[{"content":"Based on the occasional email I get seeking advice, many people considering a social science PhD end up on my website at some point in that process. As probably the most competitive round of admissions decisions ever comes to a close, thought I\u0026rsquo;d reflect on my experience not getting into any doctoral programs the first time I applied.\nClearly, my second bid panned out and I\u0026rsquo;m fortunate to have ended up in my favorite city doing what I wanted to do. But re-applying two years after first getting rejected cost more than I anticipated in energy, resources, and especially time just for another deeply imperfect crapshoot. I\u0026rsquo;m still skeptical it was wise to spend two years of the prime of my life in this sort of limbo in addition to the two years prior when I worked as a pre-doctoral research assistant. I say this even having had the security of a fully funded master\u0026rsquo;s degree to keep me afloat over that period.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re considering re-application, you should have a plan to demonstrably augment your application by the time your re-application is assessed even if you believe your blanking the first time was just a bad draw (more likely this year than ever). In my case, my gamble certainly would not have paid off had research I co-authored not been published by the time I sent out my second round of applications while I was concurrently doing my M.Phil. This was a best-case scenario. I also spent a chunk of my savings from my two years of work enrolling in summer courses to bolster my transcript, which I now feel was a dumb decision made blindly that ultimately didn\u0026rsquo;t really move the needle despite what it cost me.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re reading this as someone who\u0026rsquo;s been rejected from a PhD program, please try to fully appreciate your options without career tunnel vision. There\u0026rsquo;s no way of spinning the reality that getting uniformly rejected sucks but I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s trite to call this an opportunity. This profession has a way of subtly placing these blinders on the impressionable young people it attracts or keeping them too occupied or insulated to expand their horizons. I think people get hung up on the idea of \u0026lsquo;I just need to clear this obstacle and then the rest of my life can begin\u0026rsquo;, but academia is just a series of checkpoints exactly like that. Each one should give us pause when we come to them. Whatever you choose to pour into this career path going forward, it\u0026rsquo;s important to be cognizant that institutional academia will never reciprocate that devotion. I\u0026rsquo;m writing this for my own benefit too.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/posts/0003/","summary":"This profession has a way of subtly placing blinders on the impressionable young people it attracts or keeping them too occupied or insulated to expand their horizons. I think people get hung up on the idea of \u0026lsquo;I just need to clear this obstacle and then the rest of my life can begin\u0026rsquo;, but academia is just a series of checkpoints exactly like that. Each one should give us pause when we come to them.","title":"On not getting into a PhD program"},{"content":"Easiest bits first. There is so much of value in this book. In particular, Manne\u0026rsquo;s multi-layered formulation of misogyny not as simple \u0026ldquo;hatred of women\u0026rdquo; but as a self-perpetuating system of behavior policing is convincingly argued and I think should be taught widely. By this, I mean beyond philosophy including fields such as my own in economics, which has proved notoriously incapable of incorporating such systemic phenomena in its analytical frameworks. It is important.\nThe book is unfortunately very difficult to read. It is an academic book that the reader will quickly learn is not oriented towards general audiences. Even as an academic in a field of bad writers and opaque equations, this was frequently impenetrable and as a result, I took a break from continuing the book for about seven months. Lots of Goodreads reviews have voiced this frustration but I particularly relate to one that singled out the following sentence from page 180:\nThe implicit modus ponens here is too seldom tollensed.\nI involuntarily said, \u0026ldquo;Oh fuck off\u0026rdquo; within earshot of a children\u0026rsquo;s playground when parsing that sentence before highlighting it and noting \u0026ldquo;wtf\u0026rdquo; next to it. As someone who went to college intending to major in philosophy, I get the temptation of verbosity but an editor should have axed that on sight. The concepts aren\u0026rsquo;t even that difficult to express in simple writing and frankly, it is a wasted opportunity to invite marginalized voices to participate in philosophy, a field that like mine suffers from elitism and a lack of diversity.\nBeyond this, it is a bit disorganized; the chapters could be better distinguished and there are too many large footnotes throughout. The constant forward and backward references to previous and forthcoming chapters (e.g. \u0026ldquo;We will see in Chapter 5 how this manifests...\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;recall in Chapter 2 how\u0026hellip;\u0026rdquo;) breaks the flow of an already laborious read.\nThe writing isn\u0026rsquo;t bad. The examples provided, drawn from news stories, literature, movies, and other art, are well chosen. Manne\u0026rsquo;s writing is very quotable and there are a lot of segments where as a reader you just think, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m familiar with this concept but just hadn\u0026rsquo;t seen it systematically put into words before.\u0026rdquo; Case in point, a lot of people engaged enthusiastically with this tweet of mine , which was a literally random sentence from the book (replies seem to be hidden for some reason). I like in particular the exposition of exonerating narratives. I\u0026rsquo;d recommend this review of the book \u0026mdash;it\u0026rsquo;s what got me to buy it in the first place.\nNow, the bad parts and they are indeed very bad. In particular, this book is deeply irresponsible in its discussions of race and empire. Manne to her credit begins with a positionality statement acknowledging her limited vantage point and throughout makes reference to misogynoir and the privileged status of white women like herself. Nonetheless, the racial analysis is severely lacking and oftentimes harmfully so, disappointing in a book that bills itself as intersectional.\nThe first major stumbling block I identified is from her chapter on victim-blaming, namely the public\u0026rsquo;s predisposition to not believe the accounts of victims of misogyny. In it, she considers reasons that would bring women to make public their grievances in anticipation of too-common and nonsensical counterarguments that the victim would somehow benefit from the attention. As the Me Too movement has made undeniable, this he said/she said battle unfortunately places an unfair burden of proof on the alleger, who is often a stranger to the public sphere lacking the resources and benefit of familiarity of their more powerful, typically male abusers. Manne is convincing in making the point that if it were the case that the accuser seeks to attract sympathy, this is a terrible way to do it: the public is primed to preserve its goodwill towards the familiar and powerful and is prone to intrusively scrutinizing imperfect victims. The burden of proof is unbelievably daunting, often humiliating, and evidence is routinely purposely destroyed. Clearly, no sane person would willingly go through this ordeal without at least the truth on their side.\nThen Manne off-hand (page 238) says that \u0026ldquo;given... the paucity of analogues running in the other direction, gender-wise\u0026rdquo;\u0026mdash;meaning given that we rarely see actual evidence of malevolent accusers\u0026mdash;we can dismiss this motive. This was shocking to read a few days after a national commemoration of Emmett Till\u0026rsquo;s 79th birthday and during a moment where video footage keeps surfacing of white women using their privileged status in attempts to weaponize white supremacy through some wrongly perceived or outright invented abuse, i.e. \u0026ldquo;Karens\u0026rdquo;, to use the ironically now-gentrified nomenclature. Of course, the most high-profile recent example is that of Amy Cooper calling the police on Christian Cooper in Central Park. You\u0026rsquo;ll also remember this immediately recognizable dynamic gives the movie \u0026ldquo;Get Out\u0026rdquo; its climax when a police car finds Daniel Kaluuya\u0026rsquo;s character strangling Allison Williams' without context. \u0026ldquo;Who are they gonna believe?\u0026rdquo; is indeed a weapon and it is unfair to dismiss that it is wielded by the powerful, who are sometimes women. Manne\u0026rsquo;s analysis, in my understanding, cannot accommodate this complication, wherein in white women have repeatedly been shown to abuse their credibility as victims to threaten the lives of innocent others. We lament how the Black Lives Matter movement has been so dependent on fortuitous camera footage to inspire the support of non-Black people because they face the same unjust burden of proof. Believe survivors, of course, but where there is intersectional power, there is complexity beyond what Manne\u0026rsquo;s framework permits.\nChapter 8 is mostly a reflection on Hillary Clinton\u0026rsquo;s election loss to Donald Trump. Like other Goodreads reviewers here, I had followed Manne on Twitter for a while before getting to this chapter and it is clear and understandable that she identifies personally with the undeniably sexist treatment Clinton has received throughout her very public career.\nUnfortunately, the relatability of an objectively qualified and competent white woman occupying elite space has clearly clouded her judgment to the point of being unable to consider Clinton\u0026rsquo;s objective flaws. Chapters earlier, Manne makes the vital point that we cannot hold victims of misogyny to the impossible standard of being perfect victims. In fact, she invokes Michael Brown to make this point. Why then does Manne do Clinton the disservice of making her out as a perfect politician? Decades as arguably the most powerful woman in the world straddling neoliberal economics, a racist and punitive war on crime, and a hawkish war agenda, but Manne will only concede that some unspecified policies were \u0026ldquo;misguided\u0026rdquo; without elaboration. When she later considers Clinton\u0026rsquo;s support of the Iraq War (which she introduces as Bernie Sanders\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;controversial remarks about Clinton\u0026rsquo;s being unqualified\u0026rdquo;), she does so only to point out that \u0026ldquo;Donald Trump\u0026rsquo;s vice president, Mike Pence, also voted for the war in Iraq\u0026rdquo; and that he received less scrutiny.\nManne also uses this chapter to vaguely highlight the plight of Alice Goffman, completely omitting the racial-exploitative nature of the controversy surrounding her. There is probably a sexist component to her treatment\u0026mdash;I was a b-school undergrad not remotely interested in academia at the time so cannot speak to what the backlash was like\u0026mdash;but the absence of context is odd given Manne\u0026rsquo;s tendency elsewhere to elaborate on the context behind all her case studies and how they fit the discussion at-hand. It is also telling that Manne\u0026rsquo;s next book reportedly will include a chapter on Elizabeth Warren\u0026rsquo;s run in the 2020 Democratic primary. Manne on Twitter has repeatedly and explicitly rejected the notion that there could be a non-gendered reason for favoring any candidate besides Warren. I don\u0026rsquo;t think I need to appeal to support of Clinton over Sanders in 2016 and initially Warren over everyone this cycle (before strongly favoring Sanders) to call this ridiculously out of touch and reflective of an elitist tunnel vision. This limited perspective palpable throughout the book contributed to my hesitation to finish. Even if we were to accept the premise, there is no good reason to repeatedly narrow your scope of analysis to white, rich, powerful politicians whose chief downfall is that they\u0026rsquo;ve only occupied the second most powerful political positions in the United States. Julia Gibbard hardly constitutes diversification. There is a wealth of material ripe for philosophical analysis outside of the white Anglosphere.\nFinally, there is the matter of Manne\u0026rsquo;s analysis of the 2016 election. You would not know it from her treatment, but 82% of Black men, 63% of Latino men, and 61% of non-white others voted for Clinton. Sure, these are lower than the 94% and 69% of their female counterparts, but Manne\u0026rsquo;s analysis is so unable to consider non-white agency that one gets the sense that these facts are mere inconveniences. The racial dimensions of the election of a billionaire who popularized the Birther movement, ran on a platform explicitly equating Mexicans with rapists, and who labeled Africa a collection of shithole countries are completely absent from Manne\u0026rsquo;s election autopsy.\nThis isn\u0026rsquo;t to say she does not talk about race in the chapter:\nMy sense is that people in liberal and progressive circles were not generally as proud to vote for Clinton as President Obama, despite their very similar policies and politics, and the fact that each was or would have been (respectively) a history-making president\nBeyond this casual equation of breaking the highest gender and racial barriers, how deeply must one lose themselves in the professor bubble that they cannot fathom a non-gendered reason that an upstart Obama would have an appeal that Clinton did not? It is completely lost on Manne that, as the numbers above attest, the reason the United States does not currently have a female president is because of racism. Is it possible that white women may be active participants and benefactors in the perpetuation of white supremacy (I\u0026rsquo;m thinking, for example, of the legacy of female participation in slave ownership as documented by the historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers)? In Manne\u0026rsquo;s shockingly aracial analysis of why white women voted for Trump, it does not seem so:\nIt turns out that women penalize highly successful women just as much as men do... In the days following the election, it was common for those of us grieving the result to judge the white women who voted for Donald Trump even more harshly than their white male counterparts. I was guilty of this myself. But... I subsequently came to redirect a good portion of my anger toward the patriarchal system that makes even young women believe that they are unlikely to succeed in high-powered, male-dominated roles.\nHow can one square this takeaway with the voting patterns of non-white women unless \u0026ldquo;women\u0026rdquo; here implicitly means \u0026ldquo;white women\u0026rdquo;? Does Manne suggest non-white women think themselves more likely to succeed in high-powered, male-dominated roles? She refuses to entertain the notion of white female racism:\n\u0026hellip;almost no black women and relatively few Latina women voted for Trump over Clinton. Is racial difference part of what makes for psychological self-differentiation from Clinton? Or was the obvious fact that these women had more to lose in having a white supremacist-friendly president rather an overriding factor in blocking the underlying dispositions that might otherwise have been operative?... Whatever the case, it seems plausible that white women had additional psychological and social incentives to support Trump and forgive him his misogyny... As white women, we are habitually loyal to powerful white men in our vicinity.\nBy this account, white women are not racist. No, they are just more embedded in white culture and thus have a proclivity to forgive while Black and Latina women are just looking out for what they have to lose. As for non-white men\u0026rsquo;s overwhelming support for Clinton, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t get mention at all.\nI realize the bulk of this review is negative\u0026mdash;it\u0026rsquo;s turned out much longer than I intended\u0026mdash;and hones in on one chapter of nine. These missteps were particularly egregious to me maybe because they spoil what is otherwise such a valuable offering. I would quite readily recommend the first seven chapters to anyone with an open mind about dense writing.\nAs an aside, this book was my first time reading an excerpt from then-anonymous Chanel Miller\u0026rsquo;s impact statement in the Brock Turner case. It\u0026rsquo;s a timeless piece of writing.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0030/","summary":"The racial dimensions of the election of a billionaire who popularized the Birther movement, ran on a platform explicitly equating Mexicans with rapists, and who labeled Africa a collection of shithole countries are completely absent from Manne\u0026rsquo;s election autopsy. It is lost on Manne that the reason the United States does not currently have a female president is because of racism. Is it possible that white women may be active participants and benefactors in the perpetuation of white supremacy? In Manne\u0026rsquo;s shockingly aracial analysis of why white women voted for Trump, it does not seem so.","title":"'Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny' by Kate Manne"},{"content":"World keeps changing fast\n\u0026lsquo;The irreducible sadness of all these deaths\u0026rsquo; People are dying in hospitals and dying at home. The official tolls are almost certainly an undercount. The morgues are overflowing. Those are the facts. But where is the grief? When we first started getting the news out of Italy, and then Spain, with frightening daily numbers comparable with what is now happening in New York, that news seemed to be delivered with holy awe. In El País, for example, each day's news was led by the previous day's dead, a number that was often in the paper's main headline. In the American papers, I usually have to do some searching to find how many people have died in the past day. The front pages here seem to often carry news of the financial markets or of the political squabbles of the day. But what I want is to be directly confronted with the fact, the enormity, the irreducible sadness of all these deaths.\nThe story behind the page design A scene from the early days of lockdown in Wuhan Schools are suspended until further notice. With many workplaces also shut, notoriously absent Chinese fathers have been forced to stay home and entertain their children. Video clips of life under quarantine are trending on TikTok. Children were presumably glad to be off school \u0026ndash; until, that is, an app called DingTalk was introduced. Students are meant to sign in and join their class for online lessons; teachers use the app to set homework. Somehow the little brats worked out that if enough users gave the app a one-star review it would get booted off the App Store. Tens of thousands of reviews flooded in, and DingTalk's rating plummeted overnight from 4.9 to 1.4. The app has had to beg for mercy on social media: 'I'm only five years old myself, please don't kill me.'\nOne of the one-star reviews:\nThank you so much DingTalk for making me feel the warmth of coronavirus even though I am not in Wuhan. I am giving you five stars, but in installments.\nEssential workers are just forced laborers The situation is so stark that we can ask whether extreme economic circumstances have turned the workers we call heroes into something closer to forced labor. If so, that realization ought to shape our public policies: A just society owes much more than minimal pay and a few plexiglass shields to the citizens \u0026mdash; and noncitizens \u0026mdash; it compels into service.\nIn theory, the prospect of employees simply walking away ought to put pressure on employers. But in addition to a lack of jobs, the structure of American unemployment-insurance programs also encourages workers to stay put. Although Congress, as part of its coronavirus relief bill, increased unemployment insurance (adding a bonus on top of state benefits), it retained the basic rule that people who leave their jobs voluntarily do not qualify for compensation. Since the job market has collapsed, this means that for essential workers, the only alternative to staying in an unsafe job is unemployment without benefits\u0026mdash;not a viable option.\nThe exploitation comes not just from employers exercising monopsony power, but also the pressure of the government and the public. Recall Senator Lindsey Graham objecting to a bill to raise unemployment benefits because raising them would disincentivize nurses from working. So employers and the government have both coerced essential workers into providing hazard labor uncompensated.\nThe 'essentiality' of this labor, which theoretically would give labor bargaining power to raise wages, is turned against their suppliers by a cynical appeal to an unspoken duty to accept uncompensated hazards. In March, an emergency physician wrote this in The Atlantic:\nHow much risk do health-care workers have to take? Or, more bluntly: How many of us will die before we start to walk away from our jobs?\u0026hellip; I've been to disasters all over the world, and I have always seen health-care providers pour in to help\u0026hellip; But that sort of bravery, that work ethic, is not boundless. No one is so fearless or stupid as to discount all risks\u0026hellip; Multiple studies have asked health-care providers whether they would go to work during various disaster scenarios. The answer is a resounding yes for earthquakes, floods, and even war. But pandemics are different.\nYes, physicians and nurses have an ethical duty to provide care\u0026hellip;. We have an obligation to treat all patients, because we chose our profession and are well rewarded by society with money and respect\u0026hellip; But there are few, if any, obligations for all the support staff that make my work possible\u0026mdash;the techs, clerks, registrars, environmental staff. They don't take an oath. Some are paid minimum wage, have few benefits, and get none of the societal accolades reserved for doctors and nurses. Why should they die for a $25,000-a-year job and $10,000 worth of life insurance? Who's going to feed their kids when they're gone? When you're the one wearing a flimsy paper gown and mask in the same room as someone dying from an invisible virus that makes its home in the same air you breathe, nothing is simple.\nThe hair stands up on the back of my neck when I hear ethicists, hospital administrators, and politicians, sitting in their safe offices, lecture me on my obligation to die providing health- care. We don't take these risks because of an abstract \u0026quot;ethical duty\u0026quot;; we take them because it is what we do every time we walk into the chaos and danger of the emergency department. We do it because it is our job.\n\u0026lsquo;On the third day of the interview, the head of the department asks me if the courses I would be expected to teach should even exist\u0026rsquo; (h/t Junho) A beautifully written reflection on the academic job market by a scholar of fairy tales\nIn fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don't spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don't inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away.\nThe infinite heartbreak of loving Hong Kong The Jakarta Method, by Vincent Bevins I\u0026rsquo;ve been following the journalist Vincent Bevins on Twitter for a few years now as he's tweeted through progress on his book on the CIA's role in the Indonesian Communist Purge of the 1960s. The Jakarta Method is now out and I've been really surprised at how high-powered the press tour has been: I did not think the Times would ever touch the subject, let alone give it the frontpage headline \u0026quot;The 'Liberal World Order' Was Built With Blood\u0026quot; on their international edition. A catch is that it included the line, \u0026quot;No reasonable person denies the great things the United States did in the 20th century, or that many countries enjoyed prosperity while in happy alliances with Washington.