by N. Gabriel Martin

Among the most frequent and important complaints against President Trump and his administration is that it has contributed to the degradation of public institutions. The title of an Op-Ed in The Atlantic this year referred to his “war on American institutions,” and even prior to his election an Op-Ed in The New York Times warned that he was targeting ‘democracy’s institutions’ with his threats to jail Hillary Clinton. It isn’t just political institutions that Trump undermines, as an article in Nature argued, but scientific institutions as well.

Neither is the threat facing institutions today limited to Trump; other Trump-like political figures, such as Boris Johnson, pose similar dangers, as an article in The New Statesman argued. Still, Trump epitomises it. To sloppily paraphrase Tolstoy: every bad president is bad in their own way. The epitome of George W. Bush’s badness was his futile and venal wars, Trump’s is his destruction of institutions.

As an indictment, the one levied against Trump is oddly intangible. It is surprising that the chief complaint against the most unpopular president in history is not about a death toll, unemployment figures, or some similarly hard fact. I don’t mean that it is less consequential or important, on the contrary, our ideas and other artifacts of our culture are immensely important, and it is encouraging to see broader recognition of their significance in the opposition to Trump. To many, including myself, Trump and his enablers have proven the importance of institutions that had previously escaped attention: institutions such as voting rights, an independent judiciary, and congressional oversight, to name just a few. By endangering these and others, Trump has brought our attention to things that are easy to overlook because of their intangibility and because they can be taken for granted as long as they are functioning normally. Read more »

Just some flowers on our dining table. In memory of Franz Oberrauch (1938 – 2020).

by Thomas O’Dwyer

Shakespeare and Company is still one of the world’s great bookstores. Its modern touristy ambience does it no favours, but its location in rue de la Bûcherie remains a Paris dreamscape, next to Place Saint-Michel, under the eternal gaze of Notre Dame across the Seine. While the store is a Mecca for book lovers, like other aspects of our angry and divided age, it has noisy detractors as well as champions. When the wandering American ex-serviceman Whitman renamed his existing bookshop Mistral as Shakespeare and Company in 1964, outraged literary purists considered it blatant commercial plagiarism. Sylvia Beach, who famously published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would touch it, had founded her original Shakespeare and Company in 1919 and it remained a legend and writers’ haven at 12 rue de l’Odéon until German Nazi invaders forced its closure in 1941. Although Ernest Hemingway “liberated” it in 1945, Sylvia never reopened it. Read more »

by Callum Watts

Four years ago I looked at the US election and predicted that Donald Trump would likely win. The day after the election I described  the kind of president he was likely to be. That he would ignore all norms, stack the federal judiciary and bureaucracy with lackeys who would obey him, and likely use private militias to intimidate political opponents. Many of these predictions have born true. A key part of my argument was trying to explain the sort of man Trump is, and therefore what his behaviours are likely to be, and what effect that was likely to have on the institutions he is in charge of. One of my main points was to stop imagining that shared norms in and of themselves can provide restraint to Trump’s power when he quite explicitly does not believe in them.

As we had towards November 3rd some new questions have appeared on the lips of many commentators, will Trump step down if he loses? And is the US on the verge of a coup? I don’t feel able to make any predictions this time around, but I do think there are some observations which are worth bearing in mind. On the issue of a coup we see some great journalists like Krystal Ball and Glenn Greenwald trying to resist the case that Trump is some kind of budding dictator or fascist. They worry that this kind of alarmism is exactly what drives cynicism in politics and voters into Trump’s embrace (I know, a horrible thought). And to some extent I agree; it doesn’t look like Trump operates according to anything like a coherent political programme or philosophy which can explain his behaviour and political machinations. However, I think these pundits are missing a key point. The key issue is not whether Trump is cut from the same cloth as other nationalist authoritarians and where he fits in this political taxonomy, it is understanding what Trump is likely to do, what he is able to do, and what he wants to do. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Covid-19 reminds us once again that we can’t do without politics, or, to put it another way, we can’t do well without doing politics well.

