Quote of the Month
Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory— Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heaped for the belovèd's bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on. - Percy Bysshe Shelly, "Music when Soft Voices Die (To --)"
My Recent Writing:
What I’m Reading:
1. Why nuclear weapons won’t do much for Putin in Ukraine
Why you should read it: In the New Statesman, strategy scholar Lawrence Freedman argues that nuclear weapons aren’t the quite the trump card for Putin in Ukraine that many outside observers seem to believe.
“Thresholds currently being discussed include Ukraine moving against the separatist enclaves in Donetsk and Luhansk, and then on to Russian-annexed Crimea; the war spilling over from Ukraine into neighbouring countries, for example Moldova; Nato forces becoming directly engaged in the war, and then on to the most dreaded outcomes – limited ‘battlefield’ use of nuclear weapons, and strategic nuclear exchanges. The passing of each threshold brings new obstacles in containing the war and bringing it to a conclusion. Clearly, once nuclear weapons are in play then everything becomes more alarming, which is why it is the threshold that currently captures the most attention. It may be the scariest, but is it the most likely?”
“In recent weeks, several Kremlin officials have suggested that nuclear options are being considered. But it is important to keep in mind that the thresholds of war are passed for a reason, and the best reason would be to help win the war… What would be the military gain [from using nuclear weapons]? If employed in a battlefield role, a substantial number of Ukrainian units would have had to offer themselves as a convenient target, though for now they are not massing at all but hunkering down. Even then, Russia has other deadly but still conventional weapons that can cause huge explosions if that is the idea. Russia would also need to ensure that its own troops were not engaging with the Ukrainians at the time. Fallout might be carried into Russia and Belarus (which suffered most from the radiation effects of Chernobyl). A final risk is that the weapons turn out to be embarrassing duds when detonated… It is possible to imagine other scenarios, for example an attempt to coerce Ukraine into capitulation. Suppose it was successful. Russia would still suffer from the problems it would have faced if it had already seized Kyiv and imposed a puppet government – a sullen and uncooperative population making it impossible to govern. Most of all, the Kremlin could not be sure how the other nuclear powers would respond because this would be such an unprecedented situation.”
Why it matters: “Using nuclear weapons in these circumstances would not solve any military or political problems for Russia in its war against Ukraine and would create many new ones. It would turn the world into an even more hazardous place, including for Russia. Against this is the objection that this analysis is too rational. Putin appears unhinged and capable of anything (although he would still need underlings to carry out the orders to launch). He certainly does not want us to forget that Russia is a great nuclear power and has had missile tests to prove the point… Unless anxieties about nuclear use is considered an argument by itself to get Kyiv to capitulate, it is not clear what Nato leaders – let alone the Ukrainians – are supposed to do about the possibility of such craziness, other than possibly toning down their rhetoric. For now, to use the cliché, the best advice is to keep calm and carry on.”
2. Why Putin won’t take any off-ramps in Ukraine
Why you should read it: Historian Timothy Snyder writes on his Substack that there’s no reason to build Putin an off-ramp he won’t take, and that he’ll build his own off-ramp if he thinks it’s needed.
"The Russian media and political system is designed to keep Putin in power regardless of what happens in the outside world. Russian politics takes place within a closed information environment which Putin himself designed and which Putin himself runs. He does not need our help in the real world to craft reassuring fictions for Russians. He has been doing this for twenty years without our help… What matters in Russian politics is not Putin's feelings nor battlefield realities but the ability of the Putin regime to change the story for Russian media consumers. It is senseless, as the Ukrainians understand, to sentence real people of real territories to suffer and die for the sake of Russian narratives that do not even depend upon the real world.”