\u0026quot;\nIn my 13 years in Jakarta, the mass killings of the 1960s were basically a completely neglected topic in school so this was shamefully educational for me. The short version :\nThe \u0026quot;Jakarta Method\u0026quot; is rounding up and killing huge numbers of unarmed leftists, in the service of establishing a specific type of social order. By eliminating these people, this potential opposition, you clear the way for authoritarian capitalism at home and the creation of a geopolitical actor that fits into a growing, US-led system.\nThe short version is that the US-backed military used a rebellion as a pretext to launch a grotesque anti-communist propaganda campaign, round up and murder approximately 1 million leftists or accused leftists, and put another million in concentration camps\u0026hellip;The mass slaughter of leftists in Indonesia was more than just another Washington-backed atrocity. It was the prototype for smashing the hopes and dreams of the Left in the developing world\u0026mdash;for good.\nI found Bevins' excerpt in the New York Review to be the best of the many appearances the book's made:\nThe rank-and-file card-carrying members of the unarmed Communist Party, who made up a large proportion of the victims, were also entirely innocent. They didn't do anything wrong at all, yet they were condemned to annihilation, and almost everyone around them was sentenced to a lifetime of guilt, trauma, and being told they had sinned unforgivably because of their association with the earnest hopes of left-wing politics.\nWhen the conflict came, and when the opportunity arose, the US government helped spread the propaganda that made the killing possible and engaged in constant conversations with the Army to make sure the military officers had everything they needed, from weapons to kill lists. The US embassy constantly prodded the military to adopt a stronger position and take over the government, knowing full well that the method being employed to make this possible was to round up hundreds of thousands of people around the country, stab or strangle them, and throw their corpses into rivers. The Indonesian military officers understood very well that the more people they killed, the weaker the left would be, and the happier Washington would be.\nMay write more about this once I read my copy.\nIs it OK to have a child? A pre-quarantine read I\u0026rsquo;ve neglected to post. Meehan Crist's essay on childbearing in the climate change era is as good as everyone was saying:\nThe polar icecaps are melting. Is it OK to have a child? Australia is on fire. Is it OK to have a child? My house is flooded, my crops have failed, my community is fleeing. Is it OK to have a child? It is, in a sense, an impossible question. With her careful rhetorical shift from the intimate 'should I' to the more theoretical 'Is it OK to still have a child?' Ocasio-Cortez conjured the paradox of scale that haunts any consideration of the ethics of childbearing in a time of planet-wide catastrophe. Having a child is at once the most intimate, irrational thing a person can do, prompted by desires so deep we hardly know where to look for their wellsprings, and an unavoidably political act that increasingly requires one to confront not only the complex biopolitics of pregnancy and birth, but also the intersecting legacies of colonialism, racism and patriarchy, all while trying to wrap one's head around the relationship between the impossible extremes of the personal and the global.\u0026quot;\nRevisiting the essay is also a grim reminder that as recently as February, it appeared that the Australian wildfires were going to be the story of the year . Now it feels like a memory from another lifetime.\nRebecca Solnit on learning from a new generation of feminists One of the pernicious myths of our time is that wisdom accumulates with age in some steady, standard way, like tree rings. In this scheme, the old have it and the young lack it, and should open their little beaks and wait for a worm of wisdom to be dropped in. Told this way, wisdom is also the result of individual development, rather than of how we as a society become better at seeing something, smarter about knowing how something works.\nI was shaped by a world that no longer quite exists, so I can't imagine myself at, say, 18 in the present moment, because to do so is to imagine someone utterly different. She does not exist, and I\u0026mdash;as we all do\u0026mdash;exist as the cumulative effect of my experiences, opportunities or lack thereof, and ideals\u0026hellip; There is no 18-year-old me, but there are plenty of 18 year olds to show me how much has changed, and to promise through their beautiful insubordination and high expectations that more is going to change.\nPortrait de la jeune fille en feu Two gorgeous stills:\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0029/","summary":"The official tolls are almost certainly an undercount. The morgues are overflowing. Those are the facts. But where is the grief? When we first started getting the news out of Italy, and then Spain, with frightening daily numbers comparable with what is now happening in New York, that news seemed to be delivered with holy awe. In the American papers, I usually have to do some searching to find how many people have died in the past day. The front pages here seem to often carry news of the financial markets or of the political squabbles of the day. But what I want is to be directly confronted with the fact, the enormity, the irreducible sadness of all these deaths.","title":"'We can't comprehend this much sorrow'"},{"content":"Many people find the first year of the PhD excruciating (economics in particular ), especially those in programs like mine that may cut a number of their students based on their coursework performance. This leads people to offer advice along the lines of what I quoted below:\nCounterpoint: nah. https://t.co/Qp9TK5o6za\n\u0026mdash; infinite wiggles (@alampaydavis) November 25, 2019 I\u0026rsquo;d suggest reading the full thread and the replies to get a sense of how prevalent these feelings are. In retrospect, Prof. Cunningham\u0026rsquo;s well-intentioned advice didn\u0026rsquo;t deserve my flippancy and I also don\u0026rsquo;t mean to disregard the experiences of others who\u0026rsquo;ve struggled. To that end, I should state upfront that I\u0026rsquo;ve been known to be \u0026ldquo;unnaturally chill\u0026rdquo; even when objectively struggling, to paraphrase a friend from grad school. This is often beneficial and I think it comes from being very in touch with my personal values, things far more difficult and important than grad school giving me perspective, and a view that alarmist advice like this is counterproductive at best and toxic at worst.\nFirst, I\u0026rsquo;ve been in academia now for over five years and I have yet to run into a grad student who I felt wasn\u0026rsquo;t working hard enough: effort is never why students fail. The admissions process is random and biased and flawed, but it reliably overselects on work ethic. I worry that telling prospective or current students that they will fail if they aren\u0026rsquo;t ready to commit all their waking hours to a subject they\u0026rsquo;re really only just sinking their teeth into will be self-fulfilling with deterrent effects on people with underrepresented or non-traditional backgrounds and less entrenched in the self-preserving microculture of academia.\nSecond, if you have outside options, appreciate them and if they lead you to assess your priorities, let them. Ironically, a lot of first year material is dedicated to the adverse consequences of informational asymmetry so it\u0026rsquo;s funny for economists to willfully restrict their information set.\nTo turn Dr. Cunningham\u0026rsquo;s advice further down the thread against itself, \u0026ldquo;living in reality is rule one.\u0026rdquo; Academics are prone to career tunnel vision and judgment of those who don\u0026rsquo;t have the same academic aspirations so as PhD students inevitably absorb an academic myopia through osmosis, their definition of success needlessly narrows. It happens subtly, but it can be powerful and when not considered mindfully, toxic. Being in tune with your personal values is part of countering this. The academics I least respect are very bad at this.\nCombine this with well-documented proliferation of stress-related mental health problems of grad students and an unforgiving market for professorships and you\u0026rsquo;re needlessly setting yourself up for a greater and largely manufactured fall later on, if not in the first-year cuts, then later on the job market or on the tenure track. Having experienced many successes but also much more failure than the typical student in my position, I see some of my lifelong high-achieving peers\u0026rsquo; inability to consider or relate to doing anything less than excelling at the task or objective put in front of them as a weakness.\nThird, for those with less research experience, it is ridiculous to expect to feel so passionate about the field that you cannot imagine doing anything else. First-year economics material in particular is dense and theoretical and surely removed from the stuff that drew people to pursue a PhD. A lot of it is fascinating, but it\u0026rsquo;s undoubtedly the vegetables of the PhD training process. Feeling less than totally committed to spending six years of your 20s to 30s at below-market wages when your only exposure to academia is being examined on upper hemicontinuity is\u0026mdash;it cannot be said enough\u0026mdash;extremely sane. First-year course material is unlikely to directly inspire your eventual research agenda; it\u0026rsquo;s healthy to maintain a longer-term perspective and remind yourself that what you do in first year isn\u0026rsquo;t the job.\nFourth, conditional on passing, your coursework grades don\u0026rsquo;t matter. I find this is difficult for some of my peers to internalize, but it really doesn\u0026rsquo;t (except in Chicago apparently). Sure, some professors will have a better impression of the top performers, but that\u0026rsquo;s a pretty tenuous and intangible reward for overexertion and will be forgotten and replaced by progress on your research anyway. The relationship between the two is weak; I have first-hand experience with this and know of full professors arguing this point internally to reduce the mental burden on first-year students.\nFinally, it leads one to view their cohortmates\u0026mdash;who should be sources of support and future collaboration\u0026mdash;as potential adversaries. This was reportedly the case in some programs that waived the preliminary exam requirement conditional on meeting thresholds for coursework performance. This should probably be familiar advice, but its triteness doesn\u0026rsquo;t make it untrue: I would not have made it through first year without the collaboration of my cohortmates.\nI can have a competitive streak at times, but I also spent first year purposefully trying to reject the incentives to view cohortmates as competitors. For example, whenever possible, I tried to share my typewritten notes with my classmates ahead of midterm and final exams. Spending entire days producing them, there was of course a part of me that felt people were freeloading off my work. But refer to points 1 and 4: no grad student isn\u0026rsquo;t working hard enough and the odds that the usefulness and quality of my notes would come back to haunt me so directly that it proximately caused my failing the program are negligible. I think getting over the trepidation to help others at personal cost is healthy in any context even if not strictly Pareto. What made it really easy was my classmates doing it first and reciprocating. Culture is endogenous.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/posts/0002/","summary":"I’ve been in academia now for around five years and I have yet to run into a grad student who I felt wasn’t working hard enough: effort is never why students fail. The admissions process is random and biased and flawed, but it reliably overselects on work ethic. I worry that telling prospective or current students that they will fail if they aren’t ready to commit all their waking hours to a subject they’re really only just sinking their teeth into will be self-fulfilling with deterrent effects on people with underrepresented or non-traditional backgrounds and less entrenched in the self-preserving microculture of academia.","title":"Reflecting on the first year of an economics PhD program"},{"content":"Protests in Modi\u0026rsquo;s India Finally got around to the much-lauded New Yorker story on Rana Ayyub \u0026rsquo;s heroic work reporting on India\u0026rsquo;s Hindu supremacist turn under the leadership of Narendra Modi. The piece enjoyed a second wave of circulation in my Western bubble amidst the highly visible nationwide demonstrations against the discriminatory citizenship laws and a third wave as a violent backlash against the protests endangered university students at Jawaharlal Nehru University .\nA feeling of despair has settled in among many Indians who remain committed to the secular, inclusive vision of the country\u0026rsquo;s founders. \u0026ldquo;Gandhi and Nehru were great, historic figures, but I think they were an aberration,\u0026rdquo; Prasad, the former Outlook editor, told me. \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s very different now. The institutions have crumbled\u0026mdash;universities, investigative agencies, the courts, the media, the administrative agencies, public services. And I think there is no rational answer for what has happened, except that we pretended to be what we were for fifty, sixty years. But we are now reverting to what we always wanted to be, which is to pummel minorities, to push them into a corner, to show them their places, to conquer Kashmir, to ruin the media, and to make corporations servants of the state. And all of this under a heavy resurgence of Hinduism. India is becoming the country it has always wanted to be.\u0026rdquo;\nSee also Arundhati Roy\u0026rsquo;s essay from November, which I saw her deliver at the Cooper Union and this correspondence between Pankaj Mishra and Mirza Waheed.\nKashmir became the jewel in India\u0026rsquo;s crown. And like India in the British imagination, the natives became an obstacle to the act of self-cherishing that Kashmir facilitated. They had to be edited out of this incredibly exotic and desirable place, or be degraded to menial status.\nIt is remarkable to me that as several outlets have been publishing articles towards the theme of \u0026ldquo;political trends to watch for in the 2020s\u0026rdquo; at the turn of the decade, not one I read mentioned the tide of anti-Muslim subjugation occurring in the two most populous countries in the world, each of which are detaining millions of Muslim minorities and with the Rohingya crisis occurring adjacently. It has plainly not been recognized as a trend in mainstream opinion columns, certainly not to the extent that \u0026ldquo;strongman electoral victories\u0026rdquo; have been lazily grouped together.\nEconomics does not always assume rationality. Just almost always . Since 2010, there were 350 articles from AER, QJE, ReStud, JPE or ECTA which estimated discrete choice models. 90% assumed consumers are fully informed. 126/350 do welfare analysis. 86.5% assumed consumers are fully informed.\n\u0026mdash; Jason Abaluck (@Jabaluck) December 19, 2019 As Abaluck says, pointing to the Thaler Nobel and referring vaguely to the field of behavioral economics is too exonerating. Likewise for awarding a climate change Nobel.\nRelated: Cass Sunstein at the time of this writing is being ratioed on Twitter for a tone-deaf tweet numerating Modi\u0026rsquo;s successes the weekend after hundreds of thousands of Indians took to the streets. The context is that his partner in nudge, Richard Thaler, met with the prime minister. It is part of the conceit of the \u0026lsquo;rationality\u0026rsquo; crowd that their non-emotionality and willingness to engage with \u0026ldquo;those with which they disagree\u0026rdquo; (that self-serving euphemism somehow so frequently referring to advocates of ethnicity-based cruelty) is a measure of their civility and impartiality.\nA pattern I\u0026rsquo;ve recognized is their looking out for cases wherein they can come to the defense of ideas from the \u0026lsquo;other side\u0026rsquo; so as to demonstrate that their only loyalty is to the strength of arguments. In staking such a contrarian stance (or, for maximum self-preservation, just promoting Quillette\u0026rsquo;s existence without mention of its editorial track record), they earn contrarian credits for their apparent unbiasedness and detachment from ideology. But they never really pay for these credits. In the above case, they risk nothing in possibly conferring some legitimacy to a prime minister with genocidal ambitions. The cost is entirely paid for by the faceless Indians resisting a violent tide of ethno-religious nationalism. Economics and Uber\u0026rsquo;s academic program I enjoyed the second of three EFiP panels from the ASSA weekend, which was moderated by Dani Rodrik and featured presentations by Suresh Naidu, Sam Bowles, and Luigi Zingales. A bit hard to summarize, but follows in the network\u0026rsquo;s theme of purportedly course-correcting economics.\nZingales mentions it briefly, but Tim pointed me to this guest post from Zingales\u0026rsquo; ProMarket blog calling out Uber\u0026rsquo;s academic program. Should probably be a bigger deal? I\u0026rsquo;m inclined to agree that academics should collaborate and engage with the private sector more, but work like this that is so reliant on proprietary data and susceptible to \u0026lsquo;contamination\u0026rsquo;, that I don\u0026rsquo;t feel any professional obligation to believe any resulting analysis.\nUber\u0026rsquo;s employees co-authored academic papers with brand name scholars that were then used to back the company\u0026rsquo;s PR and lobbying strategy. Published in respected journals, those articles are based on proprietary data and non-replicable analysis. Moreover, they all don\u0026rsquo;t discuss the subsidies that make it possible for Uber to pursue market dominance despite its endless losses.\nHow the lateral academic job market works At least in legal academia. The economics job market\u0026mdash;wherein every graduating PhD meets in one city over one weekend to run around different hotels meeting with prospective employers\u0026mdash;understandably seems insane to outsiders (and insiders). But this seems wilder.\nA history of The Economist being on the wrong side of history. On like everything. Like all the time. Pankaj Mishra is reviewing \u0026lsquo;Liberalism at Large\u0026rsquo; by Alexander Zevin, which takes an interesting approach to assessing the track record of liberalism, a notoriously difficult task given how slippery it can be to define:\nUsing The Economist as a proxy for liberalism enables Zevin to sidestep much conceptual muddle about the doctrine. His examination of The Economist\u0026rsquo;s pronouncements and of the policies of those who heeded them yields, in effect, a study of several liberalisms as they have been widely practiced in the course of a hundred and seventy-five years. The magazine emerges as a force that\u0026mdash;thanks to the military, cultural, and economic power of Britain and, later, America\u0026mdash;can truly be said to have made the modern world, if not in the way that many liberals would suppose.\nAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one year in We\u0026rsquo;ve gotten so accustomed to her I think we understate the political ingenuity of her rapid ascent to influence. The article does a good job of complementing this by-now well-trodden narrative by demonstrating that underlying her methods is an intentional theory of politics.\nThe meat-substitute industry The science of recreating the taste of beef sounds straight out of Bertie Bott\u0026rsquo;s:\nImpossible\u0026rsquo;s first prototype burgers contained the \u0026ldquo;off-flavors\u0026rdquo; characteristic of their foundational protein, soy or wheat or pea. (Pea protein is sometimes said to evoke cat urine.) So the company\u0026rsquo;s scientists had to learn how to erase those flavors, even as they were learning the subtleties of the aroma and taste they were trying to emulate.\n\u0026ldquo;You have to bunny-sniff at a very high rate, often trying to characterize molecules you\u0026rsquo;ve never smelled before.\u0026rdquo; He looked at a handwritten list from the last assay: \u0026ldquo;You might say, \u0026lsquo;We\u0026rsquo;ve got to get rid of \u0026ldquo;Band-Aid,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;skunk,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;diaper pail\u0026rdquo; \u0026lsquo;\u0026mdash;but don\u0026rsquo;t judge, because all of those together make up \u0026lsquo;burger taste.\u0026rsquo; \u0026ldquo;\nThere\u0026rsquo;s also an interesting account of how competitors to Pat Brown\u0026rsquo;s Impossible Foods like Beyond Meat are premised on starkly different theories of meat consumption, some evolutionary, some behavioral, and some sociological. And taste-wise, do you want your substitute to taste like meat or like a better version of meat? The latter risks creating a complementary product rather than a substitute:\n\u0026ldquo;Early on, we had two goals that were fully aligned: to be identical to a burger from a cow, and to be much better than a burger from a cow. Now they\u0026rsquo;re somewhat at odds, and we talk about the chocolate-doughnut problem. What if what people really like in a burger is what makes it taste like a chocolate doughnut, so you keep increasing those qualities\u0026mdash;and suddenly you\u0026rsquo;re not making a burger at all?\u0026rdquo;\nIt\u0026rsquo;s hard to predict whether customers will adjust more easily to meat made from plants or meat grown in enormous vats. In a recent survey by the investment bank Barclays, plant-based meats have a tiny edge among American, Indian, and Chinese consumers. Tetrick believes this will shift in time, as people in the developing world eat more meat. \u0026ldquo;If the objective is to get to a billion dollars in sales in seven years, I would do plant-based meat,\u0026rdquo; he told me. \u0026ldquo;And every time I\u0026rsquo;m in San Francisco, L.A., or New York I think, Why aren\u0026rsquo;t we doing plant-based? But every time I\u0026rsquo;m in Shanghai, where meat is all about cultural arrival, I think, We can only change the world\u0026rsquo;s system of animal agriculture by doing cultured meat. So I think Pat Brown is wrong. Of course,\u0026rdquo; he added, \u0026ldquo;I could also be wrong. Or, guess what, we could both be wrong!\u0026rdquo;\nPat Brown on academics doing unimportant stuff :\n\u0026ldquo;Eating meat, publishing in Nature, and other asinine things you dumb fucks keep doing.\u0026rdquo;\nGiven its relevance to climate change, the industries it affects, and its potential to entirely transform entire ways of life worldwide, I wonder why the meat substitute industry isn\u0026rsquo;t as high-profile in the public sphere as, say, Tesla is. Brown seems to be much more charismatic than Elon Musk but isn\u0026rsquo;t close to a household name.