Prince

[ed. Love the throw-away chording on this beautiful classic. Really quite perfect.]

Wild Strawberries

Wild Strawberries (1957), dir. Ingmar Bergman 
via:

Get in Losers, We’re Doing Socialism

If I were to tell you “a great deal of American television is dedicated to portraying the glories of capitalism and tearing down anything that looks like an alternative system” you would probably say “thank you, that’s the most obvious thing I’ve ever heard.” All the same, the third season of Netflix’s Stranger Things merits special mention, since it takes the love of all things corporate to a supersized extreme. Product placement crawls across the screen, more frightening and insidious than this season’s body-snatching monsters. A legion of “Evil Russians” (they are literally referred to as “Evil Russians”) builds a gigantic evil laboratory under a good, law-abiding, honest American mall. A 10-year-old Black girl gives the following unlikely speech: “Know what I love most about this country? Capitalism. Do you know what capitalism is?…It means this is a free market system. Which means people get paid for their services depending on how valuable their contributions are.” Stranger Things has always been a Reagan-era nostalgia-fest, but generally through its popcorn-movie source material rather than as a hammy reimagining of the time period itself. There’s no hint whatsoever of acid irony or critique: Watching the third season of Stranger Things is the equivalent of bathing in the undesired sugariness of New Coke.

So you may be surprised to learn that the very same Netflix that brought us The Plucky Mallrats vs. the Red Menace has also created a show called The Society, in which a group of stranded teenagers—with hope, fear, clumsy wonder, and a lot of mistakes—explicitly, directly, textually, try to do socialism. I mean it: They actually say the word “socialism” and it’s presented as something quite positive.

How can these two shows exist on the same streaming service? I suppose The Society is simply being paid for the value of its contributions to art. That being said, The Society is only a good show, not a great one; for starters, the title is too vague, and guaranteed to get buried in Netflix’s black-box algorithmic rankings, even though Get In Losers, We’re Doing Socialism was a perfectly available choice.

So how do the teens come to embrace socialism? It’s not, alas, through a student revolution planned in the cafeteria, but through a series of mysterious occurrences. First, a weird smell pervades a small upscale Connecticut town. Then the local teens are all bussed away for an overnight school trip. The trip is suddenly canceled; the teens are turned back and dropped off in the town square, only to find that everyone else is gone. No parents, no teachers, no younger siblings, no grandparents. The town is deserted except for the teens. All roads and train tracks heading out of town now end in a massive, eerie wood crawling with snakes. There’s still electricity and water—for now—and cell service, but the characters can only reach each other, not the internet or the outside world. Where are they? Is it a parallel universe? Why is all this happening? Who has done this to them? These questions are not fully answered in the first season, and they’re ultimately unimportant. In the tradition of what’s commonly called “soft” science fiction, The Society is a thought experiment about power, gender, and civilization, with the mysterious premise serving mostly as a backdrop and a framing device.

Here’s our thought experiment: What would happen if a bunch of mostly affluent Connecticut teenagers were suddenly forced to form their own society? On the opening night in their strange new town, the teens—not yet realizing that everyone else is gone forever—throw a dance party in the empty church. But once the full reality of their situation sinks in, there’s lots of moping about and missing their parents. As boring as this is, it’s appropriately realistic. These aren’t just any kids, but the children of the upper middle class in a New York City commuter town (as one character says: “everyone’s parents are lawyers. It’s like a zoning requirement or something.”) With a few exceptions, these high schoolers are bound for Ivy League universities and private liberal arts colleges. They don’t really know how to let loose and have real fun, because they haven’t been raised to have a good time. They’ve been bred as room-meat for the professional-managerial class order, which has suddenly vanished along with their parents.

The sudden lack of social expectations throws them completely off-balance.

Cassandra, the student body president, initially attempts to instill a sense of social responsibility and communal effort. “There’s no civilization here, not until we start one,” she says. “So what are we going to do? First, I think we have no choice but to share. Share food. Share resources.” She’s joined in this effort by the only working-class character, the biracial orphan Will; and virulently opposed by the rich kids, led by the outrageously wealthy Harry and Cassandra’s own sociopathic cousin Campbell. Harry and Campbell’s position boils down to “keep what’s ours”—that is, hold on to their private property (even in the absence of their parents or any other governing authority) at all costs. Harry, in an effort to impress his estranged girlfriend Kelly and convince her of the rightness of his ideology, shows her a stack of gold bars that his father put in a safe “in case things go to shit…You can’t trust anybody. All you can do is have an advantage, and this is mine.” Kelly, skeptically eyeing a gold bar, replies, “It’s just a chunk of metal, Harry. I don’t think that’s gonna matter now.”

At first, most of the teens follow Harry and Campbell’s example, and anarcho-capitalism reigns supreme, with everyone just hoarding and hiding while the trash accumulates behind their houses. But 10 days of chaos culminate in a violent, drunken riot, with smashed windows and burned-out cars. Almost all the perpetrators are boys. The next day, Cassandra gathers the girls and organizes them into a socialist feminist liberation front. “Right now it’s just pillage, but how long until someone’s raped walking home one night and no one gives a shit because that’s just how it is?” Cassandra argues. “Women aren’t safe in a world that’s run by brute force and stupidity. If we want peace, we need order. And to get order, we need to exert our power.” From this moment follows a delightful series of scenes, cutting from conversation to conversation across town, in which different groups of girls organize, recognizing their power (“We’re like, half the town. Women. More than half, I think. I mean, if we all just said ‘stuff needs to change’, would they be able to say no?”) and discussing how to convince their boyfriends.

Interestingly, however, these grassroots feminist organizers are not the first characters on the show to directly say the forbidden word “socialism”: that comes out of the innocent mouths of the jocks.

The jocks are easily the funniest characters in the show: I’ve transcribed their conversation in full, because it’s great.

JASON:
I’ve been thinking. What if we like, didn’t… take stuff? Like food or whatever? Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, right? Sharing? It could be like… socialism. There’s no “I” in team, right?

CLARK:
Erika give you that talk?

JASON:

… no.

CLARK:

Oh really? ’Cause Gwen said that exact shit to me last night. Lukey?

LUKE:
Well, it’s not like it worked in China. Socialism…

JASON:
It kind of worked. Everything’s made in China.