‘Science’ can’t decide the right thing to do about Covid, however appealing it might be to imagine we could dump this whole mess on a bunch of epidemiologists in some ivory tower safely beyond the reach of grubby political bickering. This is not because scientists don’t know enough. The scientific understanding of Covid is a work in progress and hence uncertain and incomplete, but such imperfect knowledge can still be helpful. The reason is that since Covid became an epidemic it is no longer a merely scientific problem. Dealing with it requires balancing conflicting values and the interests of multitudes of people and organisations. This is an essentially political challenge that scientists lack the conceptual apparatus or legitimacy to address.

Epidemiologists can inform the political process but not replace it. In particular, they can advise governments on the sources of risk and the projected levels of risk associated with different Covid policies. However, as we have seen in the various approaches to lockdown and rollback around the world, how governments address Covid does not follow directly from their different epidemiological circumstances. Governments make two specific political choices well or badly: how much Covid risk to tolerate and how that risk ‘budget’ should be allocated between competing social needs and interest groups. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

Racial disparities are present in all aspects of life. In the U.S. labor market black men are 28 per cent less likely to be employed than white men, and those that are employed earn 69 cents on a white man’s dollar. Blacks and hispanics are 50 percent more likely to experience some kind of force in their interactions with police. Blacks drivers are 40 percent more likely to be stopped than white drivers. The prevalence of, and mortality from, Covid-19 is disproportionately high among blacks.

Megan Thee Stallion’s opinion piece was one of last week’s most popular articles in the New York Times. In it, the hip-hop star notes that, “Maternal mortality rates for Black mothers are about three times higher than those for White mothers, an obvious sign of racial bias in health care.” What is obvious to me is that this disparity is unacceptable. What is less evident is that it is “an obvious sign of racial bias”. Is race per se to blame for racial disparities? Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that healthcare workers or employers harbour racial prejudice against blacks. But it’s not obvious and yet, this type of claim—that racial bias can be inferred from the presence of racial disparities—is commonplace.

Economists have an arguably simplistic, but nevertheless useful way to think about the question of racial disparity. They break it down into two categories: racial bias and statistical discrimination. Racial bias refers to plain vanilla “racism”—I treat a black person differently than I do a white person because I harbour racial prejudice against blacks. Statistical discrimination is at play when I treat blacks and whites differently because, quite apart from race, they have substantively different underlying characteristics. Read more »

A Simple Ontology

maybe flower petals are held to stems by thought
and the wind’s a counter-thought that plucks
and sets them elsewhere in the grass
to grow in contemplative resolution
beside the notion of a grub-pulling crow

maybe the wind itself is a palpable bright idea,
something about motion and the abhorrence of vacuums
something about coming and going,
about ferocity and stillness
about war and its absence

maybe the moon’s the concept of fullness,
loss, abatement, regeneration from slivers,
hope at the hour of the wolf, the opposite of
darkness at the break of noon

maybe Descartes had it right
and this, from horizon to horizon, is
a simple ontology, an inherent daisy chain
of ideas chasing its tale —regardless,

……………….. one

……..               idea
hatched in this synapse nest
is to harvest
……………….. thought
from thought
under a
……………….. perception
of blue
while the
……………….. conception
of breeze
riffles the
……………….. hint
of hair
and I place them
like
……………….. dreams
of plums
into the
……………….. essence
of basket
and give them
with the
……………….. intention
of love
to my
……………….. belief
in the natural being
of
……………… you

Jim Culleny
2/26/11

by Jackson Arn

Slurs have a way of mellowing into labels. History is full of Yankees and Cockneys, Methodists and Jesuits, Whigs and Tories, who steal a term of abuse and apply it to themselves as an act of sardonic revenge. Sometimes the tactic works too well, and people forget that the word was ever tainted. And sometimes the definition changes so many times people lose count, and the word is left to drag a muddle of meanings behind it.

“System” is such a word. Its DNA is full of recessive genes ready to reappear in the next generation. It suggests the banal and the sinister equally, a low, humming scientism and a hiss of danger. Politicians use it with both connotations in mind, sometimes both at once. Immigrants, trans activists, thwarted unionists are advised to have faith in the system, even as other politicians mock them for gaming it—can the two systems really be the same? Political science majors, not yet disillusioned, dream about the day they’ll change the system from within. In 1969, Bill Clinton, 23 years old and already impatiently waiting to be president, wrote, “I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system.” Today, everyone seems to agree that the system, whatever it might be, is rigged. The word’s ambiguity is its longevity.

