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Can they, in perhaps their last act, vindicate the past half-century of centrist expertise of which they are such prominent exponents?
Excellent profile of these economic technocrats and the power they wield.
Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi Have One Last Job | Foreign Policy
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As deep waters warm and this seasonal circulation gets disrupted … it could reorganize food webs, increase non-native invasive species, and … could potentially lead to more toxic algal blooms in the Great Lakes.
Even the Great Lakes’ deepest waters are now warming | Grist
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It will be very rewarding to me to take care of him, because he tried to take good care of me in prison.
I was relieved by how respectful this was of the subjects & the viewer.
My Brother’s Keeper | Guardian Documentaries
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WiGOP’s pandemic response:
Legislature: [does nothing]
Toadies: [shrilly] The Democratic governor is overstepping his bounds trying to contain the pandemic!
Court: You can’t do that, Governor.Repeat.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Strikes Down Statewide Mask Mandate | WPR
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Crime reporters, by the nature of their job, are more like weather reporters. They relate the events that have occurred, as told to them by the police, without scrutinizing the systems.
The Press and the Police | Hedgehog Review
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The Dime-A-Dozen Bankruptcy of Tech Billionaire Serial Entrepreneurs
Last year — barely 12 months into the experiment — [CEO Evan] Williams had already grown uncomfortable with the cost of the team he had just built. Paid subscriptions, which had been on the rise, flatlined in 2020. Publication budgets were cut — and then cut again, and again. Editors who were lured to Medium on the promise of being able to build out full-fledged publications were suddenly begging for enough money to pay for a handful of freelance stories a week.
The rest of their “publications” would comprise posts written on spec by an army of self-serve freelancers who uploaded their work to the platform in hopes it would be selected by an editor for promotion. This program, called “Amplify,” has become a core pillar of Williams’ vision for the future. Instead of paying full-time salaries and benefits to staff, Williams can use Amplify to get the content he wants at a fraction of the cost.
Amplify’s writers are paid a small and essentially random fraction of subscription revenue, based on how many people read their story. In theory their financial upside is unlimited, but in practice the program pays almost no one a living wage.
It seems like all these “innovative” tech billionaire serial entrepreneurs only know how to make money one way.
The Mess at Medium | The Verge
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These are the words of the only baseball player to have his number retired by every major league team: “The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.”
Why MLB should consider moving the 2021 All-Star game from Atlanta | LA Times
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What if the humanities were marketed within the academy by the names of their best and most important ideas, and not by the names of their calcifying disciplinary formations?
Interesting, yet dubious.
The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem | Chronicle of Higher Education ($)
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Public sainthood is a repudiation of humanity, and if you spend your life fighting for humanity—and knowing how ugly the fight can get, and how you can get blood on our hands—you would be annoyed at being treated like a saint, too.
Dissidents Aren’t Saints | Foreign Policy
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[Recognising exile agency] means accepting that they will sometimes speak in a political idiom that doesn’t resonate with us, and that the methods they sometimes employ are politically inconvenient or even incomprehensible.
Exiles on Main Street | Aeon
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[A] striking feature of our current political landscape is that we disagree not just over values (which is healthy in a democracy), and not just over facts (which is inevitable), but over our very standards for determining what the facts are.
The Value of Truth | Boston Review
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“We call this a century project[.] … To get it to look even somewhat like it did before the blight is going to take centuries. It’s for the next generation—it’s planting a tree you’ll never enjoy the shade of.”
The Demise and Potential Revival of the American Chestnut | Sierra
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“Once we hit that saturation point where the first tier has all gotten their vaccines, the narrative will shift to blame. It’ll be ‘Why haven’t you taken care of this yet?’”
How Inequity Gets Built Into America’s Vaccination System | ProPublica
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“[Tubman] is a woman who spent her life destroying slavery[.] It’s a reminder about the relationship between history, capitalism and capital in this country. If we put her on the [$20] bill uncritically, that’s a grave disservice to her legacy.”
Fitting the Bill | L&S News
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Meaning, Purpose, and the Mirage of Human Progress
This really hit home:
My need for meaning and purpose, and my desire to be part of something bigger than myself, were likely motivators for joining the military. People assume that it’s the bad experiences soldiers have endured that make it difficult to adjust to life after the military. While this is sometimes true, very often it’s the absence of what soldiers valued that makes the transition difficult – the loss of meaning, sense of purpose and belonging. Those who sign up for service are likely more hard-wired than most to seek these things, making the loss all the keener. Under Gray’s influence, I recognise the difficulty of this loss and have found solace in his advice about how one can aspire to move past these innate human needs. I am not yet living in a way that Gray would approve of, hope for progress is more intoxicating than the dry lessons of history, but I am more selective in my choice of distractions today, and aspire one day to just be able to sit still in a room and live in that scented moment, before it’s gone.
Reading John Gray in war | Aeon
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The Nation: A Tale of Two Bookcases
How is it possible that two bookshelves, all but identical in appearance and construction, can exemplify both left-wing critical design and the world’s most successful capitalist furniture-manufacturing strategy?
The Communist Designer, the Fascist Furniture Dealer, and the Politics of Design | The Nation
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[Frederick Douglass] never said never. Agonizing as it must have been, with so many faith-shaking signs around him, he stood by his words to the end.
Frederick Douglass and the American Project | Hedgehog Review
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And will our media overlords engage in any self-reflection about the monsters they manufactured?
These moguls built the authoritarian grifter just evicted from the White House with a prime time hustle.
The Lincoln Project and Andrew Cuomo Are Media-Created Monsters | Jacobin
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While other states also saw a decline in union membership over the last decade, Wisconsin’s 5.5 percent drop was especially steep compared to its Midwest neighbors.
A 38.73% overall membership decline.
A Decade After Act 10, It’s A Different World For Wisconsin Unions | WPR
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The tragedy is not that Internet posters have played an elaborate and costly game of gotcha on Wall Street. It’s that the everyday business of Wall Street does that to the rest of us.
The Lessons of GameStop | Hedgehog Review
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We know the government lied about Vietnam. But should the reporter who published the Pentagon Papers have lied to his source?
ProPublica’s editor-in-chief contemplates Neil Sheehan’s deception of Daniel Ellsberg.
Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light | ProPublica
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The restaurant industry’s embrace of history-as-endless-menu coincided with a moment … in which a growing majority of Americans were coming around to the realization that future generations would in all likelihood be worse off than today’s.
Salt Fat Acid Defeat | n+1
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What happens if a human — or to be precise, a climate scientist, both privileged and cursed to understand the depth of the problem — lets the full catastrophe in?
The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try. | ProPublica
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Irresponsible practices of belief-formation are the deepest sin of a digital society since the stakes of credulity are simply too high.
To be a responsible citizen today, it is not enough to be reasonable | Psyche
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