky. Fishmonger.”

“Part of my purpose with this anthology is to break the United States’ monopoly on the idea of being a ‘nation of immigrants,’” writes Ahmad, an English professor at St. John’s University in New York City. Her introduction reads with a prophet’s passion and an academic’s sense of order. Ahmad calls for “understanding migration within a global scope” to explore commonalities and differences and to dispel misconceptions by empathizing with the pressures and desires that tug people away from their homes.

The affecting power of “The Penguin Book of Migration Literature” — the publisher calls it the first global anthology of migration literature — is in its intimacies and observations. An immigrant is often keener-eyed than a native at spotting a nation’s character, cruelties and inconsistencies. These excerpts resonate when read alongside today’s headlines of Kurdish refugees streaming out of Syria, families escaping shootings and squalor in Guatemala and Honduras and Africans fleeing drought, broken governments and the harsh consequences of climate change.

More here.

Gaia Vince in The Guardian:

Fathers are happier, less stressed and less tired than mothers, finds a study from the American Time Use Survey. Not unrelated, surely, is the regular report that mothers do more housework and childcare than fathers, even when both parents work full time. When the primary breadwinner is the mother versus the father, she also shoulders the mental load of family management, being three times more likely to handle and schedule their activities, appointments, holidays and gatherings, organise the family finances and take care of home maintenance, according to Slate, the US website. (Men, incidentally, are twice as likely as women to think household chores are divided equally.) In spite of their outsized contributions, full-time working mothers also feel more guilt than full-time working fathers about the negative impact on their children of working. One argument that is often used to explain the anxiety that working mothers experience is that it – and many other social ills – is the result of men and women not living “as nature intended”. This school of thought suggests that men are naturally the dominant ones, whereas women are naturally homemakers.

But the patriarchy is not the “natural” human state. It is, though, very real, often a question of life or death. At least 126 million women and girls around the world are “missing” due to sex-selective abortions, infanticide or neglect, according to United Nations Population Fund figures. Women in some countries have so little power they are essentially infantilised, unable to travel, drive, even show their faces, without male permission. In Britain, with its equality legislation, two women are killed each week by a male partner, and the violence begins in girlhood: it was reported last month that one in 16 US girls was forced into their first experience of sex. The best-paid jobs are mainly held by men; the unpaid labour mainly falls to women. Globally, 82% of ministerial positions are held by men. Whole fields of expertise are predominantly male, such as physical sciences (and women garner less recognition for their contributions – they have received just 2.77% of the Nobel prizes for sciences).

More here.

Elif Batuman in The New York Times:

A literary “classic” is a recurring character in one’s life. One reads it, years go by, one reads it again, and it becomes the sum of those readings over time. One identifies with the character closest to one in age — and then one’s age changes. Eventually, each classic tells two stories: its own, and the story of all the times one has read it. In a way, in “The Age of Innocence,” Edith Wharton wrote an allegory of this very process: of the way stories acquire new meanings over time. Like most novels, “The Age of Innocence” offers a version of its author’s biography. Newland Archer, the central character, is, like Wharton herself, someone who has lived long enough to see the ideals of his youth become outdated.

Edith Wharton was born in 1862, during the American Civil War. She started writing her first novel of manners at age 11, but her mother disapproved of women novelists, and of novels in general; she forbade Edith to read any more novels until after her marriage, which took place as soon as it could be arranged — in 1885, to a wealthy sportsman with manic-depressive tendencies. Wharton was 40 when she published her first novel, the year after her mother’s death. She wrote about one book per year for the rest of her life. In 1907, she moved to Paris, which is where she was at the start of World War I. People didn’t know yet that it was World War I, and called it the Great War. Many American expatriates left Paris at that time, but Wharton stayed behind, working on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who flooded across the French border. She personally housed 600 Belgian orphans, organized workshops for unemployed seamstresses and opened a home for tubercular children.

More here.