GRIZZ (THE SMART ONE):
China’s a poor example. The party took complete priority over the workers. In reality, we’ve never seen a true socialist state.

CLARK:
Maybe all the Chinese women said they wouldn’t put out unless the men got on board.

JASON (WITH HORROR):
Gwen said that TOO?

(Jason, Clark, and Luke all take a moment to realize they are being Lysistrated).

LUKE (AFTER A PAUSE):
Well, socialism it is.

Letting the silly jocks introduce socialism by name, and agree to it reluctantly in exchange for sex—rather than having the earnest, organized girls declare themselves openly and seriously in favor of socialism—feels like a deliberate narrative choice, and if it is, it’s a clever one. Introducing socialism in an offhanded, funny way makes the concept more palatable to an audience that’s been wired by decades of propaganda to see socialism as inherently dangerous and doomed. The script even brings up the classic “what about China/Venezuela/the Soviet Union” canard, but then allows it to be shot down by the well-read Grizz. This is simply not done on mainstream American television, or at least quite rarely. (...)

Time and again, the teens are portrayed as kids who are just trying to do what’s right, despite the evils they’ve inherited, and the general lack of creative solutions available to them from the old world. A review in Variety insists that “despite—or maybe thanks to—their best efforts, [the teens’] attempts to make a revolutionary new order end up looking an awful lot like the more rigid, heteronormative one in which they all grew up.” This is of course, exactly the point—it is very difficult for the teens to shed the awful attitudes they’ve been raised with. Grizz, who finally comes out as gay, says to Sam, his semi-closeted sort-of boyfriend, “We might be in a new fucking universe and we also might starve in here. How do you want to live, Sam?” He’s referring to their sexuality, but also of course to the entire situation; the teens have arrived in a new world, and they can make choices. Those choices are constrained by the history of the old world they brought with them, but at the same time, they can still choose how they want to live.

The repeat misunderstandings of the show’s depth by its critics are not surprising: Its political orientation is atypical, plus its admitted aesthetic flaws (too many characters, frequently portentous dialogue, a slow second half) obscure a lot of its real thoughtfulness and originality. What The Society is trying to do is fundamentally hard. It’s asking a question many people are asking themselves right now in a time of frightening upheaval: How do we want to live? And it’s asking it in the context of emergency. The teens have arrived in a strange, unknowable world that could hurt them suddenly and inexplicably. In the longer term, their resources are also running out. The feeling of living in a familiar place suddenly turned dangerous and mysterious is a clear echo of climate change anxiety; by the end of the season, the teens have realized they will probably have to transform from comfortable house-dwelling suburbanites into grubby farmers. Their lives are going to be difficult, physically taxing, and utterly different from the ones their parents led. Judging by the current dire climate predictions and the difficulty of halting global capitalism’s runaway carbon emissions, this is probably going to be the case for our real-world teens also.

by Lyta Gold, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: John Biggs

Republican Women Are in Crisis

The 2010s were a transformative decade for women in politics. But the biggest trend has been obscured by 2018’s female-led Democratic wave in Congress: G.O.P. women, at both the national and state levels, are on the brink of extinction.

Republicans will ring in the new year with only 13 women in the House of Representatives, the lowest number since 1993, and eight women in the Senate. (There are, for comparison, 88 Democratic women in the House and 17 Democratic women in the Senate.)

The prospects for Republican women looked quite different at the decade’s start. Pundits heralded 2010 as the Year of the Republican Woman. In a speech that spring, Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, touted her endorsements for the election of “common-sense conservative women.”

“Look out, Washington, because there’s a whole stampede of pink elephants crossing the line,” she said.

For a moment, it seemed that Ms. Palin and her pack of “Mama Grizzlies” would become the prime beneficiaries of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Yet as 2020 begins, Republicans have Ms. Palin and her brand of right-wing populism — revived and carried on by Donald Trump — to thank for the endangered state of the Republican woman. (...)

In 2012, female voters, outraged over G.O.P. attacks on Planned Parenthood and access to birth control, powered President Barack Obama to re-election and denied Republicans two winnable Senate seats. Republican women’s representation in Congress decreased by 21 percent, while Democratic women increased theirs by 26 percent
Acknowledging the party’s mistakes with female voters, the G.O.P. fielded female candidates in the 2014 midterms who could appeal more broadly. These candidates downplayed their social conservatism and leaned in to their biographies as glass-breaking female leaders. In 2014, Martha McSally, the nation’s first female fighter pilot to serve in combat, won the Republican primary in a swing district in Arizona. Elise Stefanik, then the youngest congresswoman ever elected, was chosen to be co-chairwoman of the party’s moderate caucus.

With the exception of her endorsement of Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, Ms. Palin played a minor role in the 2014 midterm victories. Her days as queen-maker seemed over. Most signs suggested that Republican pragmatism would prevail going forward.

The rise of Donald Trump eliminated any chance of that. The signs of women’s disillusionment with the party were immediate. One day after President Trump’s inauguration, an estimated four million people, mostly women, participated in hundreds of women’s marches throughout the United States. In the months that followed, women mobilized to defeat Republicans at the federal, state and local levels.

In the 2018 midterms, every Republican congresswoman from the 2014 class except for Ms. Stefanik lost. Martha McSally was defeated, though she was appointed by Arizona’s Republican governor to fill John McCain’s Senate seat after Mr. McCain died. She faces a tough election battle in 2020.

Despite winning three governors’ races and one open Senate seat in 2018, Republican women will end the decade with their governors and senators outnumbered two to one by their Democratic counterparts. Three of the four current female Republican senators running in 2020 face highly competitive elections in 2020. There are more than six times as many Democratic women as Republican women in the House.

Granted, Republicans — both men and women — have suffered dramatic losses in elections at national, state and local levels since 2016; they have lost control of the House, eight governorships and nine state legislative chambers since Mr. Trump’s election. But female Republican candidates and officeholders face an existential threat.

Mr. Trump’s misogyny and the party’s far-right stance on issues such as abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, guns and immigration have driven away many female voters. Women favor the Democratic Party over the Republican Party by a 19-point margin, according to the Pew Research Center. Seventy-three percent of women under the age of 30 disapprove of the president’s performance, according to the Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll.