\nFun reviews of bad pop science Turns out I\u0026rsquo;m a fan of when book reviewers are exhausted by a book\u0026rsquo;s gimmick. A review of a book on the history of women\u0026rsquo;s pockets from 1660-1900 :\nThere is a mock-heroic aspect to object-driven history of the kind practised in The Pocket, too: its language is strangely excessive in relation to the things it is describing. Very large or loosely defined theoretical claims are made on behalf of objects which cannot possibly live up to what is required of them. \u0026lsquo;Bringing back to life the shapeless dreams and untold stories once entrusted by a real, rather than a fictional, woman to her pocket can be a challenge,\u0026rsquo; we are told in this book; it is also \u0026lsquo;vital\u0026rsquo;. But how is this challenge to be tackled? The Pocket gives us little sense of how to bridge the gap between a small thing and a sketched series of broad arguments about gender, society and history. Instead we have general statements concerning \u0026rsquo;the power of pockets to subvert\u0026rsquo;, \u0026rsquo;the role of pockets as sites of resistance\u0026rsquo; and (rather less audaciously) the \u0026lsquo;major role\u0026rsquo; played by pockets \u0026lsquo;in the clothing strategies of large numbers of people\u0026rsquo;. Confusingly, we are invited to treat \u0026rsquo;the pocket as a lens\u0026rsquo; (how would that work?).\nLikewise for overdoing the pop in pop science. Here on a book positioning mosquitoes as at war with humans (which I briefly referred to in a previous post):\nHis new work is imposing in scope and martial in tone, as its opening sentence announces: \u0026ldquo;We are at war with the mosquito.\u0026rdquo;\u0026hellip; This is broad-brush history, for people who like heroes and villains and big, easy metaphors. But mosquitoes aren\u0026rsquo;t warriors, nor are they predators upon humans, not in any true ecological sense, notwithstanding Winegard\u0026rsquo;s subtitle. (During their immature stage, in water, some mosquito larvae attack and eat other mosquito larvae\u0026mdash;real predators.) A few kinds don\u0026rsquo;t even drink blood, not even the females, ever. Let\u0026rsquo;s get this straight: the most troublesome mosquitoes for humans, such as members of the Anopheles group or the species Aedes aegypti, are vectors, not predators. That means the females inadvertently take in, carry, and deliver disease-causing microbes of various sorts in the course of their biting activity. Otherwise both sexes feed on nectar and other plant juices.\nBut the predator trope is important to Winegard\u0026rsquo;s enterprise, which involves not only showing that mosquitoes have brought immeasurable harm to humans (quite right) and served as major determinants of human history (case well made), but also melodramatizing his material with suggestions that they have done it\u0026mdash;she has done it, that demon female\u0026mdash;intentionally and fiendishly. \u0026ldquo;She has no purpose other than to propagate her species and perhaps to kill humans,\u0026rdquo; he writes. \u0026ldquo;If I didn\u0026rsquo;t know better, I would say she is satisfying her sadistic and narcissistic impulses at our expense.\u0026rdquo; He does know better, but mentions it anyway.\nAnd this on a paleontologist\u0026rsquo;s overmodernizing dinosaurs:\nBut Brusatte is also a writer of what he calls \u0026ldquo;pop-science,\u0026rdquo; and we are its victims. Here he is on the life-span of Tyrannosaurus rex: \u0026ldquo;You could call T. rex the James Dean of dinosaurs: it lived fast and died young.\u0026rdquo; And when it matured, in Brusatte\u0026rsquo;s words, \u0026ldquo;the Rex was all man, all woman, and ready to claim its throne.\u0026rdquo;\nThis kind of writing isn\u0026rsquo;t merely exuberant nonsense, the metaphorical stumblings of an excitable scientist. It\u0026rsquo;s language that works against the grain of the science it\u0026rsquo;s trying to explain. To say, as Brusatte does, that acidifying oceans, capable of dissolving the shells of sea creatures, are \u0026ldquo;why we don\u0026rsquo;t bathe in vinegar\u0026rdquo; is ridiculous. So is calling the feather \u0026ldquo;nature\u0026rsquo;s ultimate Swiss Army knife.\u0026rdquo; But to write these words\u0026mdash;\u0026ldquo;dinosaurs at the top of their game, doing as well or better than they had ever done, still in control\u0026rdquo;\u0026mdash;is to violate something basic in our understanding of how life actually works. \u0026ldquo;Still in control\u0026rdquo; of what, exactly? Or consider this sentence, describing the effects of the asteroid strike: \u0026ldquo;The reign of the dinosaurs ended and a revolution followed, forcing them to cede their kingdom to other species.\u0026rdquo; Whatever forces were at work as that old world changed, they\u0026rsquo;re overwhelmed and obscured by the accidental forces unleashed in this terrible sentence, which sounds as though the histories of the Bourbons and the sauropods were somehow intertwined. However thoughtful he may be as a scientist, Steve Brusatte has created a lost world of his own, where metaphors war anachronistically in defiance of what scientists understand. He didn\u0026rsquo;t invent this kind of writing. He grew up on it, and sadly we\u0026rsquo;re surrounded by it.\nThat dinosaur book review also contemplates the limits of our understanding of dinosaurs. Not just the now popularly known unknowns like feathering, diet, and coloration, but also their ecological context:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s still far easier for us to imagine a dinosaur somehow visiting the world we inhabit today\u0026mdash;like the T. rex model newly on display at the American Museum of Natural History, fleshed and feathered and with eyes wet and baleful\u0026mdash;than it is to imagine the many worlds that the many species of dinosaurs inhabited over their roughly 180 million years on Earth. We can marvel at the size of one of the giant sauropods, but can we imagine the air it breathed or the plants it ate or the soil they grew in? Can we picture its moon circling nearer than ours to an earth spinning faster than ours? Can we really grasp how differently the land masses were arranged and the effects that would have had on climate? Or the consequences of extensive volcanism or the flipping of magnetic poles?\nWe\u0026rsquo;re a long way from understanding those ancient worlds as ecosystems\u0026hellip; The more clearly you picture the history of life as an unbroken series of ecosystems, and not just a line of related species, the more clearly you understand the tragedy of what we\u0026rsquo;re doing to Earth, the consequences of depleting the planet we like to claim we\u0026rsquo;ve inherited.\nAs a third bullet point on that article (it\u0026rsquo;s a broad one for one for a review of dinosaur books!), there are these interesting questions:\nHow did it happen that museums began pursuing vertical integration\u0026mdash;controlling the fate of fossils from their first discovery\u0026mdash;just when American corporations were beginning to do so? Is it possible to create symbolic value and legitimize \u0026ldquo;status and wealth\u0026rdquo; by removing objects like dinosaur bones from the market? Are dinosaurs \u0026ldquo;a fitting emblem for modern capitalism\u0026rdquo; or do they depict \u0026ldquo;the poverty of an older, laissez-faire model of social organization that much of the economic elite had already come to regard as obsolete\u0026rdquo;?\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0028/","summary":"Early on, we had two goals that were fully aligned: to be identical to a burger from a cow and to be much better than a burger from a cow. Now they’re somewhat at odds, and we talk about the chocolate-doughnut problem: What if what people really like in a burger is what makes it taste like a chocolate doughnut, so you keep increasing those qualities and suddenly you’re not making a burger at all?","title":"Protests in Modi's India; the meat-substitute industry; and fun reviews of bad pop science"},{"content":"Female politicians in developing countries Found it interesting to compare two yet-unpublished studies on female politicians in developing countries. The first is a recent NBER working paper by authors Julien Labonne, Sahar Parsa, and Pablo Querubín which finds that term limits increase the number of female mayors in the Philippines but that these changes are entirely driven by incumbents\u0026rsquo; female relatives running in their steed to maintain dynastic power.\nThe second is one by Soledad Artiz-Prillaman and does not yet have a public draft (see here for its abstract under the title \u0026ldquo;When Women Mobilize\u0026rdquo;), but I saw her present it when I was a grad student at Oxford. Rather than term limits, her policy change of interest is that of gender quotas, particularly in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. In her contextualizing the gender quota policy, she gave examples of how even though women were at the top of the ticket for these seat, campaigning would center around their husbands or their male running mates, including their relative positioning in campaign photos and the typeface sizing of their names in advertisements. This motivates the thrust of the paper, which is \u0026ldquo;to estimate the relationship between women\u0026rsquo;s political representation and women\u0026rsquo;s active political participation and resultant effects on governance and service delivery,\u0026rdquo; effectively asking to what extent the quota actually furthers gendered political causes.\nBoth these features\u0026mdash;the selection on dynastic legacy and the need for a male anchor to sell female candidates\u0026mdash;are discussed in this article :\n\u0026ldquo;I am not asking for your vote because I am young, or because I am a woman,\u0026rdquo; she would repeat to the crowds after explaining her stand on critical issues. \u0026ldquo;I have an engineering degree, I have been running a company of thousands of people.\u0026rdquo;\nStill, no speech could begin without explaining that she had the blessing of the party patriarch \u0026mdash; though he is in jail with four more years to serve \u0026mdash; and his son. And more of the crowd chants of \u0026ldquo;long live!\u0026rdquo; featured their names than hers.\n\u0026ldquo;There is a male chauvinistic mind-set in political parties,\u0026rdquo; she said, \u0026ldquo;so whenever a woman\u0026rsquo;s name comes up as a candidate, there are questions about winnability, about funding, unless it is somebody\u0026rsquo;s daughter, somebody\u0026rsquo;s daughter-in-law. If it were not for women from political dynasties, local or national, the number of women in India\u0026rsquo;s Parliament would be even worse. Nearly half the women contesting seats in the current election are dynastic candidates, according to initial data from the Trivedi center.\nDevelopment lessons from the Congolese Ebola response \u0026ldquo;The biggest impediment to containing Ebola in Congo is not its contagiousness, but suspicion of the state and of aid personnel\u0026hellip; While some aid agencies manage to provide valuable services, they are also seen by many Congolese as having questionable ethics.\u0026rdquo;\nResidents perceived the Ebola response as benefiting the rich and powerful. The arrival of vaccinators from Guinea to train locals and of medical teams with recent experience in Équateur was readily mistaken for a gravy train of people from Kinshasa coming to take up well-paid positions in lieu of local employees. The erection of health checkpoints on international and provincial borders slowed down travel and trade, increased border fees threefold, and encouraged extortion.\nThen the international responders aggravated the community\u0026rsquo;s distrust by interpreting reluctance to follow rules about safe burials and patient isolation as a lack of understanding of public health that required reeducation. In fact, the reluctance reflected an understandable lack of enthusiasm for practices that required total separation from loved ones during their illness, denial of human touch at the point of death, and the abandonment of traditional funeral rites, which are of central importance to social and cultural life.\nRote messages about hand-washing delivered to communities without consistent access to water were annoying. Heavy-handed warnings about bats and chimps as possible sources of infection accompanied by pictures of people bleeding from their eyeballs backfired. Vaccination clinics became props for international politicians arriving in SUVs, seemingly more interested in selfies than in listening to locals. Inattention to community feedback and lack of interest by responders in the quotidian health concerns that kill in larger numbers than Ebola underscored the perception that international concern was self-interested. \u0026ldquo;Riposte\u0026rdquo; became a toxic word. Fatigue, even hatred, set in. Communities experienced in evading armed groups had no trouble hiding from Ebola surveillance teams.\nOf course, this particular public health intervention had much higher stakes than development social scientific projects, but is there anything in the typical PhD curriculum that prepares researchers to be mindful of these dynamics when entering an unfamiliar foreign environment in a position of power? I mean, we hardly prepare PhDs to undertake original research of any kind .\nWhen people talk about the benefit of having researchers from developing countries, the rationale is usually that of local familiarity, (though it\u0026rsquo;s quite rare though to see people make the follow-on point that of the researchers we do have from developing countries, they tend to come from the same few ones ). Certainly sounds mutually beneficial, though when considering the developing-country researchers who do manage to enter the pipeline, they\u0026rsquo;re probably selected to be like me: on the basis of coming from a privileged expat bubble in a big city removed from the field contexts that are usually of interest. I did not spend much time in areas of interest to the development research communities as a high schooler in Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh City, it turns out. As with the above example of dynastic female politicians, this is progress but not enough to close the representation gap.\nTo me, a bigger motivation for greater representation is having researchers with a personal stake in how knowledge about (their or other) developing countries is created and how its people are treated in that knowledge production. This can maybe guard against potentially corruptive incentives to publish lower-quality research just as local familiarity does. I\u0026rsquo;m not at all qualified to be a spokesperson for the Global South nor is this meant to be a judgment of the ethics of other researchers. My point is that good intentions and even years on the ground are not sufficient guarantors for mitigating the potential for well-funded visiting researchers to naively exert influence. Economics continues to struggle with embarrassing diversity problems and development is a particularly vulnerable area where underrepresentation can cause harm. It requires all sorts of people working in this space making each other\u0026rsquo;s work better and checking one another\u0026rsquo;s blind spots.\nThe debate that brewed for months about whether the WHO should declare a PHEIC for Congo\u0026rsquo;s Ebola outbreak reflects an agenda that prioritizes distant international fears over local needs, amplifying community distrust. That three prior PHEICs have been declared only when Western countries have felt threatened is not lost on the Congolese. A PHEIC encourages travel bans, movement restrictions, and border closures, despite WHO recommendations to the contrary. The economy in an impoverished region suffers.\nFree agency in academic economics I was weirdly captivated by this article covering the management of an academic department (Columbia economics, 2002-2005) like a sports team.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s Columbia as the Billy King Nets:\n\u0026ldquo;Especially in a place like New York, there is a big temptation to go for assembling people who will be on Charlie Rose, get written up in The New Yorker,\u0026rdquo; says David Card, who\u0026rsquo;s credited with helping rejuvenate Berkeley\u0026rsquo;s economics department. \u0026ldquo;But that has nothing to do with younger people doing research\u0026rdquo;\u0026mdash;the true measure of a top program.\nColumbia as the 2010 Heat:\nDavis faced a chicken-and-egg problem: Columbia couldn\u0026rsquo;t attract first-rate faculty because it didn\u0026rsquo;t have much first-rate faculty in the department already. And the university didn\u0026rsquo;t have first-rate faculty in the department because it couldn\u0026rsquo;t attract them in the first place. Davis couldn\u0026rsquo;t break the cycle by hiring one top economist a year for fifteen years, because no one was going to leave Harvard or Princeton for a second-rate department. But sunspot theory held a tantalizing alternative: He just might be able to break the cycle by trying to hire ten or fifteen star economists in a year or two\u0026mdash;a game-changing move designed to alter people\u0026rsquo;s perceptions. If everyone expected everyone else to accept the offer, then the department they\u0026rsquo;d be joining wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be second-rate.\nColumbia as the 2008 Celtics, 2019 Nets, or 2019 Clippers:\nJust as interesting as the head count, however, was the way in which Columbia scored. Davis made a point of targeting people who had reasons to want to work together\u0026mdash;co-authors, people with similar interests, etc. Then, each time he made an offer, he would tell the candidate who else had received one and who else was likely to. All seven new hires had conversations with one another in which each suggested he was likely to go to Columbia if the other person did, too. \u0026ldquo;Toward the end, there was a lot of, \u0026lsquo;I\u0026rsquo;m thinking very strongly about coming; where are you thinking you are?\u0026rsquo; \u0026quot; recalls Davis. The theory seemed to be working.\n\u0026lsquo;Anonymous\u0026rsquo; UChicago superstar as Gilbert Arenas:\nConsider the case of a recent Nobel Prize winner from the University of Chicago who has been actively pursued by Columbia. He is a brilliant researcher and continues to be one of the most prolific economists around. But, as one senior economist at a top-five school puts it, \u0026ldquo;He is one of those guys best appreciated from a distance\u0026mdash;personally, he is very much a menace.\u0026rdquo;\nThe prickly genius poses a dilemma: On the one hand, it\u0026rsquo;s hard to say no to a Nobel Prize winner still in his productive years. On the other hand, with someone who has a reputation for being particularly hard on younger economists\u0026mdash;precisely the kind of people Columbia still needs to recruit and retain\u0026mdash;\u0026ldquo;it could be like 1929 on Wall Street, where you\u0026rsquo;re watching assistant professors jump out the window,\u0026rdquo; says the senior economist. That next rebuilding project may be just around the corner.\nZadie Smith on writing fiction outside one\u0026rsquo;s identity Also see here , where 10 authors reflect on that topic:\nI wanted to have a character who wasn\u0026rsquo;t anybody\u0026rsquo;s stereotypical version of a black woman. But looking back, I\u0026rsquo;m sure there were ways I could have written her differently \u0026mdash; more accurately, more nuanced, more grounded, more specific. What I probably did is I imagined a privileged white woman and poured this black woman inside of her.\nNow it\u0026rsquo;s a writerly virtue to get people right. I\u0026rsquo;ve learned to not fear obviousness when I\u0026rsquo;m describing race or topics related to oppression. With an American audience, you have to be as in your face about it as possible because our society encourages delicate euphemism. I\u0026rsquo;d rather be accused of being obvious than allow people to get away with thinking all of my characters are white people.\nYou\u0026rsquo;re not going to be perfect. In The Broken Kingdoms*, my protagonist was a blind woman, and she had a superpower associated with her blindness. As I now know, disability as a superpower is a trope. I didn\u0026rsquo;t read enough literature featuring blind people to really understand it\u0026rsquo;s a thing that gets done over and over again.*\nAnd for balance, here\u0026rsquo;s an attack on non-fiction that did not change my opinion (h/t Helena)\nRevisiting Wong Kar-Wai\u0026rsquo;s Happy Together (1997) A lovely reflection by Chinese-Malaysian writer Tash Aw, part of the Paris Review\u0026rsquo;s Revisited series \u0026ldquo;in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago\u0026rdquo;\nAt the time of his first time watching it, Aw was a fresh Cambridge and Warwick graduate beginning a writing career in London, so not inaccessible to where I found myself as a young adult from Southeast Asia in New York, London, Shanghai, the Bay Area, and Oxford:\nPart of me was exhilarated and determined: I was writing about a country and people\u0026mdash;my people\u0026mdash;that did not exist in the pages of formal literature; I was exploring sexual and emotional boundaries, forming relationships with people who seemed mostly wrong for me, but whose unsuitability seemed so right; I was starting, I thought, to untangle the various strands of my cultural identity: Chinese, Malaysian, and above all, what it meant to be foreign, an outsider.\nBut the increasing clarity of all this was troubled by a growing unsettledness: I had imagined that the act of writing my country and people into existence would make me feel closer to them, but instead I felt more distant. The physical separation between me and my family in Malaysia, which had, up to then, been a source of liberation, now created a deep anxiety. All of a sudden I saw the huge gulf between the person I had been and the one I now was. In the space of just five or six years, university education had given me a different view of life, a different appreciation of its choices. My tastes had evolved, the way I used language had changed\u0026mdash;not just in terms of syntax and grammar but the very fact that standard English was now my daily language, rather than the rich mixture of Malay, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Malaysian slang that I had used exclusively until the age of eighteen. I was writing about the place I was from, about the people I loved (and hated), but felt a million miles from them.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s impossible to describe the intense rush of blood to the head that I felt on seeing these two leading actors\u0026mdash;young, handsome, but somehow old beyond their years\u0026mdash;in the opening scene. They are in a small bed in a boarding house in Buenos Aires. They are far from home, wondering what to do with their lives, how to make their relationship work again. Within seconds they are making love\u0026mdash;a boyish tussle with playful ass-slapping that morphs quickly into the kind of rough, quick sex that usually happens between strangers, not long-term partners.\nIt was the end of the twentieth century; I had watched countless European movies where explicit sex was so much a part of the moviemaking vocabulary that it had long since lost the ability to shock me. But the people in this film were nrandom French or German actors, they were familiar figures of my childhood, spitting into their hands to lubricate their fucking.\nHere is the BFI\u0026rsquo;s guide to Wong Kar-wai\u0026rsquo;s filmography Barry Jenkins: \u0026lsquo;Let the record show that Paul Thomas Anderson is jealous of my close-ups. Bruh!\u0026rsquo; PT Anderson gushing over Barry Jenkins\u0026rsquo; signature close-up shots (starts at 21:47, a clip embedded below).\nBarry Jenkins and P.T. Anderson on close-ups pic.twitter.com/LY7y3WBj2S\n\u0026mdash; ANNAPURNA | The Changeling streaming now + (@AnnapurnaPics) January 8, 2020 Jenkins recounts this observation made by Angela Flournoy, who profiled the director for the New York Times , about his close-ups occurring \u0026ldquo;when it\u0026rsquo;s not a high moment of drama and it\u0026rsquo;s just a moment of repose\u0026rdquo;, what he half-jokingly refers to as HumanVision technology:\nThese looks don\u0026rsquo;t quite break the fourth wall, because the actors are not regarding the audience. In \u0026ldquo;Beale Street,\u0026rdquo; they\u0026rsquo;re most often gazing at someone they love. For nonblack audience members, it might be the first time they\u0026rsquo;ve had a black person direct such a gaze their way; Jenkins offers a glimpse at a world previously hidden to them. For a black viewer, there\u0026rsquo;s more likely a kind of recognition: I know that face, although I have never seen this actor before.