Tanner Greer at The Scholar’s Stage:

Harold Bloom is dead. His death has prompted one final, staggered brawl between the exhausted ranks who have spent away their strength with three decades of culture warring. My personal assessment of Bloom is that he was an excellent salesman and a stupendous reader, but an uninspired critic. With the concept of a ‘canon’ or a ‘classic’ I have no argument. It seems obvious to me that some works are better than others and more obvious still that if a book is still being read several centuries after it was written it is likely one of those better works–or barring that, a work whose intellectual or artistic legacy makes it a necessary piece of the larger puzzle. The trouble with Bloom was not his elephant love for the canon, but his inability to articulate anything but this passion (and disgust with those who sought to defile it). The truth is that Bloom adds nothing to the great works he champions. This weakness is seen most clearly in his many volumes on Shakespeare; in less exaggerated form it mars the judgments Bloom throws around in The Western Canon or Genius. 

Bloom declares where he should argue, emotes where he should analyze, and effuses where he should unveil. Bloom deplored young Hal to the center of his bones; his love for Falstaff soaked through his soul down into his toes. You’ll discover this within a minute of reading any of Bloom’s criticism of the Bard.

More here.

Sophie Haigney at The Baffler:

IT’S NOT QUITE CLEAR if the washer lizards are real. Washer lizards, in Hiroko Oyamada’s novel The Factory, appear only once, in a report written by a child. They are, supposedly, a species that have built a habitat in the cleaning facilities of the sprawling factory the novel describes, adapting entirely to life-near-washing-machines. The conditions of a washer lizard’s life are quite bleak; it’s constantly threatened by other washer lizards—adults hoard food from children—and by its environment. To drink water, it must climb down into a washing machine, but if a cycle begins, it might become tangled in clothes and drown. They live on lint, but young lizards often mistakenly eat dust in lint traps and die. Their lives have very small and specific perimeters. According to the report, “It will breathe its last without ever straying far from its birthplace, probably dying behind the machine where it nested or maybe inside the lint trap.”

more here.

Hal Foster at the LRB:

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at the New York Times, calls the new design ‘smart, surgical, sprawling and slightly soulless’. I would take ‘slightly soulless’ over ‘aggressively spectacular’, and given the political controversies visited on other museums due to their problematic mega-donors (the opioid Sackler family, the anarcho-libertarian Koch brothers, the police-weapon magnate Warren Kanders, and other bad actors), such a review counts as a rave. And by and large the new MoMA is a success. Of course, there are some missteps. The walls darken in the Surrealist galleries, as though to warn us, through mood control, that here modernism plunges into the unconscious. The new MoMA is more open to campy artists like Florine Stettheimer, brutish figures like Jean Dubuffet, and erotic fantasists like Hans Bellmer, but it is still rather reserved about overtly political artists, whether of the right or the left (revolutionary Russians stand in for many others). And though the intermedial presentation of film and photography is an advance, the lived history of these media, as registered in a noisy projector or an old magazine, is mostly lost – the contemplative rituals of painting still predominate, albeit not as much as before. Apart from a magnificent array of Brancusi sculptures, which introduces the fifth floor, a forceful mix of Post-Minimalist objects, which opens the fourth floor, and the Serra installation, which lends needed gravitas to the contemporary galleries, sculpture is still treated as secondary.

more here.

Jon Hamilton at NPR:

The brain waves generated during deep sleep appear to trigger a cleaning system in the brain that protects it against Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Electrical signals known as slow waves appear just before a pulse of fluid washes through the brain, presumably removing toxins associated with Alzheimer’s, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science.

The finding could help explain a puzzling link between sleep and Alzheimer’s, says Laura Lewis, an author of the study and an assistant professor in the department of biomedical engineering at Boston University.

More here.

David Livingstone Smith in IAI News:

“What would your feelings be,” asks Ambrose in Arthur Machen’s novel The House of Souls, “… if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents?” He goes on:

You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?

Machen’s examples are disturbing, but it’s not immediately obvious why. It’s not that they’re frightening, at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. Normally, we’re scared of things because we think they pose a physical danger to us, but singing roses don’t pose any such hazard, so why is the thought of them so nightmarish?

Notice that Machen said that if you encountered a singing rose you would be overwhelmed with horror rather than fear. Fear is a primitive emotional response—an instinctive reaction to perceived danger that we share with other mammals. But horror is a uniquely human state of mind that depends on sophisticated cognitive capacities of a sort that only human beings possess.

More here.