Suburban and college-educated white women, once reliable Republican voters, have fled the party in droves since Mr. Trump’s election. According to the Brookings Institution, white college educated women increased their vote for Democrats by 13 points between 2016 and 2018. Among women, only white evangelicals remain firmly committed to the G.O.P. and Mr. Trump.

The alienation of female voters from the Republican Party is compounded by the indifference, at best, of Republican men to female candidates.

by Nancy L. Cohen, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Say Goodbye to Banking as We Know It

So is China readying its own Bitcoin? Banish the thought.

It’s far bigger than that. Yes, just like any other cryptocurrency — or for that matter, cigarettes in prisoners-of-war camps — the upcoming digital yuan will be “tokenized” money. But the similarity ends there. The crypto yuan, which may be on offer as soon as 2020, will be fully backed by the central bank of the world’s second-largest economy, drawing its value from the Chinese state’s ability to impose taxes in perpetuity. Other national authorities are bound to embrace this powerful idea.

Little is known about the digital yuan except that it’s been in the works for five years and Beijing is nearly ready to roll. The consensus is that the token will be a private blockchain, a peer-to-peer network for sharing information and validating transactions, with the People’s Bank of China in control of who gets to participate. To begin with, the currency will be supplied via the banking system and replace some part of physical cash. That won’t be hard, given the ubiquitous presence of Chinese QR code-based digital wallets such as Alipay and WeChat Pay.

It may start small, but the digital yuan can disrupt both traditional banking and the post-Bretton Woods system of floating exchange rates that the world has lived with since 1973. No wonder that for China, “blockchain and the yuan digital currency are a national strategic priority — almost at the level of the internet,” says Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. fintech analyst Gautam Chhugani.

Ever since the advent of the 17th-century goldsmith-banker in London, the most crucial thing in banking has been the ledger, a repository of irrefutable records to establish trust in situations where it doesn’t exist. When Peter in Vancouver agrees to send money to Paul in Singapore, they’re forced to use a chain of interlinked intermediaries because there’s no ledger in the world with both of them on it. Blockchain’s distributed ledgers make trust irrelevant. Paul devises a secret code, and shares its encrypted version with Peter, who uses it to create a digital contract to pay Paul. A cumbersome and expensive network of correspondent banks becomes redundant, especially when it comes to the $124 trillion businesses move across borders annually. Imagine the productivity boost; picture the threat to lenders.

China isn’t the only one experimenting. Fast, cheap cross-border payment settlement is one application of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Quorum, an Ethereum-based platform on which the Monetary Authority of Singapore is running Project Ubin, an exploration into central bank digital money. These are early days, but if blockchain technology shows promise in handling a large number of transactions simultaneously, then digital currencies could become substitutes not just for physical cash but also for bank reserves.

That’s when the game changes. Reserves at a central bank are maintained by deposit-taking lenders. A digital yuan — or Singapore dollar or Indian rupee — could bypass this system and allow any holder of the currency to have a deposit at the central bank, potentially making the state the monopoly supplier of money to retail customers. As Agustin Carstens, the general manager at the Bank for International Settlement, noted recently, “If the central bank becomes everybody’s deposit-taker, it may find itself becoming everybody’s lender too.”

by Andy Mukherjee, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Michael Nicholson/Corbis/Getty

George Rodrigue, The Blue Dog, 1991

“People who have seen a Blue Dog painting always remember it. They are really about life, about mankind searching for answers. The dog never changes position. He just stares at you. And you’re looking at him, looking for some answers, ‘Why are we here?,’ and he’s just looking back at you, wondering the same. The dog doesn’t know. You can see this longing in his eyes, this longing for love, answers.” - George Rodrigue
via:
[ed. Hmm, ok... See also: Trash Talk: On Translating Garbage (Paris Review)]

Russia Deploys First Hypersonic Missiles

Russia has deployed its first hypersonic nuclear-capable missiles, with Vladimir Putin boasting that it puts his country in a class of its own.

The president described the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, which can fly at 27 times the speed of sound, as a technological breakthrough comparable to the 1957 Soviet launch of the first satellite.

Putin has said Russia’s new generation of nuclear weapons can hit almost any point in the world and evade a US-built missile shield, though some western experts have questioned how advanced some of the weapons programmes are.

The Avangard is launched on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile, but, unlike a regular missile warhead, which follows a predictable path after separation, it can make sharp manoeuvres en route to its target, making it harder to intercept.

The defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, told Putin the first missile unit equipped with the Avangard had entered combat duty.

“I congratulate you on this landmark event for the military and the entire nation,” Shoigu said later during a conference call with top military leaders. (...)

The Russian leader said the Avangard had been designed using new composite materials to withstand temperatures of up to 2,000C (3,632F) which can be reached while travelling at hypersonic speeds. The missile can carry a nuclear weapon of up to 2 megatons.

Putin has said Russia had to develop the Avangard and other weapons systems because of US efforts to develop a missile defence system that he claimed could erode Russia’s nuclear deterrent. Moscow has scoffed at US claims that its missile shield isn’t intended to counter Russia’s missile arsenals.

This week, Putin noted that for the first time Russia was leading the world in developing a new class of weapons, unlike in the past when it was catching up with the US.

by Staff, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Mikhail Klimentyev/AP

[ed. Our new best friends.]

College Football Playoff Offers Its Strongest Semifinals Yet

College Football Playoff Offers Its Strongest Semifinals Yet (NY Times)

Image: Brett Davis/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

[ed. Holy mackerel. It's not even halftime and: LSU 49, Oklahoma 14 (and Oklahoma is not playing that bad - except for pass defense, obviously. Burrow is dropping bombs everywhere - 495 yds total offense in the first half!). One for the ages. Tune in if you can.]

Gary Larson
via:

2019

Weekly Editorial Roundtable: Best of 2019 Edition (Current Affairs)

[ed. Not your normal New Year's roundup.]

via:

How Amazon Gains Control & Domination

Amazon takes over the last mile and everything else.

Amazon just gave us an update on how rapidly its own delivery system is replacing UPS, the US Postal Service, FedEx, and other carriers in delivering packages from an Amazon fulfillment center to the door of Amazon’s customer.

The numbers show how big this system is already after practically no time of starting it up, how big the package volume is already, and how many drivers are already working in this system.

