We’ve pulled these parties further left on cultural issues (prizing cosmopolitanism and questions of identity) while watering down or reversing traditional Democratic positions on trade and unions. As creative-class people enter left-leaning parties, working-class people tend to leave.

A sensible society would not celebrate the skills of a corporate consultant while slighting the skills of a home nurse.

the caring class and rural working class, unheard and unseen

the red one-percenters have economic power, but scant cultural power

A level below the people of the populist regatta, you find the rural working class. Members of this class have highly supervised jobs in manufacturing, transportation, construction. Their jobs tend to be repetitive and may involve some physical danger.

Yet they too have been reshaped by the creative class’s cultural dominance. When I interview members of the GOP donor class, they tell me they often feel they cannot share their true opinions without being scorned.

On the lowest rung of the blue ladder is the caring class, the largest in America (nearly half of all workers, by some measures), and one that in most respects sits quite far from the three above it.

Yet wokeness is not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker, a strategy for personal advancement. You have to possess copious amounts of cultural capital to feel comfortable using words like intersectionality, heteronormativity, cisgender, problematize, triggering, and Latinx. By navigating a fluid progressive cultural frontier more skillfully than their hapless Boomer bosses and by calling out the privilege and moral failings of those above them, young, educated elites seek power within elite institutions. Wokeness becomes a way to intimidate Boomer administrators and wrest power from them.

In a study for The Atlantic, Amanda Ripley found that the most politically intolerant Americans “tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves.” The most politically intolerant county in the country, Ripley found, is liberal Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which includes Boston.

Members of the younger generation see the Clinton-to-Obama era—the formative years for the creative class’s sensibility—as the peak of neoliberal bankruptcy.

The working class today vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls.

When you tell a large chunk of the country that their voices are not worth hearing, they are going to react badly—and they have.

And I underestimated our intolerance of ideological diversity. Over the past five decades, the number of working-class and conservative voices in universities, the mainstream media, and other institutions of elite culture has shrunk to a sprinkling.

I didn’t anticipate how aggressively we would move to assert our cultural dominance, the way we would seek to impose elite values through speech and thought codes.

A student with ease knows when irony is appropriate, what historical quotations are overused, how to be unselfconscious in a crowd. These practices, as Khan writes in Privilege, his book about St. Paul, can be absorbed only through long experience within elite social circles and institutions.

We tend to like open floor plans, casual dress, and eclectic “localist” tastes that are willfully unpretentious. This seems radically egalitarian, because there are no formal hierarchies of taste or social position. But only the most culturally privileged person knows how to navigate a space in which the social rules are mysterious and hidden.

Members of the creative class see their career as the defining feature of their identity, and place a high value on intelligence.

Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed. The web, of course, has democratized tastemaking, giving more people access to megaphones. But the setters of elite taste still tend to be graduates of selective universities living in creative-class enclaves. If you feel seen in society, that’s because the creative class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not.

An analysis by Brookings and The Wall Street Journal found that just 13 years ago, Democratic and Republican areas were at near parity on prosperity and income measures. Now they are divergent and getting more so. If Republicans and Democrats talk as though they are living in different realities, it’s because they are.

The 50 largest metro areas around the world house 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of global wealth.

Enormous wealth was being generated by these highly educated people, who could turn new ideas into software, entertainment, retail concepts, and more.

These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is.

It was the women’s suffrage movement that coined the idea of “bread and roses.” Humans are not entitled to basic needs only, but to joy and beauty and the abundance that God embodies. James Oppenheim’s poem notes: “Hearts starve as well as bodies. Give us bread, but give us roses.” Is this not what LGBTQ+ Catholics need from their church? Rather than lip service of welcome, we need to find ways to truly affirm the fullness of people’s multifaceted identities, to discard the rhetoric and embrace the difficult and messy work of creating the kin-dom of God.

Experts have identified the species of animals used for British legal documents dating from the 13th to 20th century, and have discovered they were almost always written on sheepskin, rather than goatskin or calfskin vellum. This may have been because the structure of sheepskin made attempts to remove or modify text obvious. Sheep deposit fat in-between the various layers of their skin. During parchment manufacture, the skin is submerged in lime, which draws out the fat leaving voids between the layers. Attempts to scrape off the ink would result in these layers detaching—known as delamination—leaving a visible blemish highlighting any attempts to change any writing. Sheepskin has a very high fat content, accounting for as much as 30 to 50 percent, compared to 3 to 10 percent in goatskin and just 2 to 3 percent in cattle. Consequently, the potential for scraping to detach these layers is considerably greater in sheepskin than those of other animals.

Upon completion of harvest in some parts of Germany during medieval times, farmers preserved the last remaining grain as “Wödin’s Share” (Vergodendeel, Vergodenstruss), an offering to the ancient pagan Allfather (Norse Odin, Slavic Volos). To solicit Wödin’s favor for the coming year, the cuttings were left for his thundering herd of horses sometimes glimpsed swirling aloft as heaps of roiling clouds. Four-wheeled “Wödin’s Wagon” was known in some German traditions as the four stars of Ursa Major with the three that descend from the corner forming the wain’s tongue. German folklorist-philologist Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) found evidence of these traditions persisting well into the nineteenth century.

This is what happened with the introduction of household appliances. Instead of spending less time doing laundry, for example, we do laundry more often.

At a time when demand for transport fuel is under pressure from government vehicle-efficiency mandates and the rise of electric cars, the oil industry is doubling down on plastics. Plastic production – which industry analysts forecast to double by 2040 – will be the biggest growth market for oil demand over the next decade, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

I made it through the entirety of the Trump presidency without once having to meet Bannon but here he was, recording his War Room podcast with Lindell. Bannon has been decomposing in front of our eyes for some years now, and I can report that this process continues to take its course.

Since last March, Midge and I have been testing the bounds of what it means to live in my very small apartment together. In many ways, she’s been a perfect pandemic pal: She hates interacting with others; she loves to sit on the couch; she long ago assessed sneezes as an existential threat.

The first pets tended to be tiny, manicured lapdogs, and were an extravagance of the wealthy

A lot of subsidized and low-income housing refuses pets or limits the type and number that residents can have, and homeless shelters generally require people to abandon their pets to get a place to sleep.