“What happens if Putin decides that he is losing in Ukraine? He will act to protect himself by declaring victory and changing the subject. He does not need an off ramp in the real world, because that is not where his power rests. All he needs to do is change the story in Russia's virtual world, as he has been doing for decades. This is just a matter of setting the agenda in a meeting. In virtual reality there is always an escape route, and for this reason Putin cannot be ‘cornered.’ (Neither, for that matter, can the actual Russian army in actual Ukraine. When Russian units are defeated, they just cross back into Russia)… If defeated in reality, Putin will declare victory on television, and Russians will believe him, or pretend that they believe him. He will find a new subject on which to fasten their attention. This is the Kremlin's problem, not ours. These are internal Russian mechanisms in which outside actors are essentially irrelevant. It makes no sense to create an ‘off-ramp' in the real world, when all Putin needs is an ‘off-ramp’ in his virtual world. It will be built by propagandists from pixels, and we are not needed for that. Indeed, there is something more than a little humiliating in Western leaders offering themselves as unpaid and unneeded interns for Russian television channels.”
Why it matters: “When we start the story from Putin's psychic needs and run it through our own misunderstanding of Russian politics, we push Ukrainian democracy to the side. Rather than acting like allied democracies, we behave like amateur therapists for a dictator. We are no good at that. We are directing our empathy towards a dictator who will only exploit it to continue a war, and away from a people who must win that war to end it… All reasonable people want this war to end. That means thinking more about the Ukrainian people, and worrying less about problems that Putin does not in fact have.”
3. How the global microchip shortage prevents chipmakers from making more microchips
Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporter Asa Fitch outlines how the global chip shortage prevents chipmakers from building more chipmaking machines in order to meet global demand.
"The drought in chip availability that has hit auto production, raised electronics prices and stoked supply-chain worries in capitals around the globe has a new pain point: a lack of chips needed for the machines that make chips… The wait time it takes to get machinery for chip-making—one of the world’s most complex and delicate kinds of manufacturing—has extended over recent months. Early in the pandemic it took months from placing an order to receiving the equipment. That time frame has stretched to two or three years in some cases, according to chip-making and equipment executives. Deliveries of previously placed orders are also coming in late, executives say.”
“…hopes of quickly overcoming the global chip shortage are dimming as it stretches into its third year. What began as a pandemic-era aberration of supercharged demand for laptops and other chip-hungry gadgets has spiraled into a structural problem for the industry. Now many chip executives say the problem will persist into 2023 and 2024, or even longer… Chip companies are pressing for such preferential treatment, arguing that if deliveries to semiconductor makers are given priority, the shortage will ease more quickly. A recent industry white paper argued the benefits of such a ‘multiplier effect.’ A sophisticated testing tool requires 80 specialist chips that can be reprogrammed after they are produced, the analysis said, but then aids in making 320,000 of those same chips each year.”
Why it matters: “…demand for chip-production tools is on fire, with chip makers embarking on expansion plans. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract chip maker, last year said that it planned to spend $100 billion through 2024 to grow its manufacturing capacity. Intel Corp., the U.S.’s largest chip maker by sales, is building factories in Arizona, Ohio and Germany that could cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade… More than 90 chip factories are expected to start production globally between 2020 and 2024, according to SEMI, an industry group—a huge number in an industry where a single manufacturing tool can cost tens of millions of dollars. Even with the supply issues, global equipment sales this year are expected to be more than $100 billion, SEMI estimates, a threshold many industry veterans thought it would take longer to surpass.”
4. How the Davos set became so out of touch
Why you should read it: Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar reports from Davos that the gathered business luminaries appear increasingly out of touch with reality.
“Davos isn’t the problem — although it’s certainly not the solution. But the annual jamboree is a high-profile measure of the fact that despite all the talk over the past several decades about stakeholder capitalism and ‘doing well by doing good’, the state of the world isn’t improving… There was, as always, plenty of discussion about the declining skill levels in many rich countries as public education has failed to keep up with technology. In the case of the US in particular, we endured the usual moaning about the loss of global competitiveness from failing infrastructure. But nobody seems to dwell on the fact that the public sector lacks the capacity to properly rebuild these systems precisely because business has so successfully lobbied against its ability to do so…The point here is that western business leaders have for many years blamed governments for not delivering on basic public services. But blanket privatisations and the neoliberal race to the bottom for offshoring both wealth and labour has ensured that it’s harder and harder for them to do so.”