This has huge consequences for the US logistics business, the companies that slug it out in it, such as UPS and FedEx, and that keep raising their published rates despite the dynamics of the market, which is facing Amazon’s creation, the mushrooming companies that Amazon is building up to get around the established carriers. Its purpose is twofold:

• One, bring down delivery costs.
• And two, gain control.

Delivery costs have always been a primary issue in ecommerce. And gaining control became a primary issue for Amazon in the 2013 holiday season. The flood of Amazon orders was such that it overwhelmed UPS and FedEx, and packages were delivered after Christmas, which created a huge debacle for Amazon.

So, to gain control and bring down costs, it has to become the number 1 gorilla in the logistics business and surround itself by thousands of small logistics companies that it totally controls and that are eating the lunch of today’s giants, UPS and FedEx. And that’s what’s happening at an astounding speed.

Amazon didn’t invent ecommerce. But from day one, it has been pushing the envelope in every direction to make itself the dominant player in just about all related fields, some high-tech, some low-tech, from cloud computing to delivery, to bring down costs and gain control.

To do this, Amazon is helping create thousands of smaller companies. It’s enticing potential entrepreneurs with attractive entry deals. These companies have non-unionized drivers, and they have no fancy corporate headquarters and overhead, and they can operate for less, especially if they can use Amazon’s purchasing power for vehicles and insurance, which Amazon has set up for them to do. (...)

One program was “Amazon Flex”: Amazon billed it as a way to “make $18 to $25 per hour delivering packages with Amazon.” It was app-based and allowed gig workers to choose a block of time during a day in which to pick up and deliver packages. The pick-up location could be an Amazon facility or “a store or even a restaurant,” it said. Gig workers could use their car or bicycle or whatever. And they were contractors, paid by Amazon.

The other program was dubbed Amazon Delivery Providers. “Whether you have one van or a fleet, our volume and your business could be a great match,” Amazon said at the time.

They’d pick up at a local Amazon facility. They’d use Amazon’s routing technology. And off you go, making gobs of money, or so you hope, delivering packages for Amazon. The entrepreneurs, so the owners of these little delivery companies, contracted with Amazon, and received their revenues from Amazon. And they paid their own drivers – like the guy I’d chatted up.

All of them were doing the work that employees of the US Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS used to do.

A year later, in June 2018, Amazon announced a new program, now called, Delivery Service Partners. At the time, Amazon said that this program would help “entrepreneurs build their own companies delivering Amazon packages.”

“Amazon will take an active role in helping interested entrepreneurs start, set up, and manage their own delivery business,” it said in the announcement at the time.

“Successful owners can earn as much as $300,000 in annual profit operating a fleet of up to 40 delivery vehicles,” Amazon said.

“Individual owners can build their business knowing they will have delivery volume from Amazon, access to the company’s sophisticated delivery technology, hands-on training, and discounts on a suite of assets and services, including vehicle leases and comprehensive insurance,” Amazon said.

“Over time, Amazon will empower hundreds of new, small business owners to hire tens of thousands of delivery drivers across the US,” it said.

Start-up costs would be as low as $10,000, Amazon said, given all the support from Amazon – the training, the software technologies, the operational support, the special deals and leases on Amazon-branded customized vans, special deals on branded uniforms, special deals on fuel, comprehensive insurance coverage, etc.

The entrepreneurs would not have to do any marketing – Amazon would be their only customer, and Amazon would give them the volume of packages to support their business. So Amazon said, “individuals with little to no logistics experience have the opportunity to run their own delivery business.”

This has apparently taken off in a massive way. Amazon announced a few days ago that its dedicated last-mile delivery network is on track to deliver 3.5 billion customer packages globally this year. Up from zero a few years ago.

By comparison, UPS delivered 5.2 billion packages and documents globally last year. At the growth rate of Amazon’s delivery system, it will blow past UPS in a couple of years globally.

Amazon said that in the US, its delivery system already handles the largest share of its customers’ orders, ahead of the share of each, the US Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx.

It said it has 150 delivery stations across the United States that employ over 90,000 Amazon “logistics associates,” as it calls them. These are Amazon employees who make a wage of at least $15 an hour plus get some benefits, it said.

They get the packages ready to be picked up by the drivers of the small logistics companies that Amazon has helped set up – namely the Amazon Delivery Service Partners.

It now had over 800 of these Amazon Delivery Service Partners in the last-mile network, it said, and these companies were employing 75,000 drivers in the United States.

So, 75,000 drivers at 800 companies, means that the average delivery company now has 94 drivers. And these companies didn’t even exist a few years ago.

For these 800 companies and their 75,000 drivers that Amazon helped create, Amazon is everything: It controls the business volume, namely the packages to be delivered, and the revenues, via the rates it is paying. It provides special deals on leasing the delivery vans, getting insurance, and even on getting fuel. It provides the app-based technology to design the most efficient routes every day.

In a situation like this, as a delivery business, where you have one giant customer that helped create your business and that controls everything, including your revenues to the last penny, how you run your business, and what services you use, there is one thing to remember: Your business thrives or dies by the grace of Amazon.

And once Amazon has the system up and running to the full extent, the squeeze invariably begins. It will start in small items here and there, paying for services that used to be free, and the special deals will get less special, and the amount Amazon pays for deliveries will get squeezed – because now that it has control, Amazon will proceed with the goal: bringing down delivery costs of ecommerce. And the way to do this is by squeezing the delivery network.

by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

[ed. See for yourself, from Amazon's website: Logistics Amazon. So, where is Congress?! Rhetorical question, of course. We all know where they are and what their main order of business is, day in, day out. Still, you'd think somebody might eventually, possibly, one day express a little concern about one company dominating nearly every ecommerce business in the economy (not to mention government itself, through Amazon's AWS cloud computing services).]

Tash Sultana

[ed. See also: Roz Firth, Happy (another talented looping lady).]

via:

via:

Planting Trees is Only a Good News Story if it’s Done Right

A few years ago I went to the Kilombero valley in Tanzania to find out why the elephants there had disappeared. It was still beautiful; a long, green plain with red earth, lined by mountains on either side. But, as recently as the 1990s, people kept telling me, it had been a wildlife paradise. One man remembered sitting in the mountains at sunset, watching the elephants cross the valley through the miombo forest, while the lions roared.