They’re a class marker and a way of coping with deep status anxiety. Dogs broadcast stability—Midge is not nearly as expensive as a child or a single-family home, but she is an indicator that I have mastered enough elements of my own life to introduce some joyful chaos into it.

People without kids adopt pets not only as a dry run for eventual children but for lots of other reasons, too, including as an outlet for caring impulses that have nothing to do with parenthood.

Dogs are, for some of us, a perfect balm for purgatorial anxieties. If you have time and care to give, they love freely, they put you on a schedule, they direct your attention and affection and idle thoughts toward something outside yourself.

As I looked around for an opening through which to push my life forward, the gap that was available to me was roughly the size of a hefty chihuahua.

After commenting on how we’ve idealized the early web, McNeil writes that “when I think I feel nostalgic for the internet before social media consolidation, what I am actually experiencing is a longing for an internet that is better, for internet communities that haven’t come into being yet.”

It also had monetization built into its design. When a user connected to a service — users could access news, games, sports updates, topical message boards, and much more — they were charged for every minute of access, creating a revenue stream for the service provider and the telephone company, which took a cut. This business model incentivized companies to keep people on their services as long as possible without having to turn to advertising or tracking. In fact, Minitel had a certain privacy built in; when a user’s bill arrived, it would not identify which services had been used.

Amazon recently launched its own “distributed” network consisting of its own products

platforms drive a superstar economy that hollows out the “middle class” of professions. A small number of people with huge followings can leverage the new tools to generate more revenue, while a vast pool is left playing the virality lottery.

Despite all that she mines from alchemical manuscripts, Rampling nevertheless implies that for her reader-practitioners, the manuscript was only a fallback format, second to the printed book. The absence of English alchemy in print is presumed to have driven this “active culture of sharing and copying alchemical books.” To me, the whole of The Experimental Fire suggests an opposite explanation: that reader-practitioners cultivated this subculture of reading and writing alchemica in manuscript to evade the publicity and impersonality inherent in print. Consider Norton, who appoints himself to write the Key only after stumbling on a precious, “secret” copy of Ripley; or the books of Robert Greene, with the accumulating signatures made by successive owners. The very title of Ripley’s Bosome Book suggests an intimacy between the owner and their book, hugged close. Old manuscripts, as Rampling acknowledges, were valued because they preserved English alchemy to be rediscovered. But newly copied manuscripts, too, had their advantages. Privately produced and circulated, they bespoke the owner’s special access to networks of alchemical knowledge in ways that mass-produced printed copies of the same text could not. Rampling gleans so many of her discoveries from manuscript sources but declines to take up alchemy’s peculiar attachments to the medium as a subject of much analysis or speculation.

Alchemy comes down to us already encrypted by its own conventions: those elisions of proximate sources, misattributions, a fondness for codewords, and attempts to recycle the old as new and pass off the new as old.

Concrete, rebar, and other building materials also have massive footprints and contribute to a range of complex ecological problems. Geofoam’s artificiality is in no way unique. It’s just visually striking,

Most large scale engineering projects have a number of competing requirements to solve for when choosing a building or fill material. Project budgets should be affordable, materials should be readily available, labor costs should be minimized, and substrate should be stable and unlikely to decay. With its light weight (11 to 45 kg per cubic meter), ease of installation, and stability, geofoam checks a whole bunch of these boxes.

(flame retardant chemicals used to treat geofoam were shown to be accumulating in the ground, which led to their discontinuation in Europe but not the US)

And you look around the internet, and itʼs all like this:  How would you change Facebookʼs design?  Twitterʼs?  Instagramʼs?  I donʼt fucking know.  Fuck, I donʼt even want to touch it.  Maybe Iʼd break something. I donʼt think itʼs very surprising, then, that most people donʼt have any desire to go out and make websites of their own.  Browsing the Internet of today, one sees little reason to make more of the same, and little inspiration for anything different.

to give Web 2.0 its due:  At first, « millions of users all collaborating on a single site » seemed pretty awe‐some. But what we now know was so awe‐ful was the manner in which it enshrined platform ownersʼ dominance and control.  One single organization having complete, unfettered access and control over millions of peopleʼs social interactions isnʼt a good thing, after all.

Iʼll save the analysis of Riot Grrrl culture for someone who was actually socially conscious at the time it was happening, but I think itʼs important, when we think of the word resource, that that is what we have in mind.  That specifically:  Resources by and for young queer girls, young trans girls, young enbies, young aromantics and asexuals.  The very sorts of resources that might help you find a community, might help you navigate an oppressive medical system, might help you escape an abusive relationship, might help you stay alive.  Not some bullshit news article or social media post.

Revival of Neoclassical architecture (reintroduction of Roman/Greek features), as one of the cornerstones of Postmodern architecture and design

filtered through the lens of a more conservative and aging Baby Boomer population that was settling down, becoming more wealthy and suburban

ElectroclashcircaVery Late 1990s - Early 2000sLiquid Sky revival, loud and clashing makeup palettes, androgynous glam fashion, revival of some Pacific Punk Wave graphic design. 

In Japan, Latin-alphabet characters — in an effort to make two different systems fit together — feature extremely short ascenders and descenders.

People are spending a lot of money to express themselves online and most of what they’re paying for is basically the digital equivalent of an emo kid’s backpack covered in Hot Topic pins, random little digital artifacts that bely some kind of personal identity.

While an individual website could be any of those metaphors I mentioned above, I believe the common prevailing metaphor—the internet as cloud—is problematic. The internet is not one all-encompassing, mysterious, and untouchable thing. (In early patent drawings depicting the internet, it appears as related shapes: a blob, brain, or explosion.) These metaphors obfuscate the reality that the internet is made up of individual nodes: individual computers talking to other individual computers.

How could a website complement what you already do rather than competing or repeating?

This is why websites are so important. They allow the author to create not only works (the “objects”) but also the world (the rooms, the arrangement of rooms, the architecture!).

However, clarity is one of many possible intentions for a website. There are other legitimate states of mind capable of communication—a surprising, memorable, monumental, soothing, shocking, unpredictable, radically boring, bizarre, mind-blowing, very quiet and subtle, and/or amazing website could work.

Inspired by the grimoire of Fred Bednarski, this is my place to put assorted snippets of code (which may or may not be cursed, so use at your own risk).