From the Greek: sun, meaning “with,” and histanal, meaning “set up, stand”—thus, a whole made out of parts, standing together. Which parts, and why they stand together, is left unclear—an ambiguity the rest of the sentence is supposed to correct but rarely does. This ambiguity is a part of the modern condition, since modernity depends on systems. Systems, rather than deities or monarchs, keep us safe: systems, for which individual parts are important but never all-important; systems, whose purpose, by definition, cannot be found in any single one of these parts.

Modernity is supposed to be an age of science, and the recent history of science is largely a history of systems. The word is already there, waiting for someone to connect the pieces: 1543, the solar system; 1628, the circulatory system; 1900, the nervous system; 1902, the endocrine system; 1956, the earliest mention of computer systems. In 1962, a NASA technician became the first person to say, “All systems go,” which isn’t a bad description of modernity itself. Read more »

Anab Jain & Superflux. The Madison Flying Billboard Drone, 2015.

” … So there are five drones, and each of these drones is designed to embody specific tasks and functions that are already gaining popularity. We are not trying to imagine new roles for drones; we are trying to build them as consumer products. The aesthetic we’ve chosen is not a hacked DIY aesthetic, but instead a carefully designed consumer product aesthetic.

Madison, the flying billboard or the advertising drone, is a hovering display platform; it uses sophisticated facial recognition to cater advertising to the interests of those that it’s around. And companies could probably hire it, and have it beam its advertisements out to people, by farming all potential data from all these potential consumers.”

More here, here, and here.

by Eric Miller

1.

A robin in the floating height of a pine warbled its fat phrases of three and, with its chest matching the tint of twilight clouds and light on leaves and houses—a lucent, resinous colour such as collected at the lower tip of every cone—, it seemed at once the motivation and the record of the fall of night.

Cartwheeling girls were to be expected. I knew, as one of the few boys in the neighbourhood, girls are more athletic than boys. They spun across the thick grass, not all grass, not meticulously kept; they spun beneath the widow’s white pine, she did not mind all the kids on her grass or depending like apes from her tree. A scent of crushed stems (in equal parts acrid and balmy), the clover-like odour of sweat in hair, made the affinity of plants and us amenable of olfactory proof.

The hill behind the widow’s house, pressing a slow muzzle to its foundation, distorted the building’s shape amiably—amiably, that is, to outward inspection. There must have been interior cracks and derangements. I have no evidence. I never went into it, only looking at it from the porch, or aslant from a higher elevation than the wrested roof. The widow had red hair, redder at dusk.

One girl especially was a virtuoso of jumping rope. She sang out the lyric that helped coordinate her steps; she might have been a sword-dancer, she was so agile; I listened for how her confident rendition of the rhyme became intermitted with gasps as, her pace not slacking, her smile brightening while she held it, her eyes contemptuous of any downward glance, her exertion made her fetch air harder into her lungs. The lyric went, Or-di-na-ry sec-re-ta-ry. Here was nothing ordinary, I would be happy to be its secretary: which has the word “secret” bosomed in it. Besides, I knew that secretaries were among the kindest people in the world. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

If you’ve any familiarity with the history of economic theory, you’ll no doubt have heard of the idea of the “Invisible Hand”. The image was introduced by Adam Smith in his masterwork The Wealth of Nations (1776).

Smith suggests that, even though each individual participant in a market may be pursuing their own individual benefit, by doing so they are in fact maximizing the benefit for society as a whole:

[Each] intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention … By pursuing his own interests, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.

The willingness of many on the Right to embrace the notion of the Invisible Hand strikes me as odd, given the unwillingness of many of those same thinkers to countenance the possibility of, to take one salient recent example, systemic racism.

In other words, thinkers on the Right often have a quasi-religious faith in positive market outcomes that transcend the self-serving intentions of the individuals making open those markets. This faith, however seems inconsistent with the flat rejection, by those on the Right, of other systemic effects in which individual agents might give rise to negative outcomes — again, not through any intentions of theirs on an individual level, but rather through the unintended consequences of their group-level interactions.