On one road there was a teak plantation on one side and a miombo forest on the other. The plantation was quiet, symmetrical, empty: there was no undergrowth because teak leaves kill whatever they fall on. The miombo forest was more familiar to anyone who loves to be out in the woods: the smell of earth, rotting leaves, the hum of bees, dove calls, an abundance of complexity and energy.

The valley is now a patchwork of teak plantations, rice and sugar fields and huge herds of cattle, so the lions and elephants have all but vanished. The most telling remains we saw were the burned stumps, like stripped bones, of the forest.

The same thing is happening everywhere. On the one hand, huge amounts of energy are going into reforesting the world. The amount of tree cover is actually rising. The 2011 Bonn challenge aims to bring 350m hectares (864.5m acres) of degraded land into restoration by 2030, and countries have already signed up 170m hectares. A impressive number of sometimes surprising countries have increased their forest cover by more than 20% over the last 25 years: China, Belarus, Chile, France, Greece, India, Iran, Morocco, the Philippines, Spain, Thailand and Turkey. It can really, at moments, seem like some kind of success story.

But the ancient forests, the original, complex, messy forests, continue to disappear, and some of the most enthusiastic signatories to the Bonn challenge have seen some of the worst losses. Argentina, for example, has committed to planting 1m hectares, but meanwhile the ancient Gran Chaco in the north continues to vanish, replaced by huge fields of soy to feed the farm animals of the world.

Cameroon, which holds part of the precious Congo basin rainforest, is offering to create 12m hectares of tree cover by 2030, but since 1990 more than 20% of Cameroon’s forests have been cut down to make way for subsistence farmers and now, increasingly, for banana and palm oil plantations, to create products that end up in our supermarket shopping baskets. Nigeria may feel better about itself after pledging to plant a million hectares, but the fact is that over the last 25 years it has lost more than 10 times that amount, more than half its forests. For a number of years it even had the highest deforestation rate in the world, but it was overtaken this year by Ghana, where cocoa bean crops for our chocolate are replacing the rainforests.

And let’s not dwell too long on the countries where the rate of loss is just as high and dramatic but are not even bothering to sign up to Bonn such as Bolivia (80,000 square kilometres gone between 1990 and 2015), North Korea (33,000), Paraguay (58,000) and Indonesia (a breathtaking 275,000km – an area larger than New Zealand).

Even the apparently cheering news that global tree cover is growing is less than it seems, explains Tim Rayden of the Oxford Forestry Institute. “There is a big difference between tree cover and forests.” A large number of countries, for example, are planning to fill their commitments with commercial plantations – but plantations, which are harvested every 10 years or more regularly, are very much less effective than tropical forests at capturing carbon. He points to recent research where scientists worked out the carbon capture potential of three different reforestation scenarios under the terms of the Bonn challenge. If the 350m hectares of reforestation are all natural forest, they can capture as much as 42 petagrams of carbon. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes that to keep global warming below 1.5C 199 petagrams must be removed from the atmosphere this century, so that is a significant contribution from the world’s forests.

However, if the trajectory of the plans already submitted carries on, at least 45% of that cover will be commercial plantation. If our natural forests are protected under that scenario, the storage potential will be 16 petagrams. But if we continue to chop into them in the same way that we do at present, the storage potential will dwindle to just three petagrams.

We wipe out whatever is complex and other and difficult to manage, and replace it with nice, easy farms and plantations full of monocultures of pigs and corn and wheat and palm oil. We like things nice and simple and symmetrical and easy to control, that’s the problem.

by Bibi van der Zee, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Sophie Tremblay/The Guardian

[ed. From The Overstory, by Richard Powers:

A man just shy of forty hands out silver dollars in the Spar roadhouse, off Route 21, not far from a town aptly named Damascus. Damascus, Oregon. "Celebration, damn it. You have to spend it on a beer".

The request has it's takers. "The hell we celebrating, Rockefeller?"

"My fifty thousandth tree. Nine hours a day, rain or shine, five and a half days a week, through every planting month, for almost four years." (...)

"Who're you planting for?"

"Whoever pays me."

"Lotta new oxygen out there, because of you. Lotta greenhouse gasses put to bed."

"People have no idea. You know they make shampoo with wood? Shatterproof glass? Toothpaste?"

"I did not know that."

"Shoe polish. Ice-cream thickener."

"Buildings, am I right? Books and such. Boats. Furniture."

"People have no idea. Still the Age of Wood. Cheapest priceless stuff that ever has been." (...)

"Fifty thousand trees. Huh."

"It's a start." (...)

"Hate to burst your bubble, friend. But you know that BC alone takes out two million log trucks a year? By itself! You'd have to plant for like four of five centuries just to... (...)

"And those companies you plant for? You realize they got good-citizen credits for every seedling you plant? Every time you stick one in the ground, it lets them raise the annual allowable cut."

"No," Douglas says. "That can't be right."

"Oh, it's right, all right. You're putting in babies so they can kill grandfathers. And when your seedlings grow out, they'll be monocrop blights, man. Drive-through diners for happy insect pests."]

Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes

From the mid-1920s, when Hugo Gernsback coined the term “science fiction,” several fallacies became associated with the increasingly vigorous commercial genre and never entirely went away. The first was the “Taught Me Science Fallacy,” which goes something like this: Isaac Asimov writes about science and particle physics, so if I read the Foundation trilogy, I might learn what a neutrino is. (Kingsley Amis argued in his influential New Maps of Hell in 1960 that, at the very least, the “aim” of sci-fi was to do “justice to the laws of nature.”) But while it is theoretically possible for someone to learn science from a science fiction novel, it would probably be foolish to read the entire Foundation trilogy—concerning a secret tribe of “psycho-historians” who design millions of years of future history before it happens—to learn something. In fact, if you read the Foundation trilogy and put it down thinking, “Ah, a neutrino!” then you very likely missed the point of that ridiculous and absorbing set of novels.