In other words, “the socioeconomic gap between black and whites is doubtless an important contributing factor.” The disproportionate killing of blacks may reflect not bias, but the probability of encountering the police, which itself is a function of the probability of living in poverty. That said, given the base rates of encountering the police, there may be a higher rate of bias that surfaces in interactions between police officers and residents in neighborhoods where the rate of poverty is high (which may surface because officers feel emboldened to act with impunity, in part because law enforcement has too much power and not enough accountability, as Musa al-Gharbi recently argued compellingly). Nonetheless, ubiquitous and vivid media narratives that emerge from such tragic events as the horrific death of George Floyd can activate availability bias, leading us to believe such events are more common than they are or, alternatively, that “the names change but the color is always black” when, in fact, they are not.

Base-rate neglect, for example, may explain why people are inclined to believe that results from the Implicit Association Test reflect prejudice rather than appropriate judgments about underlying base rate probabilities that prevail in the world.

Midwestern states like Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana all have quick access to cities when compared to Appalachia.

that wasn’t horrifically online in middle school

I was in Detroit doing my usual thing when a man across the street began yelling at me. You have no right to photograph me without express written permission! He came at me with righteous indignation. I handed him my card, told him I was visiting from San Francisco, and said I was curious about what Detroit was really like. I will sue you if you publish any photos of me in them! How dare you violate my rights! I scrolled though the images on my camera screen and showed him I wasn’t actually photographing him at all. His expression flickered for a split second before he redirected his tirade. You have no right to invade our community. You think this place is yours to do with as you please, but it’s not. The conversation went on like this for a while. I wanted to know who he thought I was and what he thought I was doing. I wanted to know about the specifics of his grievances. Anything I tell you will only be used against me and my people.

Though paranoid readings can be enlightening and grimly revelatory, they also have a tendency to loop towards dead ends, tautology, recursion, to provide comprehensive evidence for hopelessness and dread, to prove what we already feared we knew. While helpful at explaining the state we’re in, they’re not so useful at envisaging ways out. An “altogether different approach” is “reparative” reading, reading that “isn’t so much concerned with avoiding danger as with creativity and survival.” A useful analogy for what [Sedgwick] calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn’t mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments. I would like to adopt that line as a mission statement: “To be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment rather than identify poison.” Because you can identify all the poison you want, but if you don’t find nourishment, you’ll starve to death.

I am fascinated by the Farmer’s Almanac, and the “Planting by the Moon” guide in particular, which has advice such as: “Root crops that can be planted now will yield well.” “Good days for killing weeds.” “Good days for transplanting.” “Barren days. Do no planting.” I think it’d be funny to make up an almanac for writers* and artists, one that emphasized the never-ending, repetitive work of the craft.

Their prospective students are diverse: a mix of first generation college students without mentors to guide them, high achievers enthralled by their perception of the academic lifestyle, international students desperate for a Green Card, students lacking the prestigious undergraduate degree or network needed to gain entry into exclusive creative industries, and students who believe that the degree they earn will be the career collateral they need to be successful. 

Students told me that in practice, MAPH and MAPSS attendees are often treated as second-class students, and must convince professors to allow them into courses and perform elaborate courting rituals to find one willing to serve as a thesis advisor. Students from PhD programs in other departments told me that it was an “open secret” that the MAPH was a “cash cow” for the university. One MAPH graduate told me of a professor who only allowed students into his seminar if they agreed not to speak during the first half of class. 

Thee iota/jot thing and the WW2/Swiss watches thing are both instances of the intrinsic joy in finding out how two separate pieces of knowledge connect, and start to build a web.There’s a couple of quotes from Damon Knight’s essay in Turning Points that relate to that joy:It seems to me that the more you train your mind to perceive order, the more joy you are likely to get from the perception. (Order in the sense of patterns and heuristics, not “proper behaviour and rules”.)Once you learn one thing, whatever it is, however niche, it becomes easier to learn other things:Any system that helps you understand the world around you is valuable. Natural history, biology, ethnology, physics, geology.... You must have knowledge to make the nets in which other knowledge is caught.

So, when a mystery writer is writing a book / film / tv show — let’s say show — their target is for you, the audience, to figure out who did it just a few minutes before the detective does. If you figure it out too early, you’ll get bored. And if you figure it out after the show reveals it, you lose the joy of solving a puzzle and feeling clever. (The writer is not aiming to outsmart you, because they’re not in competition with you. They’re trying to create something fun for you. If you figure it out just a bit before it’s revealed, I’m sorry, you have not outsmarted the writer, you have fallen exactly into their trap, the trap of “having an enjoyable experience”.)

Vogue writer Emma Specter recently sent out emails for her upcoming birthday party, and had a different gripe.“It’s very hard to organically and subtly get a crush’s email,” she tells me in a voice note. “The nice thing about Facebook invites was it suggested people so it could seem like, ‘Oh Facebook suggested you so I invited you!’

There’s an idea called “gray man”, in the security business, that I find interesting. They teach people to dress unobtrusively. Chinos instead of combat pants, and if you really need the extra pockets, a better design conceals them. They assume, actually, that the bad guys will shoot all the guys wearing combat pants first, just to be sure.

With J.Crew, say, or Urban Outfitters, claims to authenticity tangle bizarrely with economies of scale, and we see “value-mining”, hollowing out the individual unit for maximum profit. T-shirt weaves conceived to require less cotton (“it looks authentically worn”). That’s when you get into seriously sad simulacra territory.

Many visions of technological progress anticipate the existence of ubiquitous high-speed networks and plentiful, cheap power. I would suggest that for every localized instance of ‘techno-utopia’, a desert of extraction is created.

The sensibility connects to the past- it resurrects older hardware and software platforms and aesthetics and reconnects them to the present. Programming new art tools for vintage hardware and software is a common exercise.

The Merveilles visual aesthetic restricts color palettes to black and white, vector or pixel art, with at most a single accent color (usually a sea-foam aqua).

There is a tendency towards salvaging older computer equipment and avoiding electronics waste, as well as preparing for a world where the electronics distribution chain breaks down

an assertion that individuals should create their own personally tailored tools to serve their own objectives and values.

Merveilles is associated with, but distinct from sensibilities like ”Solarpunk”, “Cyberpunk” or “Junkpunk” in that it is practical rather than speculative.

As more and more bright young people devoted themselves to this discipline, new technological subcultures were born out of dissatisfaction with the systems these tech workers found themselves serving under. These subcultures are not monolithic, but tribal.