“Some progress is being made by politicians. The recent OECD tax agreement, led by US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, is a step in the right direction. American Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, the most senior member of the country’s Davos delegation, talked about how investment must take the place of deregulation and tax cuts as a growth prescription for the future… Building back the “human capital” (as Davos Man would put it) in US politics is going to take time. There’s an entire generation of talent missing, because from the late 1980s onwards, the money culture drew the best and the brightest to Wall Street or Silicon Valley rather than to Washington. That’s one big reason why we now have an ideologically and age-bifurcated political class, led by near-octogenarian centrists like Joe Biden or young radicals like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.”
Why it matters: “Business should mind that gap, which certainly isn’t good for ‘growth and stability’, the two things that executives keep calling for. They use this mantra during times that are increasingly economically and politically unstable thanks, in good part, to their own efforts. I fear the divide between the health and prospects of the public and private sectors, as well as between capital and labour, may get worse before it gets better.”
5. Why implementation matters as much as innovation
Why you should read it: The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson observes that America doesn’t lack for innovation and invention so much as implementation.
“Many books about innovation and scientific and technological progress are just about people inventing stuff. The takeaway for most readers is that human progress is one damn breakthrough after another. In the 19th century, we invented the telegraph, then the telephone, then the light bulb, then the modern car, then the plane, and so on. But this approach—call it the eureka theory of progress—misses most of the story. In the 1870s, Thomas Edison invented the usable light bulb. But by 1900, less than 5 percent of factory power was coming from electric motors. The building blocks of the personal computer were invented in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. But for decades, computers made so little measurable difference to the economy that the economist Robert Solow said, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’”
The U.S. could absolutely use a better ‘science of science’ to produce more breakthroughs—in biotech, artificial intelligence, and clean energy. But the insistence on invention often overlooks the fact that we’re running low on the capacity to deploy the tech we already have… Progress is a puzzle whose answer requires science and technology. But believing that material progress is only a question of science and technology is a profound mistake.”
Why it matters: “If we focus on the worst consequences of creating abundance, we’ll come away with a cavalcade of scarcity: too little wind, solar, nuclear, and geothermal energy; too few doctors, psychologists, nurses. That’s the world we have. We need to invent a better world. We need to build what we’ve already invented.”
6. How to keep experts from overstepping their bounds
Why you should read it: In American Compass, Oliver Traldi contends that the “cult of expertise” has overstepped its own bounds in recent years and made it harder to tell legitimate expertise from mere opinions of experts.
“And it highlights a vexing problem for modern political discourse and deliberation: We need and value expertise, yet we have no foolproof means for qualifying it. To the contrary, our public square tends to amplify precisely those least worthy of our trust. How should we decide who counts an expert, what topics their expertise properly addresses, and which claims deserve deference?… More so than the population, [experts] appear susceptible to motivated reasoning and belief cascades. The replication crisis is a case in point, overturning dozens of seemingly established results, especially in social psychology, that claimed large effects on people’s behavior from deceptively small inputs. The findings that have succumbed range from bestselling fare like the 'power pose’ claimed to give women feelings of confidence and strength to storied research like the Stanford Prison Experiment. Incentives to find popular, important, statistically significant results seem frequently to overwhelm any imperative to find the correct answer… Once qualified, experts remain susceptible to the related phenomenon of belief cascades as new questions emerge, because they place their standing at risk if they depart from the views of fellow experts. (After all, what could threaten the enterprise more than the revelation that expertise does not dictate a particular conclusion?) When one expert, or a small number of experts, expresses a certain view—especially on a politically charged topic—that view quickly propagates through social networks both formal and informal, public and private, and becomes widely held on the assumption that experts can be trusted. What appears a broad-based consensus among people who have thought about the issue is really only the overamplified view of the few people who have thought about it at all.”