Second, and more annoying, is the “Predictive Fallacy.” This suggests that science fiction might accurately describe what the world will be like 100 years after we’re dead. This argument usually runs along the line of: “Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, and guess what? A few years later we went to the moon!” Or it cites the various occasions when some story described television sets, microwaves, escalators, and two-way video phone calls and then, voilà, they happened. But of course, sci-fi novels—both good and bad—are littered with gadgets that happened and didn’t happen; what they never foresaw was how (and usually how poorly) those inventions would be implemented. Show me one novel that predicted something like Fox and Friends, or The View. You can’t do it. (Oh, well, maybe C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons.” But let’s move on.)

Finally, there’s the “Cautionary Fallacy,” which suggests that science fiction provides urgent warnings about our collective need to prepare for world-hammering comets, nuclear war, climate catastrophe, totalitarian mind-control, and so forth. In support of this fallacy, people say things like: “George Orwell warned us about the Thought Police, and now we’ve got Nancy Pelosi!” (“I don’t want to predict the future—I want to prevent it” was a line often attributed to Ray Bradbury.) The idea that human beings require explicit fictional warnings about their increasingly world-destroying stupidities seems like an exercise in futility, doesn’t it? And by the way, science fiction has long warned readers about things like climate catastrophe—but nothing was done about it. And the imminence of totalitarianism. (Check.) And even the suicidal ridiculousness of mutually assured nuclear destruction—and guess what? We have more bombs than ever.

The science fiction novels of the 1960s—as this two-volume collection of eight very different sci-fi novels testifies—remain enjoyable because they got everything wrong. They didn’t accurately predict the future of space travel, or what a postnuclear landscape would look like, or how to end intergalactic fascism. They didn’t warn us against the roads we shouldn’t travel, since they probably suspected we were going to take those roads anyway. And they definitely didn’t teach us what a neutrino is. But what ’60s science fiction did do was establish one of the wildest, widest, most stylistically and conceptually various commercial spaces for writing (and reading) fiction in the history of fictional genres. Each book is unpredictable in so many ways as to almost constitute its own genre.

Take, for example, Samuel R. Delany’s influential space opera, Nova (presented here in a newly corrected, author-approved text), which takes the concept of the “cybernetic” fusion of human and machine and runs with it. Nova envisions a universe boiling over with star-hopping spaceships, spine-socketed crew members, weirdly mutated sexual and familial relationships, synesthetic video-art instruments, and at least one character raised on another planet who speaks in a verb-delaying syntax several years before Yoda was a gleam in George Lucas’s eye. (“Not too good going to be is. Out of practice am.”) Delany’s prose was stylistically bright, fizzing with ambitious energy (he began publishing novels in his late teens and won several major awards early) and relentlessly inventive, with flashy new visions of the future in one paragraph after another.

Then there’s Jack Vance, who also wrote about incomprehensibly far-off futures that weren’t driven by the splashy intergalactic military conflicts of his Golden Age predecessors, such as E.E. Doc Smith or Robert A. Heinlein. Instead, Vance’s futures are marked by rich, panoramic socioeconomic systems. One of his best is Emphyrio, which charts the coming of age of a young economic adventurer named Ghyl Tarvoke in a galaxy ruled by “lords” and “ladies” who flit from star to star in their luxury space-liners while planet-bound artisans must produce beautiful objects for them to buy and enjoy. People rarely blast each other with laser pistols in a Vance novel; they are more likely to buy one another out or break their distribution chains. (...)

It’s impossible to encapsulate the wide variety of styles and stories contained by these Library of America volumes, but many of the best never even leave Earth. There’s the classic Flowers for Algernon, told through the diary of a mentally limited young man as he is subjected to an intelligence-enhancing drug. Or Way Station, a perfect example of Clifford D. Simak’s often poetic and moving “rural S.F.,” in which a Civil War soldier, enlisted by a galactic federation, maintains a secret travel stop for star-hopping aliens in the Wisconsin woods. (Simak was another of Campbell’s regulars who advocated “plausible” science fiction.) Or Roger Zelazny’s Hugo Award–winning This Immortal (here published under Zelazny’s preferred title, And Call Me Conrad) describing a post–nuclear holocaust Earth populated by both prewar cultures and new, mutant ones. (In the event of an actual nuclear holocaust, we should be so lucky.)

by Scott Bradfield, TNR |  Read more:

Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
[ed. C.M. Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons (Wikipedia). Full story here.]

Time to Nationalize Boeing?

Boeing finally fired its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg. Many where baffled by the fact that he still had the job months after the world grounded 700 of the company's new planes because of serious safety issues. And the more the world looked into these issues, the more it saw a company that was more concerned with meeting the demands of shareholders rather than producing quality planes. Under Muilenburg, the value of Boeing stock rose from around $150 a share (which was already too high) to $440 (it reached this peak 10 days before the crash in Ethiopia). Those billions went to shareholders in the form of buybacks.

The buybacks even continued after the first 737 MAX crash. They stopped after the second. But the company did not discontinue manufacturing the 737 MAX after they were grounded. 400 came out of the plant. Where are they going to go? No one wants them. The value of all 737 MAX planes is around $100 billion. The crisis has so far cost Boeing $9.2 billion. To make matters worse, the company's Starliner spacecraft test mission failed because it went into the wrong orbit. That project was behind schedule, and now its future is unknown.

If we properly appreciated the economic scale of this crisis, then the news of the new CEO would be as valuable as pennies placed on dead eyes. The power of the market is not, as so many Americans are told believe from day one, unlimited. There is a point when the temporal distance between costs and returns is too great for private investment. Since the crisis began in early March, not one day has seen a contraction. Its expansion has only accelerated. What will happen in 2020? What is the fate of the plant workers in the Seattle-area? If we continue to turn to the market for answers, these and other pressing questions will receive no realistic answers. The time for the nationalization of Boeing is now.

Of course, everything will be done to avoid this obvious solution—the state ownership of an enterprise that can no longer afford the crisis it created by cutting costs for shareholders. The indirect solution might be an increase of government contracts, but that will only be a short-term fix. (Please think about and attempt to picture this possibility: Boeing might have made $100 billion worth of worthless of planes.)

Boeing's situation is existential in nature and depth. Meaning, the ontology of the corporation, its mode of being in the market, which is the kind of culture that shapes what the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang calls institutional memory (the actual value of an enterprise of Boeing's size and complexity), must be replaced if it hopes to live for as long as it has been around.