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0027/","summary":"The biggest impediment to containing Ebola in Congo is not its contagiousness, but suspicion of the state and of aid personnel\u0026hellip; The international responders aggravated the community’s distrust by interpreting reluctance to follow rules about safe burials and patient isolation as a lack of understanding of public health that required reeducation. In fact, the reluctance reflected an understandable lack of enthusiasm for practices that required total separation from loved ones during their illness, denial of human touch at the point of death, and the abandonment of traditional funeral rites, which are of central importance to social and cultural life.","title":"Female politicians in developing countries; development lessons from the Congolese Ebola response; revisiting Wong Kar-Wai; and Barry Jenkins' signature close-ups"},{"content":"As with the last post, these are reads that have accumulated over the last several months that I\u0026rsquo;m only just now writing up.\nHurricane Dorian As I shared video footage with friends in Puerto Rico, they remarked, \u0026lsquo;I know the sound of that wind.\u0026rsquo; \u0026lsquo;It\u0026rsquo;s all gone. What we\u0026rsquo;re doing to Mother Earth and the way this turns around on areas like here\u0026hellip; I just can\u0026rsquo;t. Never\u0026hellip; never in my life. My heart is broken. I\u0026rsquo;m in shock\u0026hellip; We are the biggest victims of climate change. But how can we fight for ourselves against bigger, global countries? How do we move forward?\u0026rsquo; \u0026lsquo;Economists have contributed disturbingly little to discussions about climate change \u0026rsquo; Back in September, there was a mid-sized economics Twitter response to this article by Andrew Oswald and Nick Stern which criticized the field for its silence on climate change. They charge that economists have \u0026ldquo;contributed disturbingly little to discussions about climate change\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;are failing human civilisation, including their own grandchildren.\u0026rdquo; (See also Stern\u0026rsquo;s more recent opinion piece published with Naomi Oreskes)\nParticularly provocative was their observation that the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the field\u0026rsquo;s most cited journal, has published zero articles on climate change ever. They and others point out that other mainstream journals are not much better . There was some pushback from agricultural economists who felt their work was being overlooked in this sweeping indictment of the discipline and also from economists from other subfields who mined the annals to find examples of climate-adjacent articles in those journals. On the latter, I wasn\u0026rsquo;t convinced by any counterexamples that surfaced: there do exist environmental and energy papers in those journals, but they were not remotely climate papers. Regardless, the point stands unless you think the dearth is explained mostly by papers choosing to publish in science journals for its wide reach and quick turnarounds. Seems unlikely to me.\nI side most with Oswald and Stern, though I empathize with the agricultural economists\u0026rsquo; grievances (see Dr. Whitehead\u0026rsquo;s embedded tweet thread). Doing so unfortunately feeds into a view that economists have contributed literally nothing to climate change understanding, which I vehemently disagree with despite my qualms. This seems to implicitly equate climate economics with the unresolved/unresolvable debate over damage discounting and the overly conservative foundations of ad hoc damage estimation that still haunt the subfield at large.\nI do object to what I see as overly generous revisionism by economists from other subfields who I think are too proud of the field\u0026rsquo;s successfully modeling the problem as an externality. That\u0026rsquo;s a low bar to say the least. It is easy to reach consensus on carbon taxes when you don\u0026rsquo;t specify what those taxes should look or model its political economy. On climate, economists have a tendency to view the failure of an intermediate-economics level theory of carbon taxes as an indictment of reality, it\u0026rsquo;s so bizarre.\nOne part of the answer is that part of environmental grew out of ag Econ departments. Land grant university Econ vs Ag Econ turf battles and the farm Econ stigma have constrained environmental.\n\u0026mdash; John Whitehead (@johnwhitehead81) September 17, 2019 1. Economists (and integrated assessment models of economists) have generally suggested smaller action necessary than climate scientists\n2. Economists favor carbon taxes even though they have had a pretty bad political track record.\nWe economists shouldn\u0026#39;t be Panglossian here. https://t.co/yy613E5zF0\n\u0026mdash; Arin Dube (@arindube) September 20, 2019 \u0026lsquo;The politics of migration reveals itself in all its sexual hatred\u0026rsquo; Obama\u0026rsquo;s legacy of generational disaffection Thought this was terrific and very creatively delivered by way of a critical review of the various memoirs his staffers have been publishing (Samantha Power\u0026rsquo;s came too late to be included). Even as someone who liked Ben Rhodes\u0026rsquo; memoir, the jabs at the self-presentations of the \u0026ldquo;Obamanauts\u0026rdquo; as plucky Sorkinesque underdogs are well-taken and devastating. Excerpts getting to the heart of the piece:\nLincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan won election by promising to crush a systemic social malignancy: the slaveocracy, economic royalists, a parasitic class of liberal elites. Unlike these transformative presidents of left and right, Obama disavowed any structural transformations of society or the economy.\nSo perhaps Obama\u0026rsquo;s most important legacy will be one of productive disappointment: energizing a multiracial coalition of young voters whose subsequent disaffections with Obamaism and inclinations toward socialism are today remaking the left.\nOne Summer in America Can\u0026rsquo;t read this recapping this past Summer 2019 in American news without some horror at how we just\u0026hellip; move on. Second or third LRB article I\u0026rsquo;ve come across to use this patchwork style of news commentary and it\u0026rsquo;s devastatingly effective each time. Even in writing this blog post, I\u0026rsquo;m revisiting articles I read one or two months ago that alarmed me at the time before just being forgotten.\n\u0026lsquo;At the Times, a Hesitance to Hyperlink\u0026rsquo; A+ title, I had to co-opt it.\nThis week it was Slate (and BuzzFeed ); at other times it\u0026rsquo;s been the Guardian and Gawker ; several times , it\u0026rsquo;s been VICE . It goes on and on, with the Times running stories that other people already have and not acknowledging them for seemingly no better reason than the paper\u0026rsquo;s institutional belief that a thing does not exist until the paper has deemed it noteworthy.\nSome reporters and editors at the paper say that individual instances of not properly crediting are attributable not to a policy of not linking to rival news outlets, but just to harried journalists not getting around to doing so, green reporters not knowing to do so, and editors not being aware of previous reporting and not doing the research needed to add links. Others just throw their hands up.\n\u0026lsquo;I wish you great luck,\u0026rsquo; a current Times employee said, \u0026lsquo;in shaming people out of this policy.\u0026rsquo;\nReporter April Glaser:\nI don\u0026rsquo;t know what I\u0026rsquo;m doing wrong. I worked hard to break the Kickstarter Union story and gain the trust of sources. Why won\u0026rsquo;t the NYT or WaPo cite who broke it? This is my career.\nWhat if your abusive husband is a cop? In the nineteen-nineties, researchers found that forty-one per cent of male officers admitted that, in the previous year, they\u0026rsquo;d been physically aggressive toward their spouses, and nearly ten per cent acknowledged choking, strangling, or using\u0026mdash;or threatening to use\u0026mdash;a knife or a gun. But there are almost no empirical studies examining the prevalence of this sort of abuse today.\nThis year, an independent panel found that the typical penalty for New York City police officers found guilty of domestic violence\u0026mdash;some had punched, kicked, choked, or threatened their victims with guns\u0026mdash;was thirty lost vacation days . In nearly a third of cases, the officers already had a domestic-violence incident\u0026mdash;and, in one case, eight\u0026mdash;in their records. In the Puerto Rico Police Department, ninety-eight police officers were arrested for domestic violence between 2007 and 2010; three of them had shot and killed their wives. Only eight were fired.\nAriel Rubinstein on game theory (h/t Tim) Q: Looking at the flipside, was there ever a situation in which you were pleasantly surprised at what game theory was able to deliver?**\nAR*: None. Not only none, but my point would be that categorically game theory cannot do it. Maybe somewhere in a Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie story there was a situation where the detective was very clever and he applied some logical trick that somehow caught the criminal, something like that. You know in America there was a programme on CBS, called Numbers, written \u0026lsquo;Numb3rs\u0026rsquo;, with the \u0026rsquo;e\u0026rsquo; reversed... But outside such programmes, I categorically cannot see any case where game theory could be helpful.*\nThe choice of the name \u0026ldquo;theory of games\u0026rdquo; was brilliant as a marketing device. The word \u0026ldquo;game\u0026rdquo; has friendly, enjoyable associations. It gives a good feeling to people. It reminds us of our childhood, of chess and checkers, of children\u0026rsquo;s games*. The associations are very light, not heavy, even though you may be trying to deal with issues like nuclear deterrence. I think it\u0026rsquo;s a very tempting idea for people, that they can take something simple and apply it to situations that are very complicated, like the economic crisis or nuclear deterrence. But this is an illusion. Now my views, I have to say, are extreme compared to many of my colleagues. I believe that game theory is very interesting. I\u0026rsquo;ve spent a lot of my life thinking about it, but I don\u0026rsquo;t respect the claims that it has direct applications.*\nMy thinking was that formal models could help in this respect, from an intellectual point of view. And that\u0026rsquo;s all. If you ask me now whether I would repeat my life in this way, I don\u0026rsquo;t think so. If I could repeat my life, I would probably follow my unfulfilled dream to be a lawyer.\nAn interview of physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I\u0026rsquo;m an expert on a hypothetical particle called the axion. This axion might be the particle that explains dark matter. It could compose all of the dark matter.\nLawrence Ware: So it is a hypothetical particle? It doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist? Are you an expert in stuff that exists or stuff that doesn\u0026rsquo;t exist?\nCP: That\u0026rsquo;s an interesting question. My job is as a theoretical physicist. So I\u0026rsquo;m not someone who collects data, right?\nLW: Wait, wait, wait, you don\u0026rsquo;t collect data?\nCP: No. I don\u0026rsquo;t collect data out in the world. I collect data in my mind.\nLW: Keep going, keep going, I\u0026rsquo;m listening.\nCP: My job is real, okay?\nLW: I know it\u0026rsquo;s real.\nParasite (2019), dir. Bong Joon-ho My favorite movie of the year so far and by a large margin. The New York Times had four articles on the movie in October alone, the last one effusive to an OTT degree:\n\u0026ldquo;What makes Parasite the movie of the year\u0026mdash;what might make Bong the filmmaker of the century\u0026mdash;is the way it succeeds in being at once fantastical and true to life.\u0026rdquo;\nThematically and visually, this succeeds in all the ways I thought Us (2019) far undershot its ambitions. It\u0026rsquo;s also hilarious. Don\u0026rsquo;t read anything else about it if you can watch it.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0026/","summary":"The choice of the name \u0026lsquo;game theory\u0026rsquo; was brilliant as a marketing device. I think it’s a very tempting idea for people, that they can take something simple and apply it to situations that are very complicated, like the economic crisis or nuclear deterrence. But this is an illusion. Now my views, I have to say, are extreme compared to many of my colleagues. I believe that game theory is very interesting, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about it. But I don’t respect the claims that it has direct applications\u0026hellip; If I could repeat my life, I would probably follow my unfulfilled dream to be a lawyer.","title":"Climate change underrepresentations; the 'productive disappointment' of the Obama era; and 'Parasite' (2019)"},{"content":"First post back in the States and as a PhD student, this one's been in the drafts for like three months. Plan was to maintain this reading log by dedicating a day a week to keeping up with my subscriptions and trying to cut into the hundreds of tabs of reads I've accumulated since my June exams. Hasn't worked out that way as I've just passed another exam season and those tabs have been keeping my laptop fan busy since.\nHistoricizing the Southern Border The most notorious gangs the children are fleeing are the Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) and the Barrio 18. Luiselli writes that both gangs were actually formed in the United States, in Los Angeles, in the 1980s. MS-13 was started by El Salvadoreans in exile from the violent military governments backed by the Carter and Reagan administrations. A wave of deportations in the 1990s returned some of the gang members to El Salvador, creating what Luiselli calls 'a transnational army'. The history that led to the wave of children arriving at the border is an 'absurd, circular nightmare'. She bristles at a question-and-answer style article in the New York Times, which gives the questions in the voice of someone with obtuse nationalist views. It seems to her 'like something from an openly racist 19th-century magazine or a reactionary anti-immigration serial'.\nThe trafficking of arms from the United States is rarely discussed as a cause of the violence people are fleeing; the drug war, she argues, is also hemispheric: it 'begins in the Great Lakes of the northern United States and ends in the mountains of Celaque in southern Honduras'. Consumers and producers of prohibited drugs bear responsibility in each country along the route, as do the dysfunctional laws that push the trade into a violent underground. The migrant children, she writes, are more accurately described as refugees of a hemispheric war.\nHBO\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Chernobyl\u0026rdquo; Belatedly reading some of the writing commemorating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing is particularly interesting after having just watched HBO's \u0026quot;Chernobyl\u0026quot; miniseries:\nEach of the components of our hardware was designed to certain reliability specifications, and by far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I've been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, substantially better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have.\nI can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that's setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman: 'If anything goes wrong here, it's not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.' And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that's the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off.\nIt may be superficial to compare these very different implementations of industrial policy, but in my defense, the show brought out the bad takes in everyone. Depending on the viewer, the show is simultaneously a rebuke of the progressive politics democratic socialists want or actually an indictment of Donald Trump .\nI learned a lot from the show not knowing much about the event going in, but didn't think it was framed particularly well. To read about it after watching the series, I came away thinking how underemphasized the aftermath of the disaster was. The motivation behind revisiting this particular disaster ostensibly must have been to highlight the political failures belying it which persist today. Also temptingly available, maybe too obviously, is to nod to the mismanagement of modern environmental crises. Regardless, a missed opportunity not to draw from the international failure to responsibly respond to and learn from Chernobyl.\nKate Brown is interested in the aftermath of Chernobyl, not the disaster itself\u0026hellip; Her villains include not only the lying, negligent Soviet authorities, but also the Western governments and international agencies that, in her account, have worked for decades to downplay or actually conceal the human and ecological cost of nuclear war, nuclear tests, and nuclear accidents. Rather than attributing Chernobyl to authoritarianism, she points to similarities in the willingness of Soviets and capitalists to sacrifice the health of workers, the public, and the environment to production goals and geopolitical rivalries.\nChernobyl provided an opportunity to gather a vast body of knowledge about the effects of radiation exposure, but politics trumped science. In the 1990s, when studies of Chernobyl should have been in full swing, Americans and Europeans were suing their governments for exposing them to radioactivity through nuclear tests and accidents\u0026mdash;hardly a situation in which Western governments would wish to publicize the many harms of long-term exposure\u0026hellip; International agencies and diplomats worked to minimize reports of Chernobyl's damage. Despite calls from scientists from many countries, there has never been a large-scale, long-term study of its aftermath. In 2011, when an earthquake caused an accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, there was still no firmly established understanding of the effects of chronic exposure to lower levels of radiation, or of the ways in which radioactive fallout continues to circulate years after a disaster.\nFor example, as with climate change, there was an opportunity here to parallel the extreme inequity of impacts that arose from the Chernobyl disaster and emphasize how man-made institutions and priorities focused them on the least powerful:\nRadioactive fallout was distributed far beyond the Exclusion Zone, which was, after all, just a circle on a map. Clouds absorbed radiation and then moved with the wind. Red Army pilots were dispatched to seed clouds with silver iodide so that radioactive rain would fall over provincial Belarus rather than urban Russia. Belarusian villagers fell ill, as did the pilots.\nThe show of course does emphasize the harms of lax environmental regulation and failures of quality control, but \u0026quot;poor disaster response is hardly unique to authoritarian regimes\u0026quot; even when restricted to the context of Chernobyl:\nThis misguided thriftiness was not a uniquely Soviet or authoritarian practice. Chernobyl fallout had contaminated much of Europe. When Italy rejected 300,000 tons of radioactive Greek wheat, Greece refused to take it back; the European Economic Community eventually agreed to buy the wheat, which was blended with clean grain and sent to Africa and East Germany in aid shipments.\nMarc Maron on cultural constraints of modern comedy The context is Todd Phillips, who directed him in the movie Joker, lamenting the limitations of comedy writing amid \u0026ldquo;this woke culture\u0026rdquo; There\u0026rsquo;s plenty of people being funny right now, not only being funny but being really fucking funny. There are still lines to be rode if you want to ride a line, you can still take chances. The only thing that is off the table, culturally at this juncture, and not entirely, is shamelessly punching down for the sheer joy of hurting people, the sheer excitement and laughter that some people get from causing people pain, from making people uncomfortable, from making people feel excluded, that excitement. As I\u0026rsquo;ve said before, it\u0026rsquo;s no excuse if you\u0026rsquo;re too intimated to try and do comedy which is deep or provocative or even controversial without hurting people then you\u0026rsquo;re not good at what you do or maybe you\u0026rsquo;re just insensitive.\nI believe they don\u0026rsquo;t think they are hurting people, I believe they think they are just pushing the envelope just to see if they can do it. If you want to quit doing comedy like Todd said he did then fine, just quit, but to sit there and complain that it\u0026rsquo;s got too difficult then what are you? Are you just not good enough? You can\u0026rsquo;t rise to the occasion or you can\u0026rsquo;t figure your way around a new perspective? Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s time to quit.\nBottom line is, no one is telling you you can\u0026rsquo;t say things or do things; it\u0026rsquo;s just going to be received a certain way by certain people and you\u0026rsquo;re going to have to shoulder that and if you are isolated, or marginalized, or pushed into a corner because of your point of view or what you have to say but you still have a crew of people who enjoy it, then there you go. Those are your people.\nPatricia Lockwood\u0026rsquo;s takedown of John Updike The best reading experience I\u0026rsquo;ve had this year. No excerpts, just read it even if, like me, you know nothing about Updike. OK, here\u0026rsquo;s one excerpt, but note it\u0026rsquo;s all relentlessly this good:\nAfter Rabbit, Run, the books cease to be interesting primarily for their art but become essential recordings of American life. They continue to be speedily readable \u0026ndash; the present tense works on Updike the way boutique transfusions of young blood work on billionaires \u0026ndash; and perfectly replicate the experience of eating a hot dog in quasi-wartime on a lush crew-cut lawn that has been invisibly poisoned by industry, while men argue politics in the background and a Nice Ass lurks somewhere on the horizon, like the presence of God.\nThis type of comedy could not have existed 10 years ago, not because it's benefiting from the wave of progressivism, but because it's unapologetically of its time: there was no historical context yet for capital-N-capital-A Nice Ass to make sense. The literary example I've discussed here before is Sally Rooney's use. Comedy's always been adapt or die, Mr. Phillips who wrote and directed two too many Hangover sequels.\nEconomics After Neoliberalism There's not a whole lot here that wasn't freely available on the original online forum . The premise is also too open-ended that with the diversity of perspectives offered, the book lacks an organizing argument or idea that the contributing essays and responses can be said to be replying to. Some responses are too narrow to find interesting. A coherent structure, including a much stronger overview or timeline of the supposed faults of the discipline, would improve the work significantly. Despite its title, there's very little in the way of prescriptions for what a post-neoliberal economics would look like. Overall, Democracy Journal probably executed the same premise better here .\nAmerican unionization post-FDR Dug up sources for two interesting empirical results cited:\n\u0026quot;The children of union parents earn more when they grow up, and so do children merely raised in a neighborhood with many union families\n\u0026mdash; Source: Center for American Progress \u0026ldquo;A 2018 study found that right-to-work laws, by impairing union activities, reduce turnout in Presidential elections by two percentage points.