At the same time, on the Left, there at least at times seems to be a parallel unwillingness to recognize that, if the negative consequences of a certain institution are in fact systemic, then moralizing about the individuals involved in those institutions is likely misplaced. Furthermore, such moralizing will also likely be counterproductive, as it is difficult to change the mind of someone that you’re busy demonizing. Read more »

by Joshua Wilbur 

Last month’s most popular movie on Netflix is a horror show in the guise of a documentary.  In 2020, reality has turned scarier than fiction, and The Social Dilemma expends more dread per minute than any episode of Black Mirror. It’s a timely, manipulative film, built for one purpose: to scare the f*ck out of everyday Americans.

Directed by Jeff Orlowski, The Social Dilemma draws authority from an impressive group of Big Tech apostates—ex-employees of Google and Facebook ilk—who, in a series of pull-back-the-curtain interviews, lay bare the evils of social media and its attendant technologies. The fact that services like Facebook and Tik Tok are addictive by design will surprise few viewers. What’s unique to the film is its interweaving of a fictional morality tale, a gloomy mini drama about a suburban every-family caught in the throes of social media addiction.

The teenage son can’t resist looking at his ex-girlfriend’s Instagram. The youngest daughter, a middle-schooler, obsesses over the perfect selfie while the oldest daughter, a college-aged know-it-all, criticizes the rest of the family for succumbing to “surveillance capitalism.” The watchful mother does what little she can to connect with her eternally distracted children. These are cardboard characters, but the fictional scenes counterbalance the Ted Talk feel of the interviews and allow for a nimble back-and-forth between explanation and illustration, telling and showing. It’s an effective formula. Read more »

This photo reminded me of Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (see image in first comment) and appropriately, it was taken yesterday (Sunday) afternoon at the Lido in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by Alexander C. Kafka

David Byrne’s artistry has always had a living-room intimacy, reflected in the delightful cover photos of the 1982 double-live album The Name of This Band Is the Talking Heads. In the midst of a pandemic, inviting him into our space — or being invited into his — is exactly the therapy the world needs.

American Utopia is Spike Lee’s film of Byrne’s 2019 Broadway show, which was itself derived from a concert tour off his 2018 album. That included 10 tracks lasting shy of 40 minutes. The Broadway show has 21 tracks at 90 minutes, wrapping in decades of hits and lesser-known tunes from Talking Heads and solo projects. 

The work is political without stridency, with Byrne celebrating the cast’s immigrant origins, urging the audience to vote, and pulling in “Hell You Talmbout,” Janelle Monae’s protest song against racist and police violence. Like the upside-down poster lettering of the word “Utopia,” the production is tensely, tentatively optimistic — the implicit message being that America remains deeply, spasmodically screwed up, but that its better nature, its innocence, still pulses. 

Byrne begins Spalding Gray-ishly, sitting behind a desk and holding the model of a brain. He explains that we lose cerebral synapses after infancy and wonders whether we just plateau into stupidity or if the connections that start within us extend outward between us. For an artist who has speculated that he is on the mild end of the autism spectrum, this preoccupation with connection has both personal and ideological resonance. Read more »

by Robyn Repko Waller

Whether a data-driven nudge diminishes my agency turns on more than just its algorithmic origin.

With the US Presidential Election and other national contests a mere weeks away, voter persuasion efforts of all stripes are at a peak. While traditional methods of pressing the flesh (but not too literally these days — COVID and all) and handwritten postcard appeals abound, bespoke data-driven means of reaching voters have surged. And although some platforms have banned political advertising since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, not all have. 

The targeted ads aren’t restricted to politics, of course. Our social media feeds are cultivated to show the best balance and order of posts for us as individuals, those of our connections peppered with well-placed content to pique our clicking interests and keep us scrolling, all to increase platform profits. Meanwhile your watch has reminded you to stand up. But, it’s not all bad, you say. Sure I may have wasted a regrettable amount of time checking out house renovation reveals. But I also found those cute burgundy Oxford shoes and that algorithm-promoted post by a friend on algorithmic bias was deliciously ironically useful. 

So when does influence undermine my choice? What makes some choices my own and other choices problematically of outside origination?  Read more »