This radical transformation will not be easy. The resistance to changing the culture that Boeing adopted after it merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997, a merger which led to its physical separation between management (Chicago) and workers (mostly Seattle-area) in 2001, will be fierce. Why? Because the profits from the production of planes are no match, when it comes to the central but unreal program of the very rich (which is continuous high yields), to those achieved by speculation on the stock market.

And here we really hit the heart of the crisis. Boeing was not the kind of corporation that could turn a quick profit. But everything about shareholder value maximization is about fast returns on placements, which we erroneously call "investments." The SVM time horizon is rarely longer than a year (and sometimes less than a second), and development and distribution of a plane series takes decades. Shareholders leading Boeing is like an elephant tied to, and led by, the impulses of a squirrel. If you can grasp the extent of this asymmetry, if you can face it for what it is, then you will begin to have some idea of the time it will take to undo this mess. Now is not the time of markets; we have entered the time of the state or the public.

And this brings us to the scholarship of the British-based economist Mariana Mazzucato. Her research has shown that government investment (or, put another way, socialism) is really what drives product innovation in the private sector. The more a government directs resources to scientific and technological projects whose marketability is not well understood or known, the richer becomes the nation-level institutional memory (in Chang's sense) that corporations like Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon heavily draw from for their products and systems of distribution.

Mazzucato calls this the "entrepreneurial state." But what do we find happening in the US today? Right now the Fed is propping up the stock market by injecting billions upon billions in cash (so far a total of $300 billion) into the broken repo market. The value of the institutional memory of this purely financial market is actually next to zero. That IM, gathered by Boeing's largely state-educated engineers over the many years, is inestimable.

by Charles Mudede, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Earth-Quake/Getty

[ed. Not convinced (yet) on the nationalize argument (saddling taxpayers with unknown costs, despite possible long-term benefits) but, if it's that or some no-fault bail-out like the financial industry got after 2008, we should get something in return (or the 'yet' turns into yes). Corporations, even systemically important ones, need to feel a downside to greed and stupidity. See also: Muilenburg Forced Out of Boeing, But 737 Max No Closer to Flying. What Happens If It Stays Grounded? (Naked Capitalism).]

via:

Beast Mode 2.0

Why the Seahawks HAD to bring back Marshawn Lynch (SB Nation)

Image: Rod Mar via

[ed. He's back! Unfortunately, they had to lose Chris Carson for the rest of the season for it to happen.]

‘Clarification’ Ends Protection For Migratory Birds

[ed. Migratory Bird Treaty Act (of 1918) now useless.]

As the state of Virginia prepared for a major bridge and tunnel expansion in the tidewaters of the Chesapeake Bay last year, engineers understood that the nesting grounds of 25,000 gulls, black skimmers, royal terns and other seabirds were about to be plowed under.

To compensate, they considered developing an artificial island as a safe haven. Then in June 2018, the Trump administration stepped in. While the federal government “appreciates” the state’s efforts, new rules in Washington had eliminated criminal penalties for “incidental” migratory bird deaths that came in the course of normal business, administration officials advised. Such conservation measures were now “purely voluntary.”

The state ended its island planning.

The island is one of dozens of bird-preservation efforts that have fallen away in the wake of the policy change in 2017 that was billed merely as a technical clarification to a century-old law protecting migratory birds. Across the country birds have been killed and nests destroyed by oil spills, construction crews and chemical contamination, all with no response from the federal government, according to emails, memos and other documents viewed by The New York Times. Not only has the administration stopped investigating most bird deaths, the documents show, it has discouraged local governments and businesses from taking precautionary measures to protect birds. (...)

The revised policy — part of the administration’s broader effort to encourage business activity — has been a particular favorite of the president, whose selective view of avian welfare has ranged from complaining that wind energy “kills all the birds” to asserting that the oil industry has been subject to “totalitarian tactics” under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.

Habitat loss and pesticide exposure already have brought on widespread bird-species declines. The number of adult breeding birds in the United States and Canada has plummeted by 2.9 billion since 1970.

Now, said Noah Greenwald, the endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, the Trump administration has engineered “a fundamental shift” in policy that “lets industrial companies, utilities and others completely off the hook.” Even a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, which killed or injured about a million birds, would not expose a company to prosecution or fines.

Gavin Shire, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for protecting migratory birds, said in a statement that other federal laws like the Endangered Species Act remain on the books. The Trump administration, he said, “will continue to work cooperatively with our industry partners to minimize impacts on migratory birds.”

The documents tell a different story. In nearly two dozen incidents across 15 states, internal conversations among Fish and Wildlife Service officers indicate that, short of going out to shoot birds, activities in which birds die no longer merit action. In some cases the Trump administration has even discouraged local governments and businesses from taking relatively simple steps to protect birds, like reporting fatalities when they are found.

“You get the sense this policy is not only bad for birds, it’s also cruel,” Mr. Greenwald said.

by Lisa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press
[ed. Wouldn't it be nice to wake up in the morning and not have some new outrage coming out of Washington? It's hard to imagine. This administration, with near total Republican support, is systematically trashing everything that makes life worth living (and enjoying it). See also: The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Explained (Audubon).]

Liz Climo
via:

Costco Private-Label Wines

We reviewed a dozen of Costco’s private-label wines. Here are the best budget bottles to stock up on (Seattle Times).

Image: Greg Gilbert/The Seattle Times

Higher Ed on Autopilot

What if university executives manage to keep the status quo? Does higher ed stay on an even keel — steadily less loved and less funded, but still generating good volumes of decent credentials for people who will then mostly earn enough money to pay off their loans? The stoic demographer Nathan D. Grawe has written a book with a surprising answer. He takes no policy position, and I can picture him cringing at my impatient shorthanding of the current consensus. But his analysis rings an alarm that will sound very loud even to those with their fingers in their ears.

The consensus among today’s senior academic managers is that the most progressive ideas for universities must be defeated. Large-scale student debt relief? This college president opposes it. Free college at four-year institutions? This president opposes it. Divest the endowment from fossil fuel companies? This president opposes it. Eliminate special admissions for wealthy students? This president opposes it. On the other hand, hide a donation from an influential convicted pedophile? This president allows it. Reject a public university partnership with a for-profit diploma mill? This president created it. But make a trillion-dollar reinvestment in public universities? Where’s the president who has come out in favor of it?