\u0026quot; \u0026mdash; Source: A recently revised NBER working paper Stratified randomization Don\u0026rsquo;t really have anything original or insightful to say on the laureates and their work. The post-Nobel discourse on Twitter, the news media, and the peripheral blogosphere though was pretty repulsive. At its worst, it featured some mean-spirited punching down and tone-policing from firmly established economists against their less well-placed counterparts or critics from developing countries. Some of the former lamented the inaccessibility of a subfield increasingly dominated by expensive field projects. The latter took issue with the unchecked exercises of power and disregarded history of flagrant abuse implicitly being celebrated by the award.\nFrom the language of the randomistas, you\u0026rsquo;d think RCTs were facing an existential threat and not occupying up to half of all work published in top development journals. Apparently, being awarded academia\u0026rsquo;s biggest rubber stamp is exactly the wrong time to interrogate its dangers. Sure, there was some disregard by critics of the value of some landmark experiments and some of it was pretty stupid, but overall it was a particularly egregious demonstration of institutional academia\u0026rsquo;s tendencies towards self-preservation and to restrict discussion among themselves.\nI've become quite familiar with how academia works over the last few years, probably better than most graduate students at this stage of their careers. It makes the stomach turn to think of the academic incentive system, rife as it is with systematic biases of representation, determining how those with power come to 'create knowledge' about those without, often without an interest in their well-being. It should not be a radical opinion that well-resourced Western academics may need checks on their career-dependent conduct which affects poor people to whom they are essentially entirely unaccountable.\nThe self-reflection that is permitted is typically resolved by an expressed desire for more developing-country voices in elite academia. It\u0026rsquo;s an easy aspiration to agree with, almost to the point of being self-evident. So it\u0026rsquo;s weird what people say when they do make explicit why this is desirable or what better representation would entail.\nTo hear economists explain it, underrepresentation is primarily lamentable because of the absence of \u0026lsquo;local knowledge \u0026rsquo;. Bringing in people actually from the developing world would allow us to refine the extant search for answers to the same questions. Maybe there\u0026rsquo;s some neat policy quirk they know of that can aid in identification. Or maybe they have connections that can make new data available. Essentially, representation would be so useful and in particular, useful for continuing what we\u0026rsquo;re already doing but better, a Pareto improvement! Beyond that, I\u0026rsquo;m sure \u0026ldquo;the moral conviction that we should seek to do the most good we can for the most people\u0026quot; is a sufficiently well-defined guiding light. What, would you rather follow the path paved with bad intentions?\nFocusing on the instrumental value of \u0026rsquo;the locals\u0026rsquo; requires no acknowledgement or criticism of how we\u0026rsquo;ve been doing things. If anything, the participation of people who look different but who otherwise mostly do the same would only further justify the status quo. And so, the \u0026rsquo;local value\u0026rsquo; frame is self-exonerating on top of being useful.\nWhy this frame is problematic should be immediately obvouis but to spell out another reason, it implies area familiarity as a requisite justification for inclusion of \u0026rsquo;the locals\u0026rsquo;. Then, local knowledge being their reason for being here, locals should restrict themselves to studying their home country as it\u0026rsquo;s their comparative advantage. Westerners are allowed to not know things and to study settings they are unfamiliar with. It follows mechanically from Ricardo.\nExamples abound of academic thought leaders who exercised the power of academia to further marginalize the excluded. This was not the result of absent local knowledge nor is it a relic of a backwards past that academia's since evolved from. Pessimism about the caution and humility of academics in the absence of substantive and not just descriptive representation is the only reasonable response. These concerns are not only ignored but actively suppressed by those with the most power inclined to determine among themselves who is wronging whom. They are sore winners.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0025/","summary":"The trafficking of arms from the United States is rarely discussed as a cause of the violence people are fleeing; the drug war, she argues, is also hemispheric: it ‘begins in the Great Lakes of the northern United States and ends in the mountains of Celaque in southern Honduras’. Consumers and producers of prohibited drugs bear responsibility in each country along the route, as do the dysfunctional laws that push the trade into a violent underground. The migrant children, she writes, are more accurately described as refugees of a hemispheric war.","title":"HBO’s Chernobyl; the assassination by Patricia Lockwood of the coward John Updike; and stratified randomization"},{"content":"Bombing Nagasaki I'll never get over the role of weather and fuel capacity in the unintended atomic bombing of Nagasaki 74 years ago today. Nagasaki wasn't even on the target list until a few days prior and infamously was only bombed because more conventional targets were inaccessible after a storm depleted the carrier's fuel mid-flight. Blindly bombing Nagasaki was deemed preferable to squandering a billion-dollar nuclear weapon on the ocean\u0026hellip; and not by highers-up Washington. Mind-boggling to consider the influence of weather in history; recall that an article in the post from earlier today quoted then-General Eisenhower attributing the Allied victory on the Western Front to their superior meteorologists.\nFrom the book \u0026quot;Nagasaki\u0026quot; by Craig Collie :\n\u0026lsquo;Sit tight, boys. We\u0026rsquo;re going around again.\u0026rsquo; Sweeney wheeled into another turn. As the plane came in for its third run, the crew were anxious and edgy. Van Pelt pointed out the stadium was near the arsenal. Beahan responded that the stadium was not the aiming point. Through the Norden, he saw streets and the river, but once again the munitions factory was shrouded. Again, he reported no drop. The tension released a rush of comments: \u0026lsquo;Fighters below, coming up\u0026rsquo; (Dehart); \u0026lsquo;Fuel getting very low\u0026rsquo; (Kuharek); \u0026lsquo;Let\u0026rsquo;s get the hell out of here!\u0026rsquo; (Gallagher); \u0026lsquo;What about Nagasaki?\u0026rsquo; (Spitzer).\nFuel was getting dangerously low and the hornets\u0026rsquo; nest of defence they had stirred up below was an unacceptable risk for a plane carrying so destructive a weapon. Sweeney conferred by intercom with Beahan and the weaponeer, Lieutenant-Commander Frederick Ashworth. They decided to leave Kokura and head for Nagasaki, 160km to the south. The weather there didn\u0026rsquo;t look any more promising than Kokura, but the only other approved target, Niigata in northern Honshu, was too far away for their remaining fuel. Sweeney gathered his composure and asked the navigator, \u0026lsquo;Jim, give me the heading for Nagasaki.\u0026rsquo;\nSweeney said to his co-pilot, Lieutenant Don Albury, \u0026lsquo;Can any other goddamned thing go wrong?\u0026rsquo; On the ground at Kokura, an all-clear had sounded before the Americans\u0026rsquo; aborted bombing runs began. People were out of the shelters and getting about their business when they heard the aircraft engines high above them. However, this wasn\u0026rsquo;t the massed formations they associated with firebombing missions. They assumed it was a reconnaissance mission. Some noted the two planes made three passes over the city, the drone of their engines fading and returning each time. Then the planes disappeared, never to return. Kokurans got on with their lives, the struggle to stay afloat in a war-ravaged country.\nThe Japanese today have an expression, \u0026lsquo;Kokura\u0026rsquo;s luck\u0026rsquo;. It means avoiding a catastrophic event you didn\u0026rsquo;t even know was threatened.\nMore from the illuminating Alex Wellerstein thread here Separately, most Japanese archival evidence shows that the Nagasaki bombing did not materially have an effect on the Japanese high command, either. They learned about it during a meeting they were having to discuss Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion. This was the same meeting where they decided to put forward an offer of conditional surrender (which the US rejected).\nThere isn\u0026rsquo;t any evidence that the Nagasaki attack changed anyone\u0026rsquo;s point of view in that room. Absence of evidence is not absence of effect, but it clearly wasn\u0026rsquo;t a crucial part of it. The idea that the Japanese didn\u0026rsquo;t believe that the US had more atomic bombs is mostly untrue. If Nagasaki hadn\u0026rsquo;t happened, it seems likely that little would have changed regarding surrender. This is why many people who have studied it have found Nagasaki not that justifiable. Ted Telford, the chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, concluded that had had \u0026ldquo;never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki.\u0026rdquo;\nI think one can come up with \u0026ldquo;plausible justifications\u0026rdquo; for Hiroshima, even if they are debatable. Nagasaki is definitely a trickier moral issue, if your concern is with not slaughtering masses of civilians unnecessarily.\nHong Kong as a failure of neoliberalism There is a common saying among some protesters: 「自己香港自己救 」\u0026mdash;loosely, \u0026quot;We alone can save our Hong Kong.\u0026quot; Like so many Hong Kong slogans, the phrase speaks in multiple registers: it is both a rallying call and a pained observation of the city's existential isolation. In the same way, it points to the impotence of global neoliberalism and its empty promises to safeguard \u0026quot;freedom\u0026quot; in (wealthy) societies everywhere.\nContrary to China's propagandistic accusations that the Hong Kong protests are being propped up by nefarious Western agents, there is little indication the West craves any involvement\u0026hellip; That the globalist gods won't even answer the distress signals of this Asian capitalist citadel should be the clearest example yet of what oppressed people around the world have long known: neoliberalism has never been a framework for transnational solidarity as much as a self-serving logic of global exploitation. To the extent that conscious observers, in Hong Kong and elsewhere, harbor reluctance to give up on the post\u0026ndash;Cold War fantasy of free-market world peace, it is due to the lack of viable alternative frameworks. The crisis in Hong Kong demonstrates that neoliberalism is declining not because progressives are winning, but because it is being supplanted by a newer, more efficient ideology of authoritarian capitalist violence that is consolidating power everywhere against an alarmingly fragmented opposition. And it shows just how dangerous the world has become due to the lack of a coherent international left position.\nMore on the recent history of political unrest in Hong Kong here A review of This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto by Suketu Mehta First, catastrophic climate change, global inequality, and the ruinous aftermath of colonialism have ensured that \u0026quot;mass migration is the defining human phenomenon of the twenty-first century.\u0026quot; Not since the end of World War II have there been as many displaced persons as there are now. By 2050, up to 30 percent of the planet's surface, home to 1.5 billion people, could be desert; the population of Africa will double to 2.4 billion; in Bangladesh alone, 20 million could be displaced by rising sea levels. By the century's end, land populated by 650 million people could be underwater. Mehta has a lot more stuff like this, none of it reassuring.\nHis second proposition is that migrants from the poorer parts of the world have a right to settle in richer parts of the world. This right is essentially restitutionary: societies that unjustly enriched themselves at the expense of other societies are obligated to make restitution\u0026hellip; \u0026quot;Immigration as reparations,\u0026quot; as Mehta terms it.\u0026quot; \u0026hellip;there are millions in the Central American states that, as Mehta demonstrates, the US has destabilized, traumatized, and plundered for its own gain. There are billions of people in postcolonial societies. If you believe, as Mehta does, that restitution is also due to poor countries suffering from the impoverishment and environmental damage caused by rich countries and their predatory multinational corporations, the scope for reparations grows even larger.\nIt could also be said, of course, that Mehta is dismissive of the cultural and economic anxieties of the host population. But that is precisely his intention: to dismiss the concerns of white natives about having brown foreigners in their midst. Either their concerns are racist and accordingly without merit, or their concerns have some merit, but not as much merit as the concerns of migrants.\nWhite supremacy and paramilitary violence Published just ahead of the Dayton and El Paso shootings\nFor more than a century, anti-communism was a reliable binding agent on the American right. Disparate factions, from tax protesters and libertarians to fundamentalist Christians, from anti-abortion activists to the Ku Klux Klan and white power terror cells, could share a common enemy. For much of the 20th century, the struggles against communism and black progress were close to indistinguishable.\nThe type of free-market creed that most mainstream conservatives espouse has long been reconcilable with white nativist priorities. The Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian has recently labelled this apparent ideological mongrel 'xenophobic libertarianism', pointing to the fact that the American right has consistently paired the demand for an absolute right to free movement of capital with ever more biologised criteria for the exclusion of people.\nThe Vietnam War fused white power and anti-communism together. Shared wartime experience during World War Two seems to have reduced racism in the ranks \u0026ndash; Truman went on to desegregate the military in 1948 \u0026ndash; but Vietnam did the opposite. For the first time in any American war, black troops were over-represented in the ranks. Their presence became a galvanising political issue for the civil rights movement, whose activities in turn became a political issue for many serving white soldiers, who came to view black soldiers as unreliable or worse. As US forces evacuated Saigon, the more conservative among them felt that they had lost one war only to return home to lose another: the civil rights movement had put black rights on the national agenda in a way that imperilled the white future.\nThe Vietnam War had a further pernicious effect: it helped make possible the paramilitary expression of racist sentiment.\nA review of Reporter, by Seymour Hersh That\u0026rsquo;s the Hersh autobiography I wrote about in January. The critic, Scott Sherman, does a great job of adding critical context to Hersh's career and my own response at the time now reads as very naïvely taking Hersh's account of his life at face value. In the spirit of one of Hersh's career low points, I'm hereby issuing a correction to my review of the book. He is a self-admitted bully and now I know he has possibly ruined a man's life because of a misjudged retributive streak. Hersh convincingly portrays the image of the reporter as an underdog, but neglects to acknowledge his failure to live up to the responsibility that comes with the power of a self-regulating press.\nAt its best, Reporter is a lively self-portrait of a maverick and troublemaker. But it is scrubbed and sanitized. He appears in a half-light; the book does not illuminate the darkest corners of his long career\u0026hellip; Hersh is less than truthful in chronicling, for instance, the Korry affair, about which Reporter contains two hasty, misleading paragraphs that ignore the damage he inflicted\u0026hellip; For a full view of Hersh and an authoritative sense of his career, which embodies the expansive possibilities of muckraking as well as its many perils, one must look elsewhere.\nThe passages in Reporter devoted to Assad are strikingly friendly. They illustrate the moral dangers of Hersh's brand of muckraking, which entails a relentless determination to get the story at any cost\nThe journalist who documented war crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia has overlooked them in Syria. \u0026hellip;One wishes that Hersh had spent more time adding texture, nuance, and humility to Reporter. If he had scrutinized his own life with the same tenacity he has directed elsewhere, he might have given us one of the great journalistic memoirs.\nThe egotistic pursuit of prestige described by Sherman is hardly concealed elsewhere in the book; of Hersh's bouncing around different publications, I wrote at the time that \u0026quot;the arrangements seem more like the hiring of a truth-seeking mercenary than an employee.\u0026quot; I don't have a problem still considering many aspects of Hersh heroic. The details Sherman provides don't really undermine the qualities I had found most compelling in the narrative, namely the amazing ability of one reporter to effect change in various powerful institutions almost entirely through sheer effort and the insider's vantage of the politics of journalism.\nSomewhat related: a retrospective from last year on the 50-year anniversary of the My Lai massacre ","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0024/","summary":"Fuel was getting dangerously low and the hornets\u0026rsquo; nest of defence they had stirred up below was an unacceptable risk for a plane carrying so destructive a weapon. Sweeney conferred by intercom with Beahan and the weaponeer, Lieutenant-Commander Frederick Ashworth. They decided to leave Kokura and head for Nagasaki, 160km to the south. The weather there didn\u0026rsquo;t look any more promising than Kokura, but the only other approved target, Niigata in northern Honshu, was too far away for their remaining fuel. Sweeney gathered his composure and asked the navigator, \u0026lsquo;Jim, give me the heading for Nagasaki.\u0026rsquo;","title":"The bombing of Nagasaki; Hong Kong as a failed experiment; and 'immigration as reparations'"},{"content":"The IPCC report on climate change and land In some ways, this is the most unavoidably political document that the IPCC has ever published. Its report last year, on the dangers of global warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius, called for an unprecedented transformation in the globe\u0026rsquo;s energy system\u0026hellip; But talking about the energy system is, in this context, relatively easy\u0026hellip; land is different. It is home, and the possibility of home. The relationship between people and land is the most treasured and unresolved idea in global politics.\nThe biggest of these issues: Land can\u0026rsquo;t really multitask.\n\u0026ldquo;Land can\u0026rsquo;t, at the same time, feed people, and grow trees to be burned for bioenergy, and store carbon,\u0026rdquo; Stabinsky said. \u0026ldquo;That conflict of what\u0026rsquo;s going to take priority as we face greater and greater climate challenges\u0026rdquo; defined the talks, she said. \u0026ldquo;There\u0026rsquo;s going to be more and more desire to try to use land to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, and that\u0026rsquo;s going to interfere with food production.\u0026rdquo;\nTo address climate change, we will need to reduce our use of fossil fuels, and replace energy generated in the past (by long-dead plants) with energy generated today (by wind turbines, solar panels, and uranium atoms). But, this report adds: We must do all that in a house of only 52 million rooms, the majority of which already serve as someone\u0026rsquo;s bedroom, bathroom, or kitchen. And those 52 million rooms must stage not only the unending drama of the human family, but also\u0026mdash;as far as we know\u0026mdash;every other living thing in the universe.\nHow are you even supposed to talk about that?\nThe remarkable efficiency of the kidnapping industry One of the most interesting things I\u0026rsquo;ve read this year. If I were designing an undergrad or high-school economics syllabus, I\u0026rsquo;d make it an assigned reading. Market formation, price discrimination, luxury goods, insurance dynamics, information asymmetry, signaling, game theory, and more all in a real high-stakes setting and very well-written. So much is great, but a small sample:\n\u0026ldquo;Kidnappers make rational choices,\u0026rdquo; Shortland writes. Like the professionals on the other side, kidnappers perform research, assess risks, manage costs, and, if they\u0026rsquo;re in it for the long term, build reputations for orderly resolution. Some groups even develop an infrastructure to support their operations, though this is expensive and may increase the number of expectant beneficiaries (if operations are mounted on credit, for example).\nWhen kidnappers keep hostages for days, weeks, or months, most invest in keeping them alive (a corpse is not worth much, except in the Iliad) and in decent health. Captives with medical conditions are usually allowed to receive medications; in 2010 al-Qaeda let a French woman with breast cancer take chemo drugs. Somali pirates are governed by a strict code of conduct that fines guards for hurting hostages; there\u0026rsquo;s even a printed \u0026ldquo;Pirate\u0026rsquo;s Handbook.\u0026rdquo; They have been known to send their counterparties receipts for items, such as bottled water, procured for the proper maintenance of the captives. Criminal groups want to be seen as trustworthy adversaries bargaining in good faith\u0026mdash;if the ransom is paid, the hostage is released\u0026mdash;and know that killing or harming hostages will imperil negotiations and, in some cases, lead to armed intervention.\nThe UN forbids the transfer of money to designated terrorist groups; the US Treasury, the EU, and other governmental bodies also maintain such lists. Private persons and entities cannot legally make concessions to proscribed groups, and if they do, their insurers cannot legally reimburse them, though ransom-payers are rarely if ever prosecuted.\n\u0026ldquo;If it\u0026rsquo;s criminal, it\u0026rsquo;s legal,\u0026rdquo; a British bureaucrat told Shortland of ransom payments. But it\u0026rsquo;s not always clear which category kidnappers fit into. Some terrorists pretend to be part of criminal organizations so that they can legally collect ransoms. Shortland reports that when a Somali told British negotiators that he represented the \u0026ldquo;commercial arm\u0026rdquo; of al-Shabaab, the jihadist fundamentalist group, \u0026ldquo;they had to explain that this was not sufficiently removed from the parent organization to have a payment authorized.\u0026rdquo;\nCurrent Affairs on Steven Pinker I guess I largely agree with this takedow and the bullet-pointed quotes are damning. His endorsement of Quillette this week has predictably alreadyaged poorly . From my perspective, things improving over time is a pretty low bar to clear; new optimists seem to argue that the fact that most people are ignorant of this general trend is evidence that the status quo is justified. I don\u0026rsquo;t understand that reasoning and it\u0026rsquo;s weird how pervasive that idea is.