Throughout her work, she was critical of the infiltration of scientific terminology and methods into all aspects of human life. Couching an argument in language that sounded scientific, she thought, was a way of claiming the ability to know or predict things that could never be predicted or known. Fact-checking was a part of that larger trend: the practice, she wrote to McCarthy, was a form of “phony scientificality.”

Forem Self-Host allows you to spin up your own Forem community using our open guidelines available here for an experience that’s entirely yours.

“So if I’m not wearing makeup or if I think I don’t necessarily look my best, the beauty filter sort of changes certain things about your appearance and can fix certain parts of you.”

In October 2019, Facebook banned distortion effects because of “public debate about potential negative impact.” Awareness of body dysmorphia was rising, and a filter called FixMe, which allowed users to mark up their faces as a cosmetic surgeon might, had sparked a surge of criticism for encouraging plastic surgery. But in August 2020, the effects were re-released with a new policy banning filters that explicitly promoted surgery. Effects that resize facial features, however, are still allowed. (When asked about the decision, a spokesperson directed me to Facebook’s press release from that time.)

Since then, several dozen other U.S. municipalities, including Denver and New York, have either passed or proposed measures that ban or restrict natural gas in new or substantially renovated buildings with the hopes it will help achieve goals of reducing the carbon emissions linked to climate change. In turn, a number of states, including Texas and Georgia, have moved to prohibit local jurisdictions from enacting such bans before more cities can catch on.

We found that we can actually use table salt, sodium chloride, to basically extract the lithium from the ore. Nobody has done this before to the best of my knowledge. He didn’t go into more details about the process, which raised quite a few eyebrows in the lithium industry. But now we have obtained a new patent application for Tesla’s new lithium extraction process, which comes with a lot more details about this mysterious “table salt” method.

Following Eve’s death, the Gender & Sexuality Studies Group at Boston University had been hosting an annual lecture in Eve’s honor.1 For 2014 they invited Lauren, whose title (and poster) were so scandalous that the lecture’s usual venue refused, at the last moment, to allow it; so, the organizers led us to the Physics Department, which was above scandal (and also had a better auditorium).

Their writing tallied the psychic costs of capital but seldom called for its abolition outright. Instead, they focused on how our painful and hopelessly compromised ways of trying to get through the day flicker with the promise of something more satisfying, equitable, and free. Fantasy helps us forget how bad it is and that’s not good, but fantasy also poses this necessary and implacable question: “What is to be done,” in Kay Gabriel’s words, “given that we have the desires we do?”

One of the most popular activities for volunteers, say the experts, is helping children in orphanages. That demand, as a result, has created perverse economic incentives. "In places like Kenya and Cambodia, Nepal and Tanzania, orphanages are prolific. But the children within them are not orphans and in many cases are being placed in orphanages in order for orphanage directors to profit from the [volunteer] tourism demand to engage with orphans," says Leigh Mathews, founder of Alto Global, an international development consultancy group and the co-founder of Rethink Orphanages, a group that helps volunteer groups terminate their orphanage programs and repatriate children with their families.

If a vervet monkey sees a snake and reacts with fear, other monkeys in the group will do better if they can react quickly by internalising that fear, rather than waiting to see the snake for themselves.

Later, the anthropologist James Dow, who spent decades studying healing practices in the Caribbean and Mexico, built upon deep structure in linguistic theory to identify certain common steps: there’s a body of symbols shared between the healer and the suffering person; the healer persuades the sufferer that the problem can be explained; the healer attaches the suffering to a transactional symbol through emotion; the healer manipulates the symbols to create emotional change and alleviate suffering.

Emotions work a bit like a social immune system: social relationships provoke an emotional inflammatory reaction when something threatens them. But there are also ways to dampen that response and avoid a state of social sepsis, bringing people back into the fold when relationships have been ruptured.

Emotion regulation to reduce distress appears to be a fundamental human behaviour that doesn’t just happen within us, but between us. We’re constantly consoling others and being consoled, from instances of forgettable disappointment to life-changing traumas. Unfortunately, mainstream psychiatry and psychology, as well as the self-help movement, is burdened by the expectation that self-regulation skills must be mastered to achieve wellbeing.

Cooler regions are not immune. Boreal forests ringing the northerly parts of the globe are in fact projected to experience the greatest warming of all. In central Siberia, conifers are already dying at greater rates and are expected to retreat upslope and to the north. One boreal forest researcher told Yale Environment 360 that “the boreal forest is breaking apart.” He added: “The question is what will replace it?”

“Now’s a good time to go visit national parks with big trees,” said Nate McDowell, an earth scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the lead author of a paper forecasting that in southwestern US forests more than half of conifers, the dominant type of trees, could be killed by 2050. “It’s like Glacier national park – now’s a good time to see a glacier before they’re gone.”

I can never tell whether the writer has their tongue in their cheek or their head in their ass

If you see a picture of a minister and then a picture of a prison inmate, you’ll probably assume they have very different characters. But, Ross and Nisbett wrote:Clerics and criminals rarely face an identical or equivalent set of situational challenges. Rather, they place themselves, and are placed by others, in situations that differ precisely in ways that induce clergy to look, act, feel, and think rather consistently like clergy and that induce criminals to look, act, feel, and think like criminals.

The panel couldn’t conceive of an alternate path for the officers to have taken, and the plaintiffs didn’t seem to offer one, so it was decided that setting Olivas on fire was reasonable under the circumstances. Olivas’ family provided cases where courts found the use of a taser was excessive, but the panel declined to even consider them “given the degree of granularity involved in the qualified immunity analysis.” In other words, unless a court has identified an incredibly specific manner of excessive force, this court won’t reason by analogy.

But China had for decades been engaging in mercantilist policies against the U.S. that were far more aggressive than anything Trump or Biden has done — mercantilism that is increasingly difficult to justify on the grounds of national development. So China really started that.

In the Nineties, scientists at Nasa fed a variety of psychoactive substances to spiders to observe the effect on their web-making. The spider given caffeine spun a completely useless web, with no symmetry or centre, and holes large enough for a bird to get through. The web was much more dysfunctional than those spun by spiders high on cannabis or LSD. It’s unclear from the book (and from my subsequent Google searches) whether the spider was given the arachnid equivalent of a single cappuccino or a more Balzacian dose, which makes the comparison with other drugs less helpful, but Pollan’s point is that caffeine changes us more than we realise. Anyone who has accidentally overdosed on coffee and found themselves too jittery to function will identify with the caffeinated spider, who was extremely busy being unproductive. Perhaps the spider could even serve as a symbol for low-paid workers under present-day, hyper-caffeinated capitalism, for whom hard work yields so few personal rewards.