In taking these stands, the presidents are setting themselves against public opinion. When a recent poll asked people if they support proposals to make “two and four year public and tribal colleges and universities tuition-free and debt-free and erase the roughly $1.6 trillion in student loan debt currently owed by close to 45 million Americans,” the answer was yes, 58 to 42 percent. This majority is important because the price tag of $2.2 trillion over 10 years was included in the question, and the policy won anyway. Seventy-two percent of Democrats favored the idea (which is good news for the presidential campaigns of its proposers, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren); so did 58 percent of independents. In another poll, four-fifths of the public want federal and state governments to spend more money on higher education. College presidents are in danger of repeating their predecessors’ opposition to the 1944 GI Bill that built the modern public university system, such as University of Chicago’s president Robert Maynard Hutchins warning about “educational hoboes” who would burden colleges by living and studying at government expense.

Still, major reinvestment won’t happen if it faces opposition from higher-ed leadership en masse. Given the plans of Sanders, Warren, and others, the country might naturally ask the college presidents: if you say we can’t have zero tuition, or at least much lower tuition, or can’t end student debt, or can’t dial way back on private fundraising, or can’t greatly increase public funding, what can we do?

Higher ed’s Plan A is “you can have what you have now.” Meanwhile, its leaders will wait for free college and debt relief to die a political death while supporting more accountability metrics, simpler financial aid forms, higher income-eligibility thresholds, and calls for the next Secretary of Education to go back to prosecuting predatory for-profits. We are to have a set of dull yet virtuous tweaks, which add up, sort of. We would naturally assume that things at least won’t get worse — that graduation rates, debt levels, and racial imbalances would stay pretty much as they are now, which is mediocre by international standards, very unequal by race and income, yet mediocre and unequal in a settled, familiar way.

Enter Nathan Grawe, who has done the work to show us how wrong we are. He has built a Higher Education Demand Index (HEDI) to model the next 10 years, based on existing patterns. He looks at trends by region, by race and ethnicity, and by type of university, among other factors, so that he can avoid the banality of averages that wash out specific, intensive effects. He assumes that current patterns will stay unchanged, which is reasonable given the entrenched policy complacency within the sector itself. This is what he projects:

The US population will continue to shift from snowbelt to sunbelt — from Northeast and Midwest to West, Southwest, and South. The populations in the faster-growing areas will also tend to have a higher birth rate than the national average. The shift won’t in itself be a big deal for overall college completion — the students who don’t go to college in Massachusetts would in theory be graduating in Arizona, so there would be no overall loss.

But there are complications. “The nation’s total fertility rate has plummeted by more than 12 percent since 2007. And so, beginning in 2026 the number of native-born children reaching college age will begin a rapid decline.” Birth rates hit bottom in 2013, but there has been no meaningful recovery.

In addition, the highest population growth “is concentrated in populations that aren’t likely to attend a regional four-year school.” This is in part because the chances of a high school student finishing college are shockingly dependent on having parents that went to college, and regions with high rates of immigration or poverty are likely to have high shares of what would be first-generation college students — except they are less likely to attend. Polls at least in California suggest that Latinx parents have very high expectations for their children’s college attendance (closer to Asian Americans than to the lower white levels), but translating these desires into completion is easier said than done.

A third issue is that colleges aren’t going to get another major boost to enrollment from women entering the workforce or from “knowledge economy” demand for college graduates (driven by “skill-based technical change”). The former boost was a one-time event, though it will continue on the margins; the latter seems to have stalled and may be going into reverse, given the offshoring of so much medium- and even high-skill work — not to mention expanding automation.

Based on the current autopilot, Grawe’s model yields the following. The two-year colleges that both parties present as the hope of the working classes will experience “dramatically reduced enrollments” — down 15 percent over the decade in some places. In Grawe’s graveside deadpan, “the HEDI anticipates that enrollments among-non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks will plummet by 20 and 30 percent, respectively, while the number of Hispanic students is expected to grow by 10 percent.”

Regional four-year colleges should benefit from the decline of two-year enrollments, shouldn’t they? Actually, no. After some mid-2020s growth, birth-death contraction will set in, and four-year numbers will also drop everywhere except in the Pacific region, where over 10 years they will grow by less than one percent.

Grawe’s model forecasts widespread under-enrollment that will produce fiscal crises at many colleges in many regions at once. We should expect systemic stress and turmoil, which would include cascading college closures of the kind threatened at Hampshire College and already occurring elsewhere. Closures will be worse in the Snow Belt/Rust Belt but not confined there. Many endangered colleges will struggle to stay open by cutting payrolls, which is likely to mean staff and faculty layoffs. Colleges may try to avoid layoffs with further adjunctification of the teaching force — or may combine layoffs with adjunctification, sometimes with the same professors (“We have to deny you tenure, but we’ll be happy rehire you on a three-year contract”). Grawe projects a loss of 8,000 faculty positions at two-year colleges and a further 9,000 positions lost at regional four-year schools.

It’s hard to imagine this fading higher-ed sector having the power to uplift or transform society. It will keep cutting educational spending to keep some money in the bank. Enrollment and revenue losses will particularly affect the poorer colleges that provide the most social mobility. State government’s core interest, job readiness, will also be hit: “[U]nless something changes, we should not expect to meet goals for a more highly trained workforce.” This will tempt state government to cut again. (...)

Autopilot plus the smaller youth cohort isn’t a falling tide that lowers all boats. Boats will float and sink according to familiar patterns, only more so. Students with college-educated parents and high-income students will know where to apply and what to do to get in, as they do now. But they will be chased by elite colleges with relatively more available slots than they have now. Fewer of these students who can pay full tuition will go to regional public colleges, worsening both their finances and their academic levels. Educational gaps among graduates will increase: students with college-educated parents go to regional colleges at twice the rate of first-generation students, and at six times the rate at “national and elite” schools. In short, Grawe writes, “Overall attendance rates will lag behind projections for our economy’s needs, and large gaps across groups will persist or even grow.” All we need to do to get this less educated and more unequal world is to stay the course.

by Christopher Newfield, LARB | Read more:
Image: Amazon

George Booth
(photo: markk)