\nThat said, I\u0026rsquo;ve said before that I don\u0026rsquo;t think either side of the Pinker-Hickel spat are the best representatives of their perspectives. I also wish Nathan Robinson\u0026rsquo;s tone weren\u0026rsquo;t itself frequently grating; this is a lot of work and some good argumentation to squander packaging in immature language. I haven\u0026rsquo;t found a publication that self-identifies as leftist that is consistently readable (e.g. Jacobin, Current Affairs).\nThe development of accurate short-term weather forecasting The weather apps we often mistake as representing the frontier in meteorology are usually idiosyncratic prediction models based on a more aggregated global model of which the complexity and miraculous accuracy boggles the mind:\nLanding a spacecraft on Mars requires dealing with hundreds of mathematical variables. Making a global atmospheric model requires hundreds of thousands.\nThe article begins with two compelling wartime applications of accurate weather forecasting. The first is an argument that superior meteorologists determined the Allied victory on the Western Front. The second is of a Nazi espionage mission:\nIn the Northern Hemisphere, storms tend to move from west to east, so any prediction of what lay in store for Europe relied on knowing what was happening in the Atlantic. The Allies, who were in control of all the major landmasses that lined the ocean, had the upper hand. The Nazis had to use long-range aircraft and secret weather ships to gather observations. The Allies tried to sink those ships, but the Nazis also made use of radio reports of cancelled English soccer matches for hints about weather to the north.\nSo, as Blum explains, in 1942 the German government came up with an ingenious solution. With help from the Siemens-Schuckertwerke group (a predecessor of the modern-day Siemens) and others, it developed a series of automated weather stations: these were an intricate array of pressure, temperature, and humidity sensors, encased in storm-resistant metal containers and equipped with batteries and a radio antenna. Some would hitch rides with the Luftwaffe and transmit weather readings from remote locations on the edge of Europe. By 1943, the devices were powerful enough to communicate across the Atlantic. That year, a Nazi submarine sneaked to the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, where a team of German soldiers took ten cannisters ashore on two rubber dinghies. For the plan to work, the weather station needed to stay undetected after it had been left in the wilderness, so they labelled the equipment \u0026ldquo;Canadian Meteor Service\u0026rdquo; and scattered the site with a host of American cigarette packs. Only in 1981 was the ruse discovered.\nTwo field trials successfully suppressed procreation in invasive tiger mosquitoes When male Ae. albopictus from the HC population mated with females with the native double infection, all the resulting embryos died, as would be predicted because the females were not infected with the wPip strain that infected the males (Fig. 1a). However, such embryo lethality did not occur when wPip-infected males mated with females that were also infected with the wPip strain (Fig. 1b). Thus, a risk in the authors\u0026rsquo; approach was that, if any wPip-infected females were released along with males, they would spread the wPip infection rapidly through the wild population, eliminating the population-suppressing effects of the wPip-infected males.\nZheng and co-workers\u0026rsquo; major innovation was their method of preparing HC mosquitoes for release. In facilities that mass-rear mosquitoes, male pupae are usually mechanically separated from female pupae on the basis of size differences. Using this procedure to prepare groups of male mosquitoes led to a female contamination rate of approximately 0.2\u0026ndash;0.5%, necessitating a secondary, manual screening to remove female pupae, recognized by their distinctive anatomy. However, this labour-intensive manual screen substantially limited the total number of mosquitoes that could be prepared. Zheng et al. eliminated the need for the manual screen by subjecting the HC pupae to low-dose radiation that sterilized females but that only slightly impaired male mating success. As a result of eliminating the manual screen, they were able to increase the number of male mosquitoes that could be released by more than tenfold.\nPopulation-suppression strategies crucially depend on the ratio of released males to wild males. Thus, Zheng et al. used mathematical modelling and cage experiments to calculate the optimal sizes and timings of mosquito releases. During the peak breeding season, the rearing facility produced more than 5 million male mosquitoes per week, leading to the release of more than 160,000 mosquitoes per hectare per week at the test sites. Zheng et al. monitored the numbers and viability of eggs produced by wild mosquitoes, as well as the abundance of adult mosquitoes and the rates at which they bit humans at test sites and at nearby control sites (where no HC males had been released).\nIt sounded so much simpler in my head: inject mosquitoes with science, release them to the wild, save lives.\nCoincidentally timed (I assume since it makes no reference to the study) was a NYT opinion piece on the primacy of mosquitoes , featuring the nightmare-fuel illustration below:\nMosquitoes may have killed nearly half of the 108 billion humans who have ever lived across our 200,000-year or more existence.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s the premise of the author\u0026rsquo;s new book, from which the article is adapted. As is often the case, I don\u0026rsquo;t know what makes this an \u0026ldquo;opinion\u0026rdquo; article.\nThe discourse machine I read this months ago and forgot about it before I could link it here. Fortunately some particularly terrible groupwork this week by the New York Times\u0026rsquo; headline writer, opinions section, and editor in chief conspired to remind me.\nThe essay creatively alternates between the perspectives of an editor, writer, and reader and culminates in an argument against the institution of the newspaper op-ed. It reads quite performatively and explicitly points a finger at the practice of excerpting so I\u0026rsquo;ll indulge it this time and just urge you to read it.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0023/","summary":"The UN forbids the transfer of money to designated terrorist groups. Private persons and entities cannot legally make concessions to proscribed groups, and if they do, their insurers cannot legally reimburse them, though ransom-payers are rarely if ever prosecuted. But it’s not always clear which category kidnappers fit into. Some terrorists pretend to be part of criminal organizations so that they can legally collect ransoms. Shortland reports that when a Somali told British negotiators that he represented the \u0026lsquo;commercial arm\u0026rsquo; of al-Shabaab, the jihadist fundamentalist group, \u0026rsquo;they had to explain that this was not sufficiently removed from the parent organization to have a payment authorized.\u0026rsquo;","title":"The remarkable efficiency of the kidnapping industry; the science of suppressing disease-vector mosquitoes; and the monotony of op-eds"},{"content":"The sex labor movement Fantastic and (for me) eye-opening read on sex workers\u0026rsquo; rights. The book being reviewed is \u0026ldquo;Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights\u0026rdquo; by Molly Smith and Juno Mac , themselves sex workers. In my ignorance, I had always assumed the movement was one advocating simply for straightforward decriminalization as if such a thing existed:\n(Ed. note: I took liberties rearranging the sentences excerpted below for thematic organization)\nPolice described the [seven-month investigation in which they secretly installed cameras in massage rooms and made videos of the women as they gave handjobs to their customers] as an anti-trafficking operation, but no trafficking charges have been made. Four women who ran the massage parlors were arrested. Among other crimes, they were all charged with prostitution. All of them have spent more time in jail than any of the men they allegedly serviced.\nProstitution laws primarily target women of color. Between 2012 and 2015, 85 percent of those booked in New York City under the dubious \u0026ldquo;loitering for the purpose of prostitution\u0026rdquo; charge\u0026mdash;which encompasses such innocuous behaviors as wearing tight jeans and carrying condoms\u0026mdash;were black and Latina women.\nFor migrants, the consequences are even more dire: a single arrest may lead to their imprisonment or deportation. \u0026ldquo;When you are Black, [police] take the Black women and leave the white man,\u0026rdquo; says Tina, a Nigerian sex worker in Norway\u0026hellip; Goaded on by Trump\u0026rsquo;s zero-tolerance policy, ICE began arresting immigrants at courthouses in 2017\u0026mdash;and found an easy hunting ground in the [Human Trafficking Intervention Court] in Queens. Blowin\u0026rsquo; Up captures the panic after three women are snatched and two likely deported back to China.\nThe article touches on something I and I think many others have at some point struggled to reconcile, what it presents as a false choice between whether sex work is degrading or empowering:\nMac and Smith reject this dichotomy from the start. \u0026ldquo;This book\u0026mdash;and the perspective of the contemporary left sex worker movement\u0026mdash;is not about enjoying sex work,\u0026rdquo; they write. Work need not be a good time for workers to deserve autonomy, respect, safety, and better pay. The British coal miners who battled Margaret Thatcher hardly claimed that their coal pits were fun. The question \u0026ldquo;Is sex work good?\u0026rdquo; has little to do with \u0026ldquo;Should sex workers have rights?\u0026rdquo; But this obvious truth is often ignored by writers who get hung up on the \u0026ldquo;sex\u0026rdquo; part, painting sex workers as brainless bimbos or voiceless victims. \u0026ldquo;Sex workers are associated with sex, and to be associated with sex is to be dismissible,\u0026rdquo; Mac and Smith write.\nThis approach feels revolutionary because conversations that people not engaged in sex work have about it tend to involve a stew of unspoken anxieties about not just sex but migration, disease, race, class, and the roles of women.\nJust this week, a long-time friend revealed on social media that she was a former sex worker, a job she\u0026rsquo;d held for several years originally to finance her college education. I imagine the reaction of many learning this for the first time would be to consider her situation coercive. She\u0026rsquo;d reject that description, at least as applied to her own case, and the following seems to echo much of her perspective:\nAnd for many feminists, [the sex worker] is the ultimate example of female victimhood\u0026mdash;in activist Dorchen Leidholdt\u0026rsquo;s words, a \u0026ldquo;de-individualized, de-humanized\u0026rdquo; proxy for \u0026ldquo;generic woman\u0026hellip;. She stands in for all of us, and she takes the abuse that we are beginning to resist.\u0026rdquo; Once a sex worker becomes a metaphor, her material conditions cease to matter. She is an object for study, ministration, and control\u0026hellip;The trope of the stolen innocent has lasted into the twenty-first century.\nReal sex workers are as various as humans in general, united only in the fact that they do this particular job\u0026hellip; The minister \u0026ldquo;observed that we all seemed to have started selling sex in order to get money, in a tone suggesting\u0026hellip;that she was slightly incredulous,\u0026rdquo; Smith reported\u0026hellip; Most \u0026ldquo;work is often pretty awful, especially when it\u0026rsquo;s low-paid and unprestigious,\u0026rdquo; Mac and Smith write. This includes sex work. All the more reason to prioritize the well-being of the workers, poor or rich, miserable or happy, men and especially women.\nDark Money, by Jane Mayer Sadly cannot excerpt anything from this excellent book since I was experimenting with Audible. I think for now I\u0026rsquo;m quite firmly opposed to audiobooks. My tweet-length review:\nJust finished \u0026ldquo;Dark Money\u0026rdquo; by Jane Mayer. Learned a lot, but am no less perplexed by the degree of tolerance in academia for the Koch Brothers and \u0026lsquo;affiliated\u0026rsquo; institutions. Their occasional non-awfulness on criminal justice does not make this complicated.\nWhile only briefly alluded to in the book, the Kochs\u0026rsquo; turn on criminal justice is covered in more depth here by the same author.\nYou inevitably pick up pieces about the Koch infrastructure through osmosis, especially spending as much time in academic environments and reading about climate change as I do. The contribution of the book is in threading these into a coherent narrative spanning the personal and political histories of famed billionaire dynasties and their think-tank outlets to the dark-money floodgates opened by the Citizens United ruling. The detached writing style powerfully allows the depth of research to speak for itself, though the author\u0026rsquo;s personal frustrations seep through on occasion. This seems more than fair given her own targeting by the Koch network .\nSidenote: the Freakonomics podcast\u0026rsquo;s two episodes interviewing Charles Koch , a series titled \u0026ldquo;Why Hate the Koch Brothers?\u0026rdquo;, were an absolute embarrassment of journalism from start to finish.\nMagnus Carlsen and AlphaZero The following excerpt on chessplay recalls the normative gap paper linked in my last post which took exception to the appeal to \u0026lsquo;mechanical objectivity\u0026rsquo; of using a Roth-style matching algorithm (specifically the deferred acceptance algorithm) to assign students to Boston\u0026rsquo;s public schools:\nA computer is a monomaniac: it chooses moves that it calculates will help it win, no matter how ugly they are. And they have led to an impoverishment and a homogenisation of style. If such features were replicated in political decision-making, the consequences could be much greater. More to the point, much of our politics today revolves around the perception that decisions are being taken elsewhere, whether in Westminster, Brussels or Washington. Passing off the work of decision-making to the ultimate aloof elite\u0026mdash;a computer\u0026mdash;is not a serious way of confronting this issue. Sometimes it\u0026rsquo;s important to decide things for ourselves, and to feel like we\u0026rsquo;re deciding, even if we often go astray.\nThe use of computers to train the best chess players to act more mechanically and Carlsen\u0026rsquo;s compromising between this movement and a more intuition-dependent gameplay recalls the state of the NBA in the data analytics movement By this time, Carlsen\u0026rsquo;s style had evolved into one favouring positional control over dramatic attacks. It is often compared to Anatoly Karpov\u0026rsquo;s \u0026lsquo;boa-constrictor\u0026rsquo; technique; as Kasparov described it to the New Yorker as \u0026lsquo;strangling pressure, not direct hits\u0026rsquo;. The word most commonly associated with Carlsen\u0026rsquo;s play is \u0026lsquo;intuitive\u0026rsquo;, which I take to mean that he doesn\u0026rsquo;t rely on preparation, particularly computer preparation, as much as his rivals do. He will sometimes pick unusual or apparently poor moves just to complicate the position or knock an opponent out of lines that have been prepared in advance with the assistance of a computer\nI think this is the reason I\u0026rsquo;m a Carlsen fan. No doubt he does plenty of computer preparation \u0026ndash; you can\u0026rsquo;t survive in professional chess without it \u0026ndash; but he seems constantly to be looking for ways to reduce the influence of computers, to pull the game into positions where intuition and judgment come to the fore. \u0026lsquo;When I covered the Kasparov-Deep Blue match,\u0026rsquo; Steven Levy has written, \u0026lsquo;I thought the drama came from a battle between computer and human. But it was really a story of people, with brutal capitalist impulse, teaming up with AI to destroy the confidence and dignity of the greatest champion the world had seen.\u0026rsquo; Carlsen may not be able to defeat computers at chess, but he keeps finding ways to surprise the people who team up with them.\nA maybe-stretched comparison can be made to the Cavaliers in the 2015 NBA Finals. With star players Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love lost to injury, coach Tyronne Lue reverted to an unfashionably slow and isolation-dependent style of play that produced low-percentage shots largely centered on the playmaking genius of LeBron James out of the low post. The upshot was it served to frustrate and throw off rhythm the hyper-optimized Warrior offense, revolutionary at the time for the greenlight it afforded its star shooters. The talent disparity proved too much for the Cavs to overcome, but the competitiveness of the six-game series and James\u0026rsquo; historical performance tempered the growing confidence that NBA strategy had been \u0026lsquo;solved\u0026rsquo;.\nMitski in the New Yorker Just pointing out it makes the same observation I did in an earlier post where I wrote\nI would venture a guess that at least a third of the crowd were LGBTQ couples, which was surprising to me because Mitski\u0026rsquo;s music neither lyrically nor sonically make for an obvious union of indie and queer subcultures. Even within the broad indie rock genre, hers is a less accessible sound.\nThey write:\nA 2018 headline on the NPR Web site named Mitski the \u0026ldquo;21st Century\u0026rsquo;s Poet Laureate of Young Adulthood.\u0026rdquo; But her fan base is more particular than that. Young Asian women and young queer people make up a lot of it. Her L.G.B.T. admirers seem to respond to the way her songs evoke, with theatrical grandeur, the covert emotions of someone outside the mainstream. At her shows, I\u0026rsquo;ve noticed that an unusually large proportion of the audience is there alone.\n*Bridgers said that she admires the \u0026ldquo;weirdness of the creative choices that Mitski seems to make so confidently.\u0026rdquo; Mitski sings for prickly introverts, or for anyone who has ever wanted a lover to just go home already, so that she can yearn for him in peace. The lyrics in Mitski\u0026rsquo;s songs often project a paradoxical attitude that I associate with a specific type of millennial-feminist art\u0026mdash;*Sally Rooney novels come to mind\u0026mdash;in which female strength takes the form of defiantly displaying a full range of roiling emotions, including self-abasing or submissive ones.\nWas the automotive era a mistake? When the people of the future look back at our century of auto life, will they regard it as a useful stage of forward motion or as a wrong turn? Is it possible that, a hundred years from now, the age of gassing up and driving will be seen as just a cul-de-sac in transportation history, a trip we never should have taken?\nAlso, this comparison of tech culture with Henry Ford is pretty good:\nA key factor in the explosion of the market was the release of the Model T, created by Henry Ford, in 1908. Ford was an unmannered, intellectually narrow efficiency nut of the sort that we might now associate with Silicon Valley. Early in his career, he accused milk cows of being underproductive and sought to develop a soy milk to replace them. Later, he joined George Washington Carver in preparing \u0026ldquo;weed spread\u0026rdquo; sandwiches from greens he found in his yard, an attempt to maximize nutrition with minimal waste. Ford served the nasty sandwiches to his colleagues, and didn\u0026rsquo;t understand why they never caught on.\nMinority self-depiction in the publishing industry (h/t Helena) A report from 2015, \u0026ldquo;Writing the Future,\u0026rdquo; which surveyed writers of color about their experiences, concluded that the \u0026ldquo;best chance of publication\u0026rdquo; for a BAME writer was to write literary fiction conforming to a stereotypical view of their communities, addressing topics such as \u0026ldquo;racism, colonialism, or post-colonialism as if these were the primary concerns of all BAME people.\u0026rdquo;\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re a writer of color you\u0026rsquo;re only supposed to write about what people imagine to be your self. And that self is not an imaginative, creative, artistic, or intellectual self. That self might be labeled as \u0026ldquo;Asian writer,\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;Bangladeshi writer\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;BAME writer,\u0026rdquo; but it is never labeled simply \u0026ldquo;writer\u0026rdquo;\u0026mdash;that would be the true privilege.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0022/","summary":"Is sex work degrading or empowering? Mac and Smith reject this dichotomy from the start. \u0026lsquo;This book\u0026mdash;and the perspective of the contemporary left sex worker movement\u0026mdash;is not about enjoying sex work,\u0026rsquo; they write. Work need not be a good time for workers to deserve autonomy, respect, safety, and better pay. The British coal miners who battled Margaret Thatcher hardly claimed that their coal pits were fun. The question \u0026lsquo;Is sex work good?\u0026rsquo; has little to do with \u0026lsquo;Should sex workers have rights?\u0026rsquo; But this obvious truth is often ignored by writers who get hung up on the \u0026lsquo;sex\u0026rsquo; part, painting sex workers as brainless bimbos or voiceless victims. \u0026lsquo;Sex workers are associated with sex, and to be associated with sex is to be dismissible.\u0026rsquo;","title":"Sex workers' rights; and 'Dark Money' by Jane Mayer"},{"content":"Bridging the \u0026lsquo;Normative Gap\u0026rsquo;: Mechanism Design and Social Justice, Zoë Hitzig Abstract:\nThis paper investigates the peculiarities that arise when mechanism design is deployed in contexts in which issues of social, racial and distributive justice are particularly salient. Economists\u0026rsquo; involvement in redesigning Boston\u0026rsquo;s algorithm for allocating K-12 students to public schools serves as an instructive case study. The paper draws on the distinction between ideal theory and non-ideal theory in political philosophy and the concept of performativity in economic sociology to argue that mechanism can enact elaborate ideal theories of justice. A normative gap thus emerges between the goals of the policymakers and the objectives of economic designs. As a result, mechanism design may obstruct stakeholders\u0026rsquo; avenues for normative criticism of public policies, and serve as a technology of depoliticization.\nThread from frequent co-author E. Glen Weyl here and embedded below:\nI am blown away by the brilliant, award-winning paper by @zhitzig available here: https://t.co/T5tEiAJUKP. Everyone in market design needs to read it, as it absolutely nails what is so absurd about the whole Roth-style approach to matching market design.\n\u0026mdash; (((E. Glen Weyl))) stands with 🇺🇦 and 🇹🇼 (@glenweyl) July 1, 2019 This paper follows in the footsteps of Alexandrova (2008) in critiquing the design of real-life markets using microeconomic theory. Whereas Alexandrova focused on game theory and the celebrated FCC spectrum auctions, Hitzig focuses on Roth-style matching theory and the allocation of applicants to Boston Public Schools (BPS), a canonical case study in the literature.