Each year, at the end of their first laying cycle, the hens who survive the ordeal of multiple rapes, are discarded and replaced with younger "breeding stock".

The chicks are incubated in metal drawers where the complex and constant communication that flows between mother hen and her growing embryos is replaced by the cold silence of machines.

By far the most common case for joins is following foreign keys. SQL has no special syntax for this: select foo.id, quux.value from foo, bar, quux where foo.bar_id = bar.id and bar.quux_id = quux.id

I don’t offer a program of resistance except to say: when culture is a literal click away, you should want to slow down and conjure some hurdles, make consumption a gradation harder. Cut down on your web-based content, maybe. Balk at the bingeable. Use the internet, if you must, but as a delivery system. (Go ahead and buy those expensive Criterion DVDs.) Revel in what arrives in the good old mail and spurn what comes too easily. Seek out first editions, rare albums, out-of-print movies, old numbers of magazines someone took the care to shrink-wrap. When not in lockdown owing to a global pandemic, visit bookstores and record shops, and often. Arrange to forget your smartphone and contrive to be alone. You will be amazed at what lies just out of view of the scroll.

Who needs all that tramping around cumbersome cities with boon companions? In a matter of clicks, armed mainly with a thumb, you can call up a consumer report, make your decision, and then head over to Amazon to seal the deal. You have your afternoon back. Not that you’d fill it with quiet reverie, of course: the new efficiencies merely make room for yet more scrolling.

Academic friends have expressed surprise when I tell them about spending time listening to local activists talk to, and about, the people who live around us in the decayed industrial city where I live. Their sentiment runs something along the lines of ‘I suppose activism can be local too.’ The trick for intellectuals is to imagine continually what’s actually obscured by what we read: the languages of people who don’t read Antonio Gramsci, or Paulo Freire, or Fred Moten. Darren Green, an extraordinary activist in Trenton, New Jersey, walks around 11 public housing projects every day, several of them more than once, to talk with, and listen to, the people who live in them. He likes to say that the elderly are like walking bookshelves. As the example of Bourdieu shows, even the most intellectually committed, even the smartest – perhaps especially the smartest – of us can all too easily overlook the script of those lives, the language that might remain hidden for too long.

When the Europeans came upon the magnificent medieval ruins of Great Zimbabwe in the 1870s, they had a great deal of difficulty in accepting that they could have been built by the ancestors of the Shona people who still lived there. They had so much difficulty, in fact, that they hypothesised – or even believed – that they had to have been built by a white – indeed Anglo-Saxon – race. Given that there’s absolutely no evidence that Anglo-Saxons ever inhabited sub-Saharan Africa until the 17th century, that posed a problem. It was a problem that was solved by arguing that the Phoenicians had colonised southern Africa centuries before. That was a solution only because the Phoenicians were regarded, for the purposes of this theory, as white.

In fact, the Classics scholar Denis Feeney has argued that the destruction of Carthage goaded the Romans into thinking of their language in exceptional terms, as a language that was, after the Punic Wars, the language of an empire.

At one point, Carthage was poised to become the greatest empire on Earth. It failed only because the great Carthaginian general Hannibal didn’t destroy Rome itself when he invaded Italy. If Hannibal had succeeded, Punic rather than Latin might have been the language of European intellectuals until the post-Enlightenment.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, rich, strange, and Scottish, died at eighty-four in 1799. He was known for exposing himself: he exercised naked before the open windows of his estate and eschewed travel by carriage, insisting instead on riding his horse Alburac through the damp gray of every Scottish season.

One of the most appealing features of “Highly Irregular” is its stock of poems and brain-teasers illustrating the language’s more absurd quirks. My favorite is this limerick, which, 140 years ago, graced a weekly newspaper in small-town Ohio: “There was a brave soldier, a Colonel, / Who swore in a way most infolonel; / But he never once thought / As a Christian man ought / He imperiled his own life etolonel.”

Ms. Okrent notes that establishing a model of correct usage became an obsession only in the 18th century, amid a more general zeal for organization and codification. There were sticklers before that, like the poet John Dryden, who insisted that it was inelegant to end a sentence with a preposition. Yet it was customary to exalt Latin as a language of rules and logic, whereas English was “just . . . something people did.”

the utopians and oddballs who have tried to create alternatives to natural means of communication

Clearly, though, David Reuben and William McGuffey aren’t devoted to exactly the same process of cultural homogenization for its own sake. And this is ultimately why Americanon, for all of its energetically reported detail, ultimately adds up to considerably less than its bestselling, culture-making parts.

Webster’s obsessive, orthographic brand of American homiletics, meanwhile, already augured a profound shift in national identity, McHugh suggests: The young New York schoolteacher who published the Blue Back Speller in 1783 was already entertaining visions of America as a bona fide New World empire, and spent a tour as a newspaper editor touting his high Federalist vision of New World dominion.

(One McGuffey lesson in consonants contained this didactic-yet-casual outburst: “He cannot tolerate a papist.”)

Yet, as McHugh observes, Webster’s pocket dictionary of 1806 appears to mark the first introduction of the word immigrant into print usage—prior to that, all border crossers were simply “migrants,” no different from citizens who pulled up stakes within their countries of origin. By the time the full dictionary was published in 1828, Webster had further defined “immigrate” as “to remove into a country for the purpose of permanent residence,” thereby effacing the widespread practice of seasonal migration across national borders. The battle lines for future high-nationalist culture wars were drawn.

Online and on instant messaging, asterisks have become increasingly useful and now provide a series of services; for example, to show emphasis, in the way italics are used on the printed page. This use probably started on certain online forums where to make a word show up as bold it needed to be surrounded by asterisks, like *this*. This convention then crept online where, rather than using bold to show emphasis, the asterisks serve the purpose instead.

A similar method, however, is still employed in comics, where it is known as grawlix, although the swear words are usually represented by a series of graphical glyphs, for example %@~#$!, rather than just asterisks.