“Even when expertise is genuine, disciplines and professions, along with their practitioners, seem determined to overextend its breadth for purposes of laundering their personal, non-expert opinions under their expert brand. In the summer of 2020, over a thousand public-health researchers signed a letter expressing their support for mass public protests in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, even as they insisted that in all other contexts the COVID-19 threat weighed against such gatherings. In The Atlantic, under the headline ‘Public Health Experts are Not Hypocrites,’ Harvard Medical School professor Julia Marcus and Yale School of Public Health professor and MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ winner Gregg Gonsalves proposed that ‘systemic racism’ was itself ‘a pervasive and long-standing public-health crisis.’ By expanding the reach of the term ‘health,’ the authors seemed to think they could also expand, as though by linguistic fiat, the breadth of their knowledge about the world, and demand new deference on matters of morality and politics. The signatories were public health experts, and systemic racism was a public health crisis, ergo the signatories were systemic racism experts… Now they were self-declared moral experts in two ways: qualified to adjudicate a divisive political debate, and further qualified to scold those who might question that initial qualification. They didn’t just know better than us; they were better than us.”
Why it matters: “The public will never be able to assess the validity of expertise on a case-by-case basis. Trying yields widely varied conclusions and thus eliminates any common starting point from which to conduct public debates—roughly the situation today. Assessing apparent expertise requires knowledge of a field’s inner workings, something almost no one has the time or inclination to learn. From the outside, it is difficult to infer what dogmas might contaminate a discipline’s standard training or what pressures might distort processes of hiring, promotion, and socialization… Nothing is more useful, though, than one-on-one discussions, which allow a non-expert to get a sense of the true reasoning, beliefs, motivations, and character of an expert. In private, back-channel discussions, people are often eager to be honest, even when that honesty reflects poorly on themselves or their profession. When it’s possible to observe just where exactly the expert draws their certainty from, non-experts may find themselves convinced, or they may find themselves skeptical. A surprising number of issues come down to matters like a preference for more complex explanations over simpler ones, a vague sense that certain kinds of theories have fared poorly in the past, a conviction that a field should take a stance on important matters, and so on. Identifying these points of departure and working through one’s own thoughts on them is a more valuable epistemic activity for a democratic citizen than simply deferring to an increasingly distant and unreliable expert class.”
7. How women were absurdly erased from the abortion debate
Why you should read it: Writer Helen Lewis notes in The Atlantic that progressives and their leading organizations have led themselves into absurd intersectional cul-de-sacs that prevent them from talking about abortion as an issue that primarily and disproportionately affects women.
"And on May 11, the ACLU once again caught the moment, posting a tweet that perfectly encapsulates a new taboo on the American left: a terrible aversion to using the word women… Wait. Run that second point past me again? Surely one of the many things to recommend lesbian sex is that it doesn’t risk getting you pregnant. Unsurprisingly, multiple commentators struggled to see how abortion bans ‘disproportionately harm the LGBTQ community’—even if those laws do indeed harm parts of it, such as queer women and trans men who have procreative sex. The ACLU’s defenders have pointed to data from 2015 showing that high-school students who self-define as lesbian but have had sex with male partners are more likely to get pregnant than their female counterparts who identify as heterosexual. But comprehensive longitudinal studies have found that lesbians across the age spectrum are about half as likely to get pregnant as straight women. Another suggestion would be that abortion bans could also affect IVF provision, which many gay and lesbian couples rely on to have a baby. To a casual reader, though, the ACLU has used phrasing that reads like an incantation—a list of disadvantaged groups that are more interesting than women. There’s something of the record-store hipster about it all: I care about groups with intersecting oppressions you haven’t even heard of.”