Unpacking a Globe

I gaze at the Pacific and don’t expect
to ever see the heads on Easter Island,
though I guess at sunlight rippling
the yellow grasses sloping to shore;

yesterday a doe ate grass in the orchard:
it lifted its ears and stopped eating

when it sensed us watching from
a glass hallway—in his sleep, a veteran

sweats, defusing a land mine.
On the globe, I mark the Battle of

the Coral Sea—no one frets at that now.
A poem can never be too dark,

I nod and, staring at the Kenai, hear
ice breaking up along an inlet;

yesterday a coyote trotted across
my headlights and turned his head

but didn’t break stride; that’s how
I want to live on this planet:

alive to a rabbit at a glass door—
and flower where there is no flower

by Arthur Sze
from Sight Lines
Copper Canyon Press, 2019

Nicoletta Lanese in The Scientist:

Kent Kiehl and his research team regularly park their long, white trailer just outside the doors of maximum-security prisons across the US. Inside the vehicle sits the bulky body of a mobile MRI machine. During each visit, people from the prison make their way to and from the vehicle in hourly shifts to have their brains scanned and help to answer an age-old question: What makes a murderer? “It’s not an uncommon thing for [incarcerated people], while they’re getting a scan, to be like, ‘I’ve always been different. Can you tell me why I’ve always been so different?’” says Kiehl, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico and the Albuquerque-based nonprofit Mind Research Network (MRN) who helped design the mobile MRI system back in the early 2000s.

The author of The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without a Conscience, Kiehl has been fascinated by the criminal mind since he was an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. Now, as director of mobile imaging at MRN, he oversees efforts to gather brain scans from thousands of people held in US prisons to learn what features, if any, might differ from scans of the general population. This massive dataset recently allowed Kiehl to examine the brain structures of more than 800 men held in state prisons in New Mexico and Wisconsin in an attempt to distinguish incarcerated people who have committed homicide from those who have committed other crimes. First, Kiehl and his colleagues laboriously sorted the pool of people who had volunteered for the study into three categories based on their crimes: homicide, violent offenses that were not homicide, or non-violent or minimally violent transgressions. The team relied on official convictions, self-reported homicides, and confidential interviews with participants to determine who attempted or committed murder—both offenses that got a “homicide” label in their dataset.

More here.

Moore and Lynch in Michigan News:

ANN ARBOR—Invasive procedures to biopsy tissue from cancer-tainted organs could be replaced by simply taking samples from a tiny “decoy” implanted just beneath the skin, University of Michigan researchers have demonstrated in mice. These devices have a knack for attracting cancer cells traveling through the body. In fact, they can even pick up signs that cancer is preparing to spread, before cancer cells arrive. “Biopsying an organ like the lung is a risky procedure that’s done only sparingly,” said Lonnie Shea, the William and Valerie Hall Chair of biomedical engineering at U-M. “We place these scaffolds right under the skin, so they’re readily accessible.”

The ease of access would also allow doctors to monitor the effectiveness of cancer treatments closer to real time.

The U-M team’s most recent work appears in Cancer Research, a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research. Biopsies of the scaffold allowed researchers to analyze 635 genes present in the captured cancer cells. From these genes, the team identified ten that could predict whether a mouse was healthy, if it had a cancer that had not begun to spread yet, or if a cancer was present and had begun to spread. They could do that all without the need for an invasive biopsy of an organ. The gene expression obtained at the scaffold had distinct patterns relative to cells from the blood, which are obtained through a technique known as liquid biopsy. These differences highlight that the tissue in these traps provides unique information that correlates with disease progression. The researchers have demonstrated that the synthetic scaffolds work with multiple types of cancers in mice, including pancreatic cancer. They work by luring immune cells, which, in turn, attract cancer cells.

More here.

Jedediah Britton-Purdy in The New Republic:

John Rawls, who died in 2002, was the most influential American philosopher of the twentieth century. His great work, A Theory of Justice, appeared in 1971 and defined the field of political philosophy for generations. It set out standards for a just society in the form of two principles. First, a just society would protect the strongest set of civil liberties and personal rights compatible with everyone else having the same rights. Second, it would tolerate economic inequalities only if they improved the situation of the poorest and most marginalized (for example, by paying doctors well to encourage people to enter a socially necessary profession).