It also was increasingly used as a signe de renvoi (sign of return)—a graphic symbol which indicates where a correction or insertion should be made, with a corresponding mark in the margin with the correct text inserted.

Palaeographers know that Aristarchus of Samothrace (220–143 bc) used an asterisk symbol when editing Homer in the second century bc, because later scholars wrote about him doing so. Physical examples of Aristarchus’ asterisks have not survived, so we cannot know their physical shape, but as the word asterisk derives from the Greek asteriskos, meaning “little star,” an assumption has been made that they resembled a small star. Aristarchus used the symbols to mark places in Homer’s text that he was copying where he thought passages were from another source. By the third century Origen of Alexandria had adopted the asterisk when compiling the Hexapla—a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, the Septuagint. Origen used the asterisk to demarcate texts that he had added to the Septuagint from the original Hebrew. Both these early uses of the asterisk are as an editing tool, to notify the reader that the passage they are reading should be read with caution.

It fell because the dominant schools of thought stopped speaking about the truth of literature. Once the professors could no longer insist, “You absolutely must read Dryden, Pope, and Swift—they are the essence of wit and discernment”; when they lost the confidence to say that nothing reveals the social complexity of the colonial situation better than Nostromo; if they couldn’t assure anyone that Hawthorne’s sentences showed the American language in its most exquisite form, they lost the competition for majors. Students stopped caring about literature because the professors stopped believing in its promises of revelation and delight.

But pluralism in academic settings rarely lasts for long. There has to be a truth at the end of the day, even if it’s the “truth” of an artificial academic consensus. When theory killed literary truth, it doomed the discipline. Into this vacuum, identity professors in English departments poured ersatz truths about race and sex, which have failed to shore it up.

What mattered was the way in which literature illustrated the truth of gender fluidity, heteronormativity, and other key concepts. The gender studies professors were fired up when talking about sexism, but their handling of literature was just as instrumental as any other theorist’s.

When it comes to masterpieces, they take the stance of appreciation, not a hermeneutic of suspicion—big mistake, and we knew better. Our game of endless interpretation aimed to kill those very joys of immersion and identification.

Pragmatist critics regarded words as doing things, not describing preexisting realities. Cultural Studies interpreted texts by detailing the “cultural work” they performed.

Theory had made everyone cannier, or so we thought. You had to be careful not to “privilege” literature. You did not permit yourself overt enthusiasm for great novels or poems. You submitted “texts” to analysis—you “performed” a “reading.”

One had to presuppose something, the Derrideans admitted, or else one could not say anything. But one could get through the impasse by being super self-conscious about it. Hence the endless qualifiers, scare-quotes, parenthetical remarks, and circling-backwards in deconstructive discourse. In this theory of reading, self-reflexivity would never stop. Interpretation must go on! This embrace of the heroic role of the endless interpreter swept everyone away. The search for the central truth of a literary work was over. The rehearsal of the forever-deferred and “problematized” truth of the work took its place. No more truth, only “reading.”

The position that we should not want to make all Americans think alike has an exception, which is that we want all Americans to think that we should not want to make all Americans think alike. I would subscribe to that, but it is a creed. And diversity, too, has a canon. Betty Crocker is excluded. 

McHugh is a “Ban the books” person.

To the extent that self-help and how-to genres flourish in modernizing societies, we could speculate that people consider them useful when they think that their fate is not determined by the accident of birth, when they believe that they can rise above their parents’ social station (or fall beneath it)—when people see life as a game of chutes and ladders.

no one really knows what it means to be a human being.

The honeybee doesn’t ask itself, Is this all there is? But people do ask themselves that question. We think, This is my one shot at existence. Could I be doing it better? And there have always been other people eager to tell us (sometimes for a fee) how we could. Why shouldn’t we listen to them? We could pick up a helpful tweak. Whatever else we might want to say about the books in McHugh’s canon, millions of people have clearly found them empowering.

a person who is no longer producing work of a sort that can meaningfully convince their peers of anything. So now they’re trying to convince people who are less equipped to evaluate it.

Burkhauser et al. also construct their own poverty measure, which they call “full income poverty”. In addition to some technical changes (using households instead of families, using a different inflation index), they make one big change, which is to add in the value of health insurance. Since Medicare and Medicaid were major parts of the War on Poverty, it makes sense to count these things when evaluating how much LBJ’s programs reduced poverty!

And then there’s precarity, which takes risk into account; scraping by is less satisfying when what little material comfort you’ve accumulated could be ripped away from you at any moment by a surprise medical bill or a spell of unemployment.

You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them.

Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer.

The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being. There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard. Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. . . What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are.

The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories.

When, in the course of a dispute, Metellus Nepos criticized Cicero’s lineage, calling into question the status of his father, Cicero replied, “Your mother has made the answer to such a question in your case more difficult.”

That is how it is usually presented, by contrast with the conservative unwillingness to abandon a visceral attachment to basic individual rights, seen as a legacy from the past.

The main point, as Selim Berker has pointed out, is that disagreements over how to respond to information about the psychology and neurophysiology of moral judgment are themselves moral disagreements. It is certainly legitimate to introduce these findings into the process of reflective equilibrium, but in the end, it is we who have to decide whether they should undermine our confidence in the validity of the deontological judgments they are supposed to explain away.

Good is preferable to bad and better is preferable to worse.

John Rawls gave the name ‘reflective equilibrium’ to the process of putting one’s moral thoughts in order by testing general principles against considered judgments about particular cases, and adjusting both until they fit more or less comfortably together.

Hypertexting ‘Constructing a body of hypertext over time—such as with blogs or wikis—with an emphasis on the strengths of linking (within and without the text) and rich formatting.’ ‘Constructing a body of hypertext over time—such as with blogs or wikis—with an emphasis on the strengths of linking (within and without the text) and rich formatting.’

this is why someone who comes into work with a cold but says it’s okay because “it’s not a bad one” is talking nonsense. They can’t predict what immune response you’ll have to their virus. It might be an okay cold for them and a terrible one for you. Again, look at covid. There’s worse variants, but people can respond to the same variant very differently. Hopefully the era of people placidly telling you they have a cold while they sit two feet away from you is over?

it was made only because a relatively free internet is a far more effective means of surveillance and social-control than any top-down old-fashioned authoritarian regulation ever could be

the most dispiriting literature meme I have seen circulating so far: the one that seeks to identify “red flags” on the bookshelf when you “go home with a guy” that should, dear girl, cause you forthwith to flee.