\nThe titular \u0026ldquo;normative gap\u0026rdquo; refers to the inexactness with which the mechanism designed by the consulting economists actually applies their favored theory of justice, which Hitzig identifies as Arneson\u0026rsquo;s \u0026rsquo;equal opportunity for welfare\u0026rsquo; principle , a more complex normative framework than the notion of simple efficiency on which microeconomic theory usually hangs its hat. More precisely, Hitzig argues that the deferred acceptance algorithm ultimately advanced by the consultants could not be described as an application of a particular matching theory, but rather as the imposition of an idealized setting that coerces real people to role-play as the highly idealized agents the setting demands by assumption. Hitzig describes this as an enactment (as opposed to an application) arising from two idealizing assumptions: strict compliance (e.g. applicants are forced to disclose strict preferences they may not have) and favorable circumstances (e.g. applicants are forced to communicate complete preferences even if they do not have equal access to information on all schools). The language of coercion I use here derives from the implied consequence of non-participation being total exclusion from the BPS, the severity of which is dependent on the properties of the society external to the idealized setting. For the post-Brown v. Board of Education America in which the BPS mechanism was re-designed, this of course entailed a substantial degree of public hostility and systemic racism, an environment recently revisited on a national platform when the legacy of busing policy arose in the Democratic primary debates. Further, those excluded from the idealized system are typically also excluded from the market\u0026rsquo;s welfare calculus.\nHitzig argues that such coerced enactment gives rise to \u0026ldquo;pernicious\u0026rdquo; outcomes in some circumstances: \u0026ldquo;when ideal theory is enacted as in the BPS case, it might facilitate the evasion of a proper discussion of the real injustice particular to a given situation\u0026rdquo;, in this case that of racial inequality and \u0026ldquo;domination.\u0026rdquo; I am readily sympathetic to this perspective, but feel this argument would greatly benefit from more directly linking the normative gap to the mechanism\u0026rsquo;s failing marginalized groups. To me, marginalization does not clearly follow from the imprecision of stated preferences, for example. The Weyl thread linked to above infers severe implications, suggesting the argument conveys that Roth-style matching theory\n[hides the flaws of the underlying logic of capitalism] behind a pretense of satisfying abstract properties in an extremely narrow setting while neglecting e.g. that some participants are desperately poor and abused and that their outside option is jail while others can go to prep school\u0026quot;\nand that it\n[uses] formalism to kill off such contentious debates about neoliberalism\u0026hellip;destroying in a haze of technical purity our ability to honestly debate the way capitalism and resulting monopolies are ravaging our society\nPerhaps owing to my need to have things spelled out, this didn\u0026rsquo;t neatly follow from my reading of the paper (or at least the most recent draft I have access to) since it makes no reference to specific real-life implications of the normative gap other than vaguely as a distraction from addressing systemic social problems. The paper at is at multiple points purposefully framed away from a rejection of the redesigned BPS mechanism either in theory and practice. There are references to the shortcomings of matching theory\u0026rsquo;s underlying dependence on rational choice and opportunities for behavioral economics to act as a cautionary force on these technocratic prescriptions in order to accomplish the titular \u0026lsquo;bridging\u0026rsquo;, but I\u0026rsquo;m not clear on what that could entail.\nNonetheless, it was a refreshing critical complement to my recent matching-markets module. The list of things people have argued would improve traditional PhD economics training is ever-growing and includes instruction on the history of economic thought, the demotion of macroeconomics from a core course to a field course, and guidance on the actual practice of research. Integration of critical perspectives such as these is another.\nGraduate economics students will be familiar with the correspondence of different market designs to different theories of justice. A welfare module might entail comparing the graphical and algebraic representations of utilitarian, Rawlsian, and dictatorial social welfare functionals. Any treatment of matching markets will formalize the tradeoffs among the properties of Pareto efficiency, strategy-proofness, and stability (and all sub-variants thereof). But my feeling is that we are maybe susceptible to the appeal of \u0026ldquo;mechanical objectivity\u0026rdquo; that Hitzig argues is inherent to mechanism design beyond just the familiar inadequacies of Pareto.\n\u0026quot;How are you going to satirize this guy who is using laughter to set the world on fire?\u0026quot; Hardly original to to see Donald Trump\u0026rsquo;s comedic immunity as also applicable to Boris Johnson. Still, I\u0026rsquo;m thinking of Bo Burnham\u0026rsquo;s take Donald Trump\u0026rsquo;s comedic immunity as also applicable to Boris Johnson:\nI personally felt like Trump is a product of comedy as much as anything. I mean, when I watched him in those primaries, like, I could see the tactics that he used from the Comedy Central roast that he was a part of. I can absolutely see he used the tactics of comedic timing and ribbing and all of that. And when I watched the primaries and watched him dismiss everybody and watched him make fun of everybody, I\u0026rsquo;m like he is winning this in the way a comedian wins a room.\nIt was so funny to then watch the comedy community scramble around and act like we are the one thing that can take him down when it\u0026rsquo;s, like, are you kidding me? Like, this is the exact thing that\u0026rsquo;s being used for him. How are you going to make fun of this guy? How are you going to satirize this guy who is using, you know, laughter to set the world on fire?\nA European official on Johnson:\nWe answer his attacks, but the problem is that our answers are not funny.\nGo Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin (h/t Junho and Sam) Relatable depiction of a young protagonist\u0026rsquo;s guilt and shame attempting to reconcile the Christian doctrine with the process of coming of age. The novel\u0026rsquo;s shifting perspectives through generations of a family immediately recalled East of Eden, one of my all-time favorite books. The comparison carries through to its enigmatic ending. Was curious but couldn\u0026rsquo;t find anything online on how the timing of the novel\u0026rsquo;s writing tracks the evolution of Baldwin\u0026rsquo;s own personal relationship with his faith.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0021/","summary":"This paper investigates the peculiarities that arise when mechanism design is deployed in contexts in which social, racial and distributive justice are particularly salient. The paper draws on the distinction between ideal theory and non-ideal theory in political philosophy and the concept of performativity in economic sociology to argue that mechanism can enact elaborate ideal theories of justice. A normative gap thus emerges between the goals of the policymakers and the objectives of economic designs. As a result, mechanism design may obstruct stakeholders’ avenues for normative criticism of public policies and serve as a technology of depoliticization.","title":"Mechanism design and social justice; and 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' by James Baldwin"},{"content":"A psychotherapist reviews Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne Excerpts below slightly re-arranged for fluency:\nThere is nothing deep inside us, Richard Rorty once remarked, that we haven\u0026rsquo;t put there ourselves. So even though, at least for some people, psychoanalysis, and psychology more generally, have interesting things to say about misogyny, they also run the risk of naturalising it (misogyny is deep inside us because our mothers are)\nMisogynists, of course, are radical essentialists when it comes to women. They know exactly what they are like, and we should not, Manne intimates, be fighting one essentialism with another.\nOnce misogyny is essentialised \u0026ndash; once it is treated as in some way integral to our nature, or just a part of how we live \u0026ndash; it all too easily becomes one of Manne\u0026rsquo;s exonerating narratives. If there is little justice for women, what is there? If there is no cure for misogyny, what is there? The question then is how to co-exist with it.\nHer book is clarifying about misogyny, but it is equally interesting for what it has to say about the issue that has dogged the social sciences virtually since their inception: the relationship of the individual to the systems and structures that seemingly comprise him or her.\nA review of books on the American opioid crisis Including \u0026ldquo;Dopesick\u0026rdquo; by Beth Macy :\nEach of these books devotes chapters to the history of OxyContin, a so-called blockbuster drug whose lamentable success was owed to a confluence of factors particular to the US. They include, but are not limited to: the country\u0026rsquo;s dysfunctional privatised healthcare system, which makes it possible for addicts to accumulate doctors willing to prescribe painkillers in a way they can\u0026rsquo;t in the UK; a corrupt regulatory agency beholden to the industry it was tasked with regulating; a punitive legal paradigm that criminalises drug users instead of helping them; an abstinence-only approach to treating drug addiction that impedes evidence-based medication-assisted treatment; corporate greed; a political class that takes marching orders from the lobbyists of said corporations; entrenched poverty, joblessness and hopelessness; and a general epistemological failure when it comes to ideas about what \u0026lsquo;drugs\u0026rsquo; are, which psychoactive chemicals are safe and which are dangerous, and what a drug dealer is supposed to look like. These factors converged in such a way as to unleash hundreds of millions of potent pills out into the world in the late 1990s and 2000s, which in turn prepared a consumer market for heroin. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, each one of them a world.\nEach of these books devotes chapters to the history of OxyContin, a so-called blockbuster drug whose lamentable success was owed to a confluence of factors particular to the US. They include, but are not limited to: the country\u0026rsquo;s dysfunctional privatised healthcare system, which makes it possible for addicts to accumulate doctors willing to prescribe painkillers in a way they can\u0026rsquo;t in the UK; a corrupt regulatory agency beholden to the industry it was tasked with regulating; a punitive legal paradigm that criminalises drug users instead of helping them; an abstinence-only approach to treating drug addiction that impedes evidence-based medication-assisted treatment; corporate greed; a political class that takes marching orders from the lobbyists of said corporations; entrenched poverty, joblessness and hopelessness; and a general epistemological failure when it comes to ideas about what \u0026lsquo;drugs\u0026rsquo; are, which psychoactive chemicals are safe and which are dangerous, and what a drug dealer is supposed to look like. These factors converged in such a way as to unleash hundreds of millions of potent pills out into the world in the late 1990s and 2000s, which in turn prepared a consumer market for heroin. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, each one of them a world.\nThe described ease with which self-interested parties can exploit terrible public health studies is disheartening: does academic work ever dictate policy or does it just offer a misleadingly diverse menu of evidence that only steers momentum in the direction of the most powerful interest groups? The history of tobacco, fossil fuels, and opioids are deeply discouraging. Likewise for academia interacting with the judiciary:\nA resort weekend for judges made American courts more conservative (h/t Helena) That\u0026rsquo;s the thesis of a working paper by Elliott Ash, Daniel L. Chen, and Suresh Naidu. Transcribing a podcast discussion of the work:\nDylan Matthews: You had some really eye-popping examples in the paper about pollution.\nSuresh Naidu: Yeah, and it kind of reveals... sometimes when you take economics too literally, it leads you into kind of very sociopathic ways of thinking about things. We have quotes from Armen Alchian, who said, \u0026lsquo;Give me a capsule that will magically clean all the air in Los Angeles... Beg me to crush it... I won\u0026rsquo;t crush the capsule. Because if I do, poor blacks will have to pay $20 a month more for land rental... The black in Watts, already used to living with bad air, loses his discount for doing that.\u0026rsquo;\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s just this idea that if you clean up the pollution, more people will want to live there and that will drive up the housing prices, making the people that are already used to pollution worse off. I think that\u0026rsquo;s the kind of reasoning you\u0026rsquo;ll find in a lot of what the Manne teachers were teaching, as well as, \u0026ldquo;Here\u0026rsquo;s why a lot of regulation by the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] might not be the most efficient way of reducing environmental damages \u0026hellip; and maybe people don\u0026rsquo;t value environmental damage that much anyway.\u0026rdquo;\nDM:** There\u0026rsquo;s a section in the paper where you talk about how [Goetz] had an argument that it can be rational to punish black defendants more than white defendants for the same crime. Where does that come from?\nSN:** Alongside the ideas about antitrust and regulation, there also comes this idea of thinking about crime as something that can be a rational decision. For a while, people thought that criminals were like social deviants or psychologically disturbed, and what economics brings to that is, \u0026lsquo;Nope, criminals are rational like everybody else, and they\u0026rsquo;re making decisions based on considering costs and benefits.\u0026rsquo;\nWhat that means is that part of the object of sentencing and punishment should be altering the calculus of crime. And one of the values of being harsh in sentencing, for example, is that you deter future criminals.\nI\u0026rsquo;m only about to begin a PhD now and have never so much as had to apply for a grant so I\u0026rsquo;m surely green and naïve about the relationship between billionaires and policy-oriented research. Still, I don\u0026rsquo;t anticipate that future experience will shake me from the discomfort of its normalization even when goals and politics happen to align. Like sentiments like this from a criminal justice economist on Koch funding in her research area:\nThey also frequently host conferences that bring top-notch researchers and practitioners together in one room — a chance to meet everyone else who’s working in this space. In other words, they throw great parties — sounds trivial but this is super important \u0026amp; helpful! 2/n\n\u0026mdash; Jennifer Doleac (@jenniferdoleac) May 25, 2019 To my fellow liberals that love to hate the Koch brothers, I simply say: the story is more complicated (as always, right?). Charles Koch in particular is enabling \u0026amp; supporting evidence-based CJ reform in red \u0026amp; blue states alike, and that is something we should all appreciate. 6/6\n\u0026mdash; Jennifer Doleac (@jenniferdoleac) May 25, 2019 Storming the Wall, by Todd Miller The detention-center crisis at the US-Mexico border is not often enough described as America\u0026rsquo;s long-standing and intentional climate policy . Central thesis of the book:\nOne of the most reliable forecasts for our collective future is that a vast numbers of people will be on the move and vast numbers of agents will be trained, armed, and paid to stop them\u0026hellip; the world\u0026rsquo;s biggest polluters are the same countries constructing unprecedented border regimes\u0026hellip; I have set out to chronicle the way a massive system of social and economic exclusion militarizes divisions not only between the rich and the poor, but between the environmentally secure and the environmentally exposed\nAnd some choice excerpts from my reading:\nAccording to geographer Elisabeth Vallet, there were 16 border fences when the Berlin Wall fell in 1988. Now there are more than 70 across the globe, a number that accelerated after 9//11 and includes Hungary, Greece, Spain, Morocco, Turkey, and India among the countries that have also constructed border walls\u0026hellip; Militarized borders are not only proliferating throughout the globe, they emanate from centers of power, such as the United States and the European Union, that fund border infrastructure and train the guards.\nMore dangerous than climate disruption was the climate migrant. More dangerous than the drought were the people who can\u0026rsquo;t farm because of the drought. More dangerous than the hurricane were the people displaced by the storm. The climate refugee was a threat to the very war planes required to enforce the financial and political order where 1 percent of the population wielded more economic power than the rest of the world combined.\nHarsha Walia wrote that \u0026lsquo;patterns of displacement and migration reveal the unequal relations between rich and poor, between North and South, between whiteness and racialized others.\u0026rsquo; \u0026hellip; Angela Y. Davis said that \u0026rsquo;the refugee movement is the movement of the 21st century. It\u0026rsquo;s the movement that is challenging the effects of global capitalism, and it\u0026rsquo;s the movement that is calling for civil rights for all human beings.\u0026rsquo;\nElbit Systems has invented a semi-sentient fortified \u0026lsquo;smart wall\u0026rsquo; capable of detecting human movement and touch. The company is now buliding a series of high-tech surveillance towers that are able to see night and day for a distance of up to seven miles. These towers are able to work in tandem with one another, in tandem with the drones, in tandem with the more than 12,000 motion sensors implanted along the 2,000-mile Mexican border.\n\u0026ldquo;The sameness of Cass Sunstein\u0026rdquo; Pretty mean-spirited. Recommended.\nLet\u0026rsquo;s consider, for a moment, some of the things we\u0026rsquo;ve learned since Nudge came out in 2008. We now know that in the arena of environmental regulation, nudges decrease support for the more ambitious policies that might be needed to avert an ecological catastrophe. We know that a technocratic, cost-benefit-focused approach to government works to the detriment of visionary change. We know that the old neoliberal binary\u0026mdash;state bad, market good\u0026mdash;is simplistic and no longer squares with a reality in which many of our greatest tyrannies emerge from a rapacious and meekly regulated private sector. Most importantly we know that the Obama presidency, the guiding hope to so many market-friendly liberals, ended with rising inequality, stalled social mobility, a spiraling climate disaster, and the Trumpian revolt against expertise. Sunstein ignores all of this.\nThe world has changed dramatically since those days, but Sunstein\u0026rsquo;s ideas, much like his prose, have refused to evolve with it. To read How Change Happens you\u0026rsquo;d think it was still 2008, markets were efficient, the pie was growing for everyone, and technical experts could be trusted to solve whatever minor aggravations to the social contract emerged. Sunstein continues to write as if nudges and cost-benefit analysis\u0026mdash;the whole technocratic shebang\u0026mdash;are cheeky new ideas worth giving a shot, and not the codified bedrock of an approach to government with a real and unflattering historical track record. Experience has not shaken the Sunstein worldview. It remains as smug as ever.\nArticles on land reform One in South Africa . I ended up highlighting several lines from nearly every page in my physical copy, but feels wrong to excerpt such a complicated issue.\nAnd another on privatization of land in Britain :\nOn average \u0026ndash; that is, for all kinds of housing \u0026ndash; land now accounts for 70 per cent of a house\u0026rsquo;s sale price. In the 1930s it was 2 per cent.) When Thatcher entered Downing Street in May 1979, more land was owned by the state than ever before: 20 per cent of Britain\u0026rsquo;s total area. Today the figure is 10.5 per cent. The disposals include council houses, forests, farms, moors, royal dockyards, military airfields, railway arches, railway sidings, museums, theatres, playgrounds, parks, town halls, bowling greens, allotments, children\u0026rsquo;s centres, leisure centres, school playing fields. There has been in Christophers\u0026rsquo;s words \u0026lsquo;a colossal devaluation of the public estate\u0026rsquo;, and not one that came about by accident.\nIn 1985, less than a quarter of rented homes were privately owned; in 2014, more than half. Rent as a proportion of household expenditure has doubled over the same period. Rent is the primary source of economic growth in the UK. In 2006, asking what had helped the British economy grow \u0026lsquo;so wondrously\u0026rsquo;, the Guardian\u0026rsquo;s finance reporter Patrick Collinson wrote \u0026lsquo;The answer [is] the rise of the landlord class \u0026hellip; in modern Britain, it seems, putting up the rent is somehow regarded as economic growth \u0026hellip; Germany makes millions of cars, Japan still makes consumer electronics. Britain produces buy-to-let landlords. How our competitors must envy our economic success.\u0026rsquo;\nThe New Yorker\u0026rsquo;s BoJo piece is better than the *New York Review\u0026rsquo;*s BoJo piece But from the latter:\nIt is a mark of how far Britain has fallen that, in what may indeed be its biggest crisis since 1940, so many Tories are willing to suspend disbelief in Johnson\u0026rsquo;s pantomime caricature of the man who gave it the courage to \u0026ldquo;stand alone\u0026rdquo; in that dark hour. So what if he has the V for Victory sign the wrong way around?\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0020/","summary":"You already know what you’re going to get: a section on the joys and uses of cost-benefit analysis, some dashed-off thoughts about utilitarianism and negative freedoms, three or four chapters on nudges and their importance to the design of seatbelt policy, the primacy of Daniel Kahneman–style \u0026lsquo;slow thinking\u0026rsquo; over intuition and moral heuristics, a Learned Hand quote, and a few weak anecdotes about Sunstein’s time as President Obama’s regulator-in-chief, all delivered through a prose that combines the dreariest elements of Anglo-American analytical style with the proto-numerate giddiness of a libertarian undergrad who’s just made first contact with the production possibility frontier.","title":"The opioid crisis; 'the sameness of Cass Sunstein'; and 'Storming the Wall' by Todd Miller"},{"content":"Finally returning to writing up some of what I\u0026rsquo;ve been reading after a more-than-four-month hiatus. Was tied up with commitments to my thesis and preliminary exams and then I had an extended post-exam period of absolute indolence, which included watching that new Netflix show about competitive glass-blowing (recommended!). In that time, I\u0026rsquo;ve accumulated a large stack of unread publication subscriptions I\u0026rsquo;ve neglected and over a hundred browser tabs of links I\u0026rsquo;ve saved to sift through. Why am I explaining myself? There are five people that read these.\nA first run-through.\nData imperialism in the NBA At 35:30 of this podcast , Sixers head coach Brett Brown talks to sportswriter Zach Lowe about how his team integrates counterintuitive insights from data analysis into on-the-ground basketball strategy, which has generally entailed having defenses overload on corner three-pointers and in-paint field goals at the cost of mid-range jumpshots, purportedly the least efficient shot in the game.\nBrown recounts the discomfort of watching his Sixers concede three straight midrange jumpers to All-Star opponent LaMarcus Aldridge. The analytics suggest it\u0026rsquo;s still a winning strategy in the long run, but Brown noted the effect of the perceived futility on his players\u0026rsquo; morale and adjusted his defense accordingly. Lowe refers to it as \u0026ldquo;the battle between math and humans... I don\u0026rsquo;t think [the players] care about the math in that moment.