Taken seriously, Rawls’s principles would require a radical transformation: no hedge funds unless allowing them to operate will benefit the homeless? No Silicon Valley IPOs unless they make life better for farmworkers in the Central Valley? A just society would be very different from anything the United States has ever been. Rawls argued that justice would be compatible with either democratic socialism or a “property-owning democracy” of roughly equal smallholders. One thing was clear: America could not remain as it was, on pain of injustice.

It did not remain as it was, but Rawls’s vision did not triumph either. A Theory of Justice was published in 1971, just before economic inequality began its long ascent from its lowest level in history to today’s Second Gilded Age.

More here.

Elena Renken in Quanta:

In the lowlands of Bolivia, the most isolated of the Tsimané people live in communities without electricity; they don’t own televisions, computers or phones, and even battery-powered radios are rare. Their minimal exposure to Western culture happens mostly during occasional trips to nearby towns. To the researchers who make their way into Tsimané villages by truck and canoe each summer, that isolation makes the Tsimané an almost uniquely valuable source of insights into the human brain and its processing of music.

Most studies about music perception examine people accustomed to Western music, so only a few enclaves like these remote Tsimané villages allow scientists to make comparisons across cultures. There they can try to tease apart the effects of exposure to music from the brain’s innate comprehension of it — or at least start dissecting the relationship between the two. “We need to understand that interplay between our genes and our experience,” said Josh McDermott, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the senior author of a recent paper involving the Tsimané in the journal Current Biology which suggests that a feature of music most of us might consider to be intrinsic — the perceived organization of musical pitches into octaves — is a cultural artifact.

More here.

Andrew Brown in The Guardian:

In July 2011, a quiet European capital was shaken by a terrorist car bomb, followed by confused reports suggesting many deaths. When the first news of the murders came through, one small group of online commentators reacted immediately, even though the media had cautiously declined to identify the attackers. They knew at once what had happened – and who was to blame.

“This was inevitable,” explained one of the anonymous commenters. And it was just the beginning: “Only a matter of time before other European nations get a taste of their multicultural tolerance that they’ve been cooking for decades.”

“Europe has been infested with venomous parasitic vermin,” explained another. “Anything and everything is fine as long as they rape the natives and destroy the country, which they do,” said a third.

As the news grew worse, the group became more joyful and confident. The car bomb had been followed by reports of a mass shooting at a nearby camp for teenagers. One commenter was “almost crying of happiness” to be proved right about the dangers of Islam. “The massacre at the children’s camp,” another noted, “is a sickening reminder of just how evil and satanic the cult of Islam is.”

More here.

Katherine Lucky at Commonweal:

A pair of recent essay collections—Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Leslie Jamison’s Make It Scream, Make It Burn—invite easy comparisons. They were released within a month of each other. The current professional status of their authors is superficially similar: two established women writers in their thirties both living in Brooklyn. Each writes about weddings, travel, and the sensations of drugs and alcohol; each takes up overtly feminist topics, from defeated heroines and female rage to “difficult women” and women in pain. Even the two books’ bold text-only covers are similar: multicolored lettering in ochre, hot pink, and orange (Tolentino) and fuschia, peach, and sky blue (Jamison). But to my mind what really connects them is how Tolentino and Jamison reason. What’s objective, they demonstrate, is often subjective, or hypocritical, or at the very least, complicated.

more here.

J. Nicole Jones at The Paris Review:

In a preface to her ghost stories, Wharton writes, “I do not believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them.” Following an attack of typhoid as a child, Wharton writes in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, that she returned from the brink of death with “chronic fear” that felt like a “choking agony of terror.” Well into young adulthood, she would not sleep without a light and a maid present in her room. “It was like some dark, indefinable menace, forever dogging my steps, lurking, and threatening,” she writes, and I could not help but think of Hilary Mantel’s childhood encounter with an indescribable evil in her family’s garden. Must all women be visited by terror so consistently and from such a young age? The rumors of paranormal activity at the Mount began after the house become an all-girls school in the forties, and intensified when the theater troupe Shakespeare and Company took residence there in the seventies. The performers were kicked out more than a decade ago in a landlord-tenant dispute that seemed, publicly, not related to the supernatural. Even so, nothing attracts the devil more than a group of adolescent girls, except for maybe a group of actors.

more here.