“This isn’t the first time the ACLU has dodged the W-word. Last year, the group infamously rewrote a Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote about abortion access being central ‘to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity’ to remove the gendered language. In the revised version, Ginsburg fretted about ‘when the government controls that decision for [people].’ (Which people? Do they share any characteristics that might be relevant? No one can say.) The ACLU’s chief executive later apologized, but here the group is again, removing biological sex from a conversation in which biological sex is unavoidable. The right has declared a war on women. The left has responded by declaring a war on saying ‘women.’”
Why it matters: “One of the most irritating facets of this debate is that anyone like me who points out that it’s possible to provide abortion services to trans people without jettisoning everyday language such as women is accused of waging a culture war. No. We are noticing a culture war. A Great Unwomening is under way because American charities and political organizations survive by fundraising—and their most vocal donors don’t want to be charged with offenses against intersectionality. Cold economic logic therefore dictates that charities should phrase their appeals in the most fashionable, novel, and bulletproof-to-Twitter-backlash way possible. Mildly peeved centrists may grumble but will donate anyway; it’s the left flank that needs to be appeased.”
8. How foundations and academia have dumbed down art
Why you should read it: Critic Alice Gribbin argues in Tablet that foundations and academia have adopted a debased view of art that treats it as merely a mechanism for the delivery of simplistic ideological messages.
“In the popular imagination, the great corrupter of the visual arts is the art market, with its headline-making, eight-figure auction house sales of works by living artists. The secondary art market is indeed obscene, but to blame the market for all that’s wrong with contemporary art is to disregard the no less pernicious motives of the apparatus of messaging that is foisted upon artworks by nonmarket institutions and their attendant bureaucracies. Private and public museums and galleries; colleges and universities; the art media; nonprofit, for-profit, and state-run agencies and foundations: These institutions adjudicate which living artists are backed financially, awarded commissions, profiled, taught in classrooms, decorated with prizes, publicized, and exhibited… Institutional bureaucrats, not billionaires, have the power to constrain the possibilities for aesthetic development in the present. The figure of the contemporary artist we know today is an invention of the bureaucrats. He, like them, is a managerial type: polished, efficient, a very moderate, top-shelf drinker. His CV is always up to date. He worries about climate change. The likelihood he graduated from an Ivy League university is especially high; he may himself be a tenured professor (a near given for literary artists)… The nonmarket institutions of the art world, all vanguards of the progressive movement, have telegraphed that such a profile is compulsory for artists. They should be camera-ready and, if nonwhite, eager to discuss matters of identity. Like shrapnel, the words ‘justice,’ ‘legacies,’ ‘confront,’ and ‘decenter”’ideally will litter any personal statements on their work. To conform to these expectations is to be savvy, a prerequisite for success. Such is the figure of the institutionally backed artist.”
“… over the last 20 years the museums and galleries, universities, media, agencies, and foundations moved to shore themselves up as the rightful experts on art by asserting that an artwork is not a site of numerous meanings but that which contains a single blunt message. One receives such a message publicly, not in private. It is delivered with the expectation of being acquired whole, and of being understood quite as the artist intended. This is utilitarian art: Its value lies not in itself but in its moral or political content. The majority of artists supported and promoted by the private foundations and government agencies, universities, and galleries today produce work of this kind… Progressive institutions today are overrun with utilitarians. They are the professors within universities, the administrators at major grant-awarding bodies—the MacArthur, Mellon, Guggenheim, and Ford foundations; Creative Capital; the NEA and NEH. At the public-facing venues, their attitude to art is everywhere evident: in the types of exhibitions mounted; in the way shows are curated, publicized, and reviewed; in what aspects of artworks are highlighted for audiences. Within museums, audiences are encouraged to seek not aesthetic experiences but the feeling of knowingness. Today’s educated classes cannot, as those in the 1950s and ’60s could, expect to build modest personal collections of contemporary art. Far better, though, the institutions insist, to possess art intellectually, to understand works once and for all. Artists can be mentally checked off a list: ‘I understand her paintings; his installations; her sculptures. I have studied their relevance. Their message is clear to me…’ In answer to the question of how this mass debasing of art has come about, I can offer one preliminary explanation. The prevailing institutional orientation to art has seeped from the academy, like bog water, up and out into the public-facing art world. In college humanities departments, the main type of work carried out is best described as diagnostic. Students are taught to produce information about culture—including artworks—using analytic methods first propounded in the fields of gender and ethnic studies, and, most of all, cultural studies. Beginning in the 1980s, and certainly over the last 20 years, cultural studies critiques have become the dominant mode of inquiry in the humanities.”