We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitive industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?” Hear hear.

the blood of Jonathan Franzen might be more easily hosed away as in an abattoir.

Modern literature, properly understood, has largely been about incels, and the periodic efforts to purge them for something more “optimistic” (1934, 2021) have been waged by people who do not really know what literature is.

Yet at least in the domain of arts and culture, it seems to me uncontroversial to say that in the current moment bien-pensant Americans broadly share Stalin’s view that there is, or ought to be, a concrete purpose to literature, and that that is, namely, to engineer the human soul.

The Romans used timber sparingly, it being a land-hungry material needed for other essentials such as shipbuilding, choosing instead the masonry construction that exploited the abundant labour they had at their disposal.

Thomas Kaminski is professor emeritus of English at Loyola University Chicago.

Taste is the faculty by which we make judgments about art. The term of course has broader social uses: a gift, a comment, any form of public display may, depending on the circumstances, be thought in either good or bad taste.

The sound is rhythmic and sensual, its pleasures emotionally exuberant and rebellious, often Dionysiac. And those pleasures are real. Nevertheless, some of us think them shallow, expending themselves in the endocrine system. Those who dissent from the popular taste will tell you that a Bach cantata, a Beethoven symphony, or a Wagner opera can not only stir our sensual nature but penetrate to the recesses of the human heart. Modern literary theorists and cultural critics sneer at such a claim, decrying it as a form of bourgeois sentimentality or just another attempt by the well-off to justify their “privilege.” Ultimately, the question is impervious to attempts at demonstration: either you have experienced the power of art or you haven’t.

there are still many who find abstract and conceptual art compelling and who derive real aesthetic pleasure from viewing it. So malleable is human consciousness in responding to the artifice of our fellow man, and such is the power of received opinion to shape those responses.

Ours, sad to say, is a decadent age, in which we have allowed the critics to argue us out of our senses. (Of all the arts, music has undoubtedly suffered the most from this deference to the intellect and denial of the sensual. Does anyone outside of music schools really enjoy the latest cacophony foisted upon restive but intimidated concertgoers as “modern” music?)

The late 20th century, when the art that most pleased the experts left the typical viewer cold, was the great age of the aesthetic hypocrite. One could only wonder what someone meant when he said that he “liked” a piece of modern art. Did he find the arrangement of colors in that work, however random or chaotic, beautiful in itself? Perhaps. Was that Cubist disassembly of a female torso psychologically compelling? Maybe the first time one saw that sort of thing. Or was our viewer merely watching out for his reputation, in effect saying to himself, “Everyone knows that Matisse is a great artist, and by nodding approval I show myself a man of taste”? Our motives, of course, are often unclear even to ourselves; and who is any one of us, after all, to dispute received opinion?

We may still know nothing of the work’s original social and cultural meaning, but that does not matter, for we have fit it into our own aesthetic world and conferred our own meaning upon it.

The idea of training one’s taste may seem alien, even repugnant. Perhaps beauty should be recognizable in any circumstances. But one’s own experience will generally tell against this claim.

For the purposes of this essay, there is such a thing as great art.

“Kenneth Clark was saying the other day…that people who look at old masters fall into three groups: those who see what it is without being told; those who see it when you tell them; and those who can’t see it whatever you do.” This remark, cold and hard as it is, seems largely correct. Ask anyone who has taught literature or art history at the college level: the professor will recognize these three groups—the sensitive, the teachable, and the dull. It is not necessarily a matter of intellect. I once heard a brilliant economist talk about a novel: he noticed everything in it but the art. It is a matter of taste.

Li hopes that acknowledging this history—and how it hindered an effective global response to Covid-19—will allow good ventilation to emerge as a central pillar of public health policy, a development that would not just hasten the end of this pandemic but beat back future ones. 

(Fauci declined to be interviewed for this story.)

What must have happened, she thought, was that after Wells died, scientists inside the CDC conflated his observations. They plucked the size of the particle that transmits tuberculosis out of context, making 5 microns stand in for a general definition of airborne spread. Wells’ 100-micron threshold got left behind. “You can see that the idea of what is respirable, what stays airborne, and what is infectious are all being flattened into this 5-micron phenomenon,” Randall says. Over time, through blind repetition, the error sank deeper into the medical canon. The CDC did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Randall had studied citation tracking, a type of scholastic detective work where the clues aren’t blood sprays and stray fibers but buried references to long-ago studies, reports, and other records.

Like his peers, Langmuir had been brought up in the Gospel of Personal Cleanliness, an obsession that made handwashing the bedrock of US public health policy. He seemed to view Wells’ ideas about airborne transmission as retrograde, seeing in them a slide back toward an ancient, irrational terror of bad air—the “miasma theory” that had prevailed for centuries. Langmuir dismissed them as little more than “interesting theoretical points.”

Thus comes the slow disappointment of watching movies. First you don’t understand them. Then you understand them, and they’re captivating. Then you understand them too well, and they’re boring. Special effects become ordinary, deep movies become dull, groundbreaking themes become repetitive.4 You realize some revered directors are just hacks.5

Most Stories are the Same. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are only six types of story. The fundamental constraints of the medium (and to a lesser extent, audience preferences) lead to the same story being told, over and over again.

The 2000s-era teen/adult comedy has died out, despite immense popularity. Why?2 Adult comedy thrives on irreverence. Over the past decade, we’ve become touchy about what’s okay to say or laugh at.

The final benefit is that compression and dense-packing in columnar databases free up space — space that may be used to sort and index data within the columns. In other words, columnar databases have higher sorting and indexing efficiency, which comes more as a side benefit of having some leftover space from strong compression. It is also, in fact, mutually beneficial: researchers who study columnar databases point out that sorted data compress better than unsorted data, because sorting lowers entropy.

The first action a chef will take is often to set a pan on the stove and start heating it. That pan isn’t just a pan. It is also a placeholder reminding him that a dish is in process.