\u0026rdquo; Brown:\nBrown*: That\u0026rsquo;s when you get a really big hammer and smash your calculator... The players are the pulse of what\u0026rsquo;s really going on\u0026hellip; The comfort of a player... people don\u0026rsquo;t want to see repetitive buckets. Defensively. Competitively.*\nLowe: That\u0026rsquo;s exactly what it is: to get beat by the same thing over and over again even if you know in your heart that same thing\u0026rsquo;s not gonna beat us much longer.\nRelatedly and embedded below, ESPN commentators Bomani Jones and Pablo Torre discuss the perceived intrusion of empiricism into sports management. I disagree with a number of points Jones makes (e.g. analytics have been an overwhelming success beyond just the Warriors; to dispute that reflects a misunderstanding of what analytics are), but found their discussion refreshing and much better than the Jalen Rose interview in the New Yorker that it aligns itself with.\nJones\u0026rsquo; main point is interesting: the consequence of the increased prominence of data analytics into basketball decision-making is that the diversity problems endemic to STEM fields and corporate executives\u0026mdash;those who typically govern NBA franchises\u0026mdash;is now being imported into the most powerful positions in a sport where 80% of the talent is black. It crowds out the one pathway into positions of power in the NBA that black people have traditionally enjoyed through the basketball expertise of former players.\nHow to get into the filmography of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (h/t Junho) Part of BFI\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;fast track to fandom\u0026rdquo; series that has also covered Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, and Hirokazu Koreeda, as well as neo-noir and mumblecore as genres (all linked to at the bottom of the article)\nThe comparative politics of workplace maternal policy (h/t Helena) In the course of my interviews, I discovered that American working mothers generally blame themselves for how hard their lives are. They take personal responsibility for problems that European mothers recognize as having external causes. The lesson here isn\u0026rsquo;t for overwhelmed American parents to look longingly across the Atlantic; it\u0026rsquo;s to emulate the Swedes, Germans and Italians by harboring the reasonable expectation that the state will help.\nThe Guardian on the emergence of a transatlantic left-wing economics Last July, NEF published a report advocating a sharp increase in the number of British co-operatives. On one of its later pages, with almost no fanfare, the report also proposed that conventional companies be required to give their employees shares, to create what NEF called an \u0026ldquo;inclusive ownership fund\u0026rdquo;. In September, with a few modifications, the proposal became Labour party policy. \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve never seen anything like it, from thinktank idea to adoption as policy!\u0026rdquo; says Mathew Lawrence, one of the report\u0026rsquo;s authors. This month, a version of the policy was also adopted by the US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.\nDoes science advance one funeral at a time? (Azoulay and Graff Zivin, AER Forthcoming at the AER. From the abstract (h/t @page_eco) :\n\u0026hellip;these results suggest that outsiders are reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive and that a number of barriers may constrain entry even after she is gone. Intellectual, social, and resource barriers all impede entry, with outsiders only entering subfields that offer a less hostile landscape for the support and acceptance of \u0026lsquo;foreign\u0026rsquo; ideas.\nThe authors, Pierre Azoulay and Joshua Graff Zivin, discuss the paper in this blog post :\nIn 2003, the two of us made a wager. We had just left a talk by a renowned scientist, when Pierre quipped, \u0026ldquo;It must be amazing to work in his orbit, where his brilliance and the intellectual exchange of ideas must raise the level of scholarship of everyone around him.\u0026rdquo; Josh, a bit more sardonic in nature, replied, \u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know. I bet he consumes a lot of scarce research resources and commands an oversized amount of attention. He might well suck all the oxygen out of the room.\u0026rdquo; Without missing a beat, Pierre countered that this was really an empirical question. Nearly a decade-and-a-half later, we have some answers. It seems we were both right.\nThese results paint a picture of scientific fields as scholarly guilds to which elite scientists can regulate access, providing them with outsized opportunities to shape the direction of scientific advance in that space.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll be honest: I have looked up the birthyears of some senior academics to gauge how long the field would have to tolerate their influential wrongness. Reminds me of this academic dispute between senior and junior paleontologists when the latter presented evidence that T. rexes were hunters and not (just) scavengers:\nThe discovery helped refute an old hypothesis, revived by the formidable paleontologist Jack Horner, that T. rex was solely a scavenger. Horner argued that T. rex was too slow and lumbering, its arms too puny and its eyesight too poor, to prey on other creatures. When DePalma\u0026rsquo;s find was picked up by the national media, Horner dismissed it as \u0026ldquo;speculation\u0026rdquo; and merely \u0026ldquo;one data point.\u0026rdquo; He suggested an alternative scenario: the T. rex might have accidentally bitten the tail of a sleeping hadrosaur, thinking that it was dead, and then \u0026ldquo;backed away\u0026rdquo; when it realized its mistake. \u0026ldquo;I thought that was absolutely preposterous,\u0026rdquo; DePalma told me. At the time, he told the Los Angeles Times , \u0026ldquo;A scavenger doesn\u0026rsquo;t come across a food source and realize all of a sudden that it\u0026rsquo;s alive.\u0026rdquo; Horner eventually conceded that T. rex may have hunted live prey. But, when I asked Horner about DePalma recently, he said at first that he didn\u0026rsquo;t remember him: \u0026ldquo;In the community, we don\u0026rsquo;t get to know students very well.\u0026rdquo;\nA review of Charged by Emily Bazelon There\u0026rsquo;s an affecting appeal for compassion in the prison reform movement not just for the wrongfully convicted, but for those who have served their time:\nCartwright\u0026rsquo;s story reminds us that the critical cases in arguing about incarceration are the cases not of the innocent but of the guilty. If we believe that Noura Jackson was innocent, it is easy to be indignant about her years in prison. The challenge is to justify her incarceration if we stipulate that she wasn\u0026rsquo;t.\nThe evidence is overwhelming that, even with the most seemingly noxious criminals, age and time wear away danger: little violent crime is done by middle-aged people, and eliminating all hope of release is one of the crueller, if unfortunately not at all unusual, punishments we impose.\nJustice without compassion is something other than civilized. We look back now in proper horror at the rituals of prison hangings, once so frequent in Britain and America both, without thinking that homicide is now acceptable. What was at stake was not the convict\u0026rsquo;s fate but ours. We have to want to humanize the treatment of those we think \u0026ldquo;belong\u0026rdquo; in prison with the same energy with which we agitate for those we don\u0026rsquo;t.\nIt brings to mind the story of Michelle Jones , incarcerated for over two decades for the murder of her infant child. During her incarceration, she led a team of inmates conducting research in American history using photocopies of archival documents, which she would present via videoconference. She was accepted to multiple PhD programs, but her offer from Harvard\u0026rsquo;s history department was rescinded.\nJones would go on to enroll in NYU, but to quote the book review, was Harvard\u0026rsquo;s rescindment \u0026ldquo;essential or merely vindictive\u0026rdquo;?\n\u0026ldquo;We didn\u0026rsquo;t have some preconceived idea about crucifying Michelle,\u0026rdquo; said John Stauffer, one of the two American studies professors [at Harvard]. \u0026ldquo;But frankly, we knew that anyone could just punch her crime into Google, and Fox News would probably say that P.C. liberal Harvard gave 200 grand of funding to a child murderer, who also happened to be a minority. I mean, c\u0026rsquo;mon.\u0026rdquo;\nWhy translating Homer into English is such a nightmare She announces later that she is also translating The Iliad\n4. Similarly, there aren\u0026#39;t enough non-babyish, non-silly ways to say that something is very big/ large/ ginormous/ massive/ huge/ vast/ jumbo/ whopping / titanic/ hefty/Brobdignagian.\n\u0026mdash; Dr Emily Wilson (@EmilyRCWilson) March 8, 2019 Cities: Skyline\u0026rsquo;s traffic doctor I was linked to the video below and unexpectedly found myself transfixed for its entire 28-minute duration. Cities: Skyline is a PC game in which the the player basically acts as an urban planner whose responsibilities include the designation of residential and commercial zones and construction of roads and power plants, very much like Sim City.\nThis YouTube channel is basically a guy getting sent city files from players of the game who\u0026rsquo;ve run into issues with traffic congestion. His videos are him diagnosing and fixing these problems in real time with live commentary, for example by assigning right-of-way rules at at intersections, imposing merging rules, removing unnecessary four-lane roads or installing roundabouts. Mildly therapeutic, though daunting as someone as someone who cannot drive.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0019/","summary":"In 2003, the two of us made a wager. We had just left a talk by a renowned scientist when Pierre quipped, \u0026lsquo;It must be amazing to work in his orbit, where his brilliance and the intellectual exchange of ideas must raise the level of scholarship of everyone around him.\u0026rsquo; Josh, a bit more sardonic in nature, replied, \u0026lsquo;I don’t know. I bet he consumes a lot of scarce research resources and commands an oversized amount of attention. He might well suck all the oxygen out of the room.\u0026rsquo; Without missing a beat, Pierre countered that this was really an empirical question. Nearly a decade-and-a-half later, we have some answers. It seems we were both right. These results paint a picture of scientific fields as scholarly guilds to which elite scientists can regulate access, providing them with outsized opportunities to shape the direction of scientific advance in that space.","title":"Data imperialism in the NBA; Apichatpong Weerasethakul; the virtues of academic giants dying; and Emily Wilson on translating Homer"},{"content":"Late post because I lost an early draft from two weeks ago. I also initially had a bullet-point on David Wallace-Wells\u0026rsquo; climate change book here but it morphed into its own post, posted just before this one.\nCoverage of \u0026rsquo;the migrant caravan\u0026rsquo; Why wasn\u0026rsquo;t it covered this way from the beginning:\nSan Pedro Sula may not be well known, but from 2011 to 2014 it was the most violent city in the world. The only thing to do there is escape. The crime syndicates, which have complete control over the region and the power of life and death over its people, have in recent years plunged Honduras into an unofficial state of war\u0026hellip;. President Trump talks about the migrant caravan as if it were an attempted invasion. In reality, Honduras and Central America have paid an enormous price precisely because of US policies.\nThis is what people are fleeing from, this landscape that seems to offer no future but killing or being killed. Despite their varied histories, the migrants all have in common the desire\u0026mdash;or rather the need\u0026mdash;to escape the violence of the drug gangs and the lack of work and opportunity in their country.\nJakelin Caal Maquin, age seven, was healthy when she left Raxruhá, Guatemala, with her father. On the evening of December 6, both were arrested, along with 161 other migrants, by the US border patrol in New Mexico, after illegally crossing the border. A few hours later, while in the custody of American border agents, Jakelin began suffering from a high fever and seizures; she was taken by helicopter to a hospital, where she died the next day from septic shock, dehydration, and liver failure. She had traveled two thousand miles, crossing the Mexican desert, enduring weeks of exhaustion and hardship to reach the US, because she knew that beyond its border she could hope for something better than the future her own country offered. She died in the very place she could have begun a new life.\nDespite Trump\u0026rsquo;s many assertions, there is no evidence that criminals or drug traffickers formed any part of the caravan. The journalists who followed it have consistently reported that it is made up of ordinary, desperate people who are not criminals but are fleeing from criminals. Making these people seem dangerous, for example by claiming that the caravan has been infiltrated by \u0026ldquo;unknown Middle Easterners,\u0026rdquo; does, however, serve Trump\u0026rsquo;s interests, because it allows him to resort to emergency measures to keep the migrants from entering or remaining in the United States.\nCBS also reported last week that 4,556 complaints over the past four years alleged unaccompanied migrant children were sexually abused in US custody\nThe New York Review article makes note of the diminishing numbers at refugee camps at the border and cite data from Mexican authorities: from a caravan originally estimated to be about 10,000 strong, 1,300 migrants returned home, 2,900 received humanitarian visas from Mexico and are living there legally, and 2,600 were arrested by US Border Patrol for attempting to cross illegally. The New York Times explored these migrants\u0026rsquo; decisions to return to their home countries, attempt an illegal crossing, or settle in Mexico in the face of increasingly stringent policy under President Trump. It suggests that most of the asylum seekers who have given up on entering the United States were typically economic migrants who saw opportunity in joining the Honduran exodus:\nMexican officials said the data on people who have deferred or given up their quest for asylum in the United States reinforced an idea that is often raised by Mr. Trump: that many caravan members are not truly desperate for protection.\nImmigrant advocates said that hype and false promises had attracted a group that was somewhat unrepresentative of typical asylum seekers. But they pointed to the roughly 4,000 members who had successfully entered the United States and had at least requested protected status to argue that most had legitimate claims.\nMichelle Brané, the director of migrant rights and justice at the Women\u0026rsquo;s Refugee Commission, warned that while Mr. Trump\u0026rsquo;s tough policies may discourage the undeserving, they might also endanger people who need protection. She said they would likely drive vulnerable migrants into the arms of human traffickers, who promise to provide passage into the United States.\n\u0026ldquo;It may look like it\u0026rsquo;s working in the short term,\u0026rdquo; Ms. Brané said, \u0026ldquo;But I don\u0026rsquo;t think it\u0026rsquo;s a long-term solution. It\u0026rsquo;s driving people further into the shadows and that\u0026rsquo;s exactly the opposite of what we want.\u0026rdquo;\nIt recalls this New Yorker article from last year summarizing an outstanding effort by 2016 MacArthur Fellow Prof. Sarah Stillman and her graduate journalism students at Columbia to make a record of migrants who were deported to their violent deaths \u0026ldquo;with the help of border agents, immigration judges, politicans, and US voters\u0026rdquo;:\nFear of retribution keeps most grieving families from speaking publicly. We contacted more than two hundred local legal-aid organizations, domestic-violence shelters, and immigrants\u0026rsquo;-rights groups nationwide, as well as migrant shelters, humanitarian operations, law offices, and mortuaries across Central America. We spoke to families of the deceased. And we gathered the stories of immigrants who had endured other harms\u0026mdash;including kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault\u0026mdash;as a result of deportations under Obama and Trump.\nAs the database grew to include more than sixty cases, patterns emerged. Often, immigrants or their families had warned U.S. officials that they were in danger if sent back. Ana Lopez, the mother of a twenty-year-old gay asylum seeker named Nelson Avila-Lopez, wrote a letter to the U.S. government during Christmas week in 2011, two months after Immigration and Customs Enforcement accidentally deported him to Honduras. Nelson had fled the country at seventeen, after receiving gang threats. He\u0026rsquo;d entered the U.S. unauthorized and been ordered removed, but an immigration judge then granted him an emergency stay of his deportation so that he could reopen his case for asylum. An ICE agent told his family\u0026rsquo;s legal team that Nelson was deported because \u0026ldquo;someone screwed up,\u0026rdquo; and ICE alleges that the proper office had not been notified of the judge\u0026rsquo;s stay.\nFrancisco Cantú, the former Border Patrol guard whose article on border violence was previously linked to here, reviews a new book taking a historical look at the race-based violence and militarism of the American frontier and its modern incarnation in the southern Border Patrol. This is a history of atrocity\u0026mdash;including \u0026ldquo;the lynching of thousands of men, women and children of Mexican descent from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century\u0026rdquo;\u0026mdash;that the Times this week reported is struggling to be preserved . The book is \u0026ldquo;The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America\u0026rdquo; by the historian Greg Gandin:\nGrandin\u0026rsquo;s chapters on the Border Patrol make evident the origins of many of today\u0026rsquo;s most egregious border-enforcement practices. When I read of the Mexicans who were routinely jeered at by federal agents in the 1920s as they crossed the bridge from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso, I thought of the agents who mocked a roomful of crying migrant children last summer after they had been separated from their parents. \u0026ldquo;Aqui tenemos una orquesta,\u0026rdquo; one agent joked\u0026mdash;\u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;ve got an orchestra here.\u0026rdquo; When I read of the workplace police raids that were conducted in the early nineteen-thirties, with the sanction of the Hoover Administration, as a \u0026ldquo;psychological gesture\u0026rdquo; to scare deportable migrants, I thought of the \u0026ldquo;show me your papers\u0026rdquo; law, passed in Arizona in 2010 and then adopted by other states, with the explicit hope of driving migrants toward self-deportation. When I read of the Border Patrol agents who admitted to reporters in the nineteen-seventies that, when pursuing migrant families, they would often try to apprehend the youngest member first, so that the rest would surrender in order to avoid being separated, I thought, inevitably, of the enactment last year of \u0026ldquo;zero tolerance,\u0026rdquo; which turned family separation into a national policy.\nBecause I served as a Border Patrol agent, from 2008 to 2012, Grandin\u0026rsquo;s account brought up more personal memories for me as well. Despite its white-supremacist roots, the Border Patrol has evolved into an agency where more than half of its members are of Latinx descent. Just as the military has long promised social mobility to immigrants and minority populations, the Border Patrol provides rare access to financial security and the privileges of full citizenship, especially for those living in rural border communities. In America, even at the individual level, citizenship politics often wins out over identity politics.\nSabrina, by Nick Drnaso Our latest book club venture. Strong recommendation from The New Yorker and I thinkthe LA Review had the best take on it:\nAt its best, Drnaso\u0026rsquo;s work encourages readers\u0026mdash;more thoroughly than might art with more explicit rendering of its characters\u0026mdash;to recognize the interiority of other people. We pause, reflect, and introduce more of ourselves.\nAs someone unexperienced with graphic novels\u0026mdash;I think I\u0026rsquo;ve only read Archie comics, \u0026ldquo;Watchmen\u0026rdquo;, and a few manga that were popular during high school\u0026mdash;I was surprised by how well Drnaso accomplishes that expression of interiority through images drawn in the same style as airline emergency instructions (someone else\u0026rsquo;s comparison that I can\u0026rsquo;t seem to source at the moment). The illustrations leave a lot more implied that can text-based novels. Some choice examples with some short commentary:\nIn these two frames, Drnaso can communicate a conversation hitting a lull without ever saying anything like \u0026ldquo;An awkward silence ensued.\u0026rdquo; Previous frames cut back-and-forth between the two characters as they took turns presenting their ideas so the zoomout brings both into frame emphasizing the physical presence of the silence. Sabrina\u0026rsquo;s (in blue) arm position has changed to denote the passage of time.\nIn context, we know exactly what Calvin is telling Teddy here; the exact grammar of how he phrases it is secondary to what the information means to Teddy. Teddy in shock collapses into an awkward, painful heap that would be difficult to describe in words.\nExactly what it\u0026rsquo;s like to Facetime a child who\u0026rsquo;s too close to the camera. The conversation is over as soon as the child goes out of frame (both of the panel and of Calvin\u0026rsquo;s screen, which are the same perspective here).\nTeddy and Calvin are seated together. This page only uses angles emphasizing Teddy\u0026rsquo;s isolation, obscuring Teddy who\u0026rsquo;s seated right next to him\u0026hellip;\n\u0026hellip;and the next shot is a comically contrasting cut to Calvin\u0026rsquo;s meager attempt to console him while wearing a Snuggie. The last three frames here communicate that Teddy has vomited without saying so or using an over-the-top onomatopoeic \u0026ldquo;BLEEECCCCHHHHH!!!\u0026rdquo; Just Calvin dipping his head slightly in second-hand embarrassment.\n\u0026ldquo;I don\u0026rsquo;t know what it means to write a Marxist novel\u0026rdquo; I guess the reason I feel skeptical of all that is it makes me feel that books have no potential to speak truth to power, they have no potential as political texts because of the role they play in the cultural economy\u0026hellip; because of its position as a commodity.\nJason Hickel vs. Bill Gates/Steven Pinker/Max Roser on the declien of poverty The finer points about data quality I don\u0026rsquo;t really care about (though on that, Branko Milanovic seems to be by far the most qualified ). I don\u0026rsquo;t find this graph being celebrated on Twitter particularly compelling. Poverty rates decreasing across all poverty lines over 25 years\u0026mdash;especially these last 25 years\u0026mdash;is a very low bar to clear and will be dominantly driven by China\u0026rsquo;s market reforms .\nLost in this level of aggregation is how many countries for which this invariance to poverty line does not hold (which I have no clue about but would like to see). And even in those cases, I\u0026rsquo;m not sure that\u0026rsquo;s a meaningful counterfactual upon which to evaluate the successes and inherent virtues of market fundamentalism.\n\u0026ldquo;One of the strangest