Why it matters: “Cultural studies analysis thinks of art not in itself but as a sort of rash brought on by culture, or a spore that a culture puts out. Art—just as billboards, contraceptive marketing, and horticulture periodicals—is considered a symptom or emissary of the society from which it emerged. Solely on the basis of what it demonstrates about its time and place is art a subject of study. Naturally, an artwork’s aesthetics are irrelevant in the cultural studies mode of critique; no one work of art is any better, or more significant, than another. In its predominant lower forms, cultural studies is a kind of supremely unrigorous social studies, practiced by people who believe all art is propaganda… The number of new jobs for humanities professors started declining in the late 1970s; following the 2008 financial crisis, the job market collapsed. Rather than continue in academia on the tenure track, successive generations of humanities Ph.D.s instead have become K-12 teachers, editors, cultural critics, arts administrators, and nonprofit workers. Almost every employee in the cultural professions has a humanities bachelor’s degree, and many have postgraduate training. Obedient as nuns, all have been trained to regard aesthetic experience with suspicion and seek from art a diagnosis of society.”
9. How climate change threatens America’s past
Why you should read it: Washington Post reporter Michael E. Ruane details how climate change threatens to submerge the site of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America.
“The 400-year-old colonial site [at Jamestown] here is losing its battle with climate change, experts say, and Wednesday the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed it on a list of the country’s most endangered historical places… In recent years there have been spectacular discoveries, including the location of the colony’s ‘lost’ fort, the remains of colonial VIPs and evidence that the first settlers, facing starvation, may have resorted to cannibalism… But the location is on a low-lying tidewater island menaced by the river on one side, a swamp on the other and what the archaeologists believe are increasingly frequent deluges of rain caused by climate change.”
“Drainage systems date back to the 1950s, said Michael Lavin, director of collections and conservation for Jamestown Rediscovery. And archaeologists have had to use sump pumps to empty water-filled excavations… Last week, as archaeologists scraped away dirt in the sandbagged pit, several construction barges were anchored in the river awaiting government permission to start shoring up the sea wall that has protected Jamestown for over 100 years… Although the sea wall is made of huge blocks of concrete, it has been battered by the river for decades and now is being undermined by water seepage from the land.”
Why it matters: “… some areas where there may be artifacts already have been engulfed by the swamp, and others are in danger of that… But Jamestown needs more than just a reinforced sea wall, Lavin said. The landscape needs to be adjusted to cope with the continuing impact of climate change… Roads should be raised. A modern drainage system needs to be created. And a special flood berm needs to be built on the site.”
Odds and Ends
The quest to build a new supersonic airliner, two decades after the final flights of the Concorde…
How scientists recovered human DNA from ancient ashes from Pompeii…
And how they grew plants from lunar soil brought back by the Apollo astronauts…
The Internet has decided to illegally stream the recent flop movie Morbius for some reason…
How Guy Fieri became America’s culinary scribe…
What I’m Listening To
Three songs from Haim:
“Forever,” from the band’s 2013 debut album Days Are Gone.
“Want You Back,” off their 2017 sophomore effort Something to Tell You.
“The Steps,” from 2020’s Women in Music Pt. III.
Image of the Month