One of the first material scientists I spoke to about making things that last for thousands of years offered a compelling insight: “Everything is burning, just at different rates.” What he means is that what we perceive as aging is actually oxidisation, like rusting. When we imagine materials that may last for thousands of years, most people think of stone or precious metals like gold – because they don't oxidise readily. But even bodies can be preserved for millennia if stored in the right chemical environment, as the mummies of Egypt demonstrate.

bio-concrete. This is where bacteria called Bacillus pasteurii is actually encapsulated and added to the concrete, along with a form of starch that serves as its food. The bacteria stay dormant in the concrete until a crack forms and air gets in. This change wakes the bacteria up, and they begin to eat, grow and reproduce. In doing so, they excrete calcite, which bonds to the concrete, fills the crack and seals it up. So in essence, this type of concrete structure is capable of self-repair.

Bio-cement is formed by taking sand, or other forms of aggregate, and then adding bacteria and urea, a component of urine. The urea triggers the bacteria to secrete calcite – a form of calcium carbonate – binding the mixture together into a solid material similar to limestone.

Sand mining caused a bridge to collapse in Taiwan in 2000, and another the following year in Portugal just as a bus was passing over it, killing 70 people.

And then there’s Singapore, a world leader in land reclamation. To create more space for its nearly six million residents, the jam-packed city-state has built out its territory with an additional 50 sq miles (130 sq km) of land over the past 40 years, almost all of it with sand imported from other countries. The collateral environmental damage has been so extreme that neighbouring Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia have all restricted exports of sand to Singapore.

Desert sand is largely useless to us. The overwhelming bulk of the sand we harvest goes to make concrete, and for that purpose, desert sand grains are the wrong shape. Eroded by wind rather than water, they are too smooth and rounded to lock together to form stable concrete. 

Archaeologically-speaking, clothes have not been very hard-wearing for much of human history, says Zalasiewicz. "But as soon as plastic came along, we suddenly have super durable techno-fur, as it were – detachable techno-fur."

At first the car will simply rust but, as iron dissolves well in anoxic water, once the oxygen level decreases its metal components will begin to dissolve. Or perhaps a part of the chassis will mineralise, reacting with sulphides to form pyrite. The iron in steel beams or embedded in reinforced concrete, kitchen implements, or even tiny quantities of iron in the speaker of a mobile phone will all acquire a glittering sheen. Even whole rooms – a food court kitchen fitted with stainless steel worktops – might be transformed into fool’s gold.

Actual photo of actual women in the 1890s doing minimal not-really skirt hiking to walk up steps. Note how all they’re doing is holding their long skirts neatly to one side, out of the way of their feet.

here's a small GIF animation of my Ian Knot to prove that it really is the world's fastest.

A coherent and articulated thought does not produce itself automatically, but the process is significantly simplified when all the parts are on the table.

An open protocol for per-user storage on the Web

Fire mindset An approach to circumventing mental blocks by deliberately interpreting everything as fuel for your own progress. "Transform it into something useful" If the outcome is not what you wanted, ask if it still serves your purposes in some way. I have surprised myself many times at how often this is the case.

For some things, however, that artificiality is what people respond to. A cherry flavour almost never tastes like fresh cherries, which are quite mild and defined by the texture of the fruit. Instead it has strong notes of almond, of Maraschino cherries from a jar, and if you leave that out, Wright has found, a client will come back and tell you, that’s the flavour they want.

The flavourist comes up with a first draft at their desk, then puts on a white coat and hits the lab bench, mixing oils, essences, extracts, and synthetic molecules. Wright, who is known for her pear flavours, can reel off the ingredients. There’s a bubblegum, almost banana-tasting molecule called isoamyl acetate, and another molecule called ethyl decadienoate, which has a strong pear taste but that can get a little acrylic.

veryone from Bill Maher to Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson

Over the course of these communications, Weinstein asked if he could nail down the name and contact number of the person with whom he was interacting. “I said, ‘Look, I need to know who you are first, whether you’re real, what your real first and last names are, what your phone number is, and so on,” Weinstein recounts. “But on asking what ‘Christopher’s’ real name and email was, they wouldn’t even go that far.”

Engineering, programming, agriculture (like, actual agriculture, not your shitty organic garden), construction, metallurgy and math—basically a list of things the left is currently allergic to—are all absolutely foundational. Only with actual skills, often gained through work, does the abstract knowledge of these chokepoints become relevant, since sabotage and occupation can then be paired with attempts to build territories. This knowledge also serves to temper our enthusiasm, as most of us must simply recognize that not much is happening and we are quite far from the levers of power. It is necessary, then, to make more friends.

one of the reasons that places like China and Vietnam became ideal locations for factories was precisely the high literacy rates and glut of mid-level engineers they had inherited from the socialist period.

discovering what can and cannot be severed from global production networks requires a process of experimentation carried out by those who have gained some knowledge of how these technologies operate.

Expensive redundancies are built into these networks, for example, to ensure that when strikes do happen at one link in the chain, there are back-up channels to keep production flowing downstream.

On a technological level, it’s surprisingly reasonable.

The actual knowledge required to make a car, a computer, even a hunk of steel, grows more rarefied, itself an expensive commodity rationed to smaller and smaller shares of the population, often pieced apart and distributed so widely that no single engineer or programmer actually knows the entirety of the process, which can only be synthesized at the social level through coordination between many firms via the market. The process is abstracted—not in thought, but materially or “objectively,” by its literal piecing-apart and recomposition in the market, with the mechanism of money as an abstract universal equivalent.

The excess workers are a net cost. In some cases this cost is made up for at the expense of wealthier workers, whose consumption of services pays the bill for poorer workers. In other cases the state takes up the cost in the form of welfare, stimulus spending, prisons or simply through an array of social programs mashed together in an attempt to pay the diffused costs of slow-motion societal collapse. In all these instances, this general cost takes the form of second-hand rents charged on productive work.

The trend is often met with optimism by the highly-skilled, who guarantee that the “second machine age” will create as many jobs as it eliminated, just as previous bouts of mechanization replaced farm work with manufacturing and manufacturing with services. These are often the dreams of people living within today’s Silicon bubble economies, part of the small fraction of the population actually employed in high-end services, STEM fields or, god forbid, “the arts.”

The flyknits represent the largest mechanization of the notoriously labor-intensive footwear industry in decades. According to a research report by Deutsche Bank, “the technology reduces labor costs by up to 50% and cuts material usage by up to 20%, resulting in .25% higher margins.”

These cities are attractive because they have immense, thriving markets in bullshit—and bullshitting is one of the few skills that hasn’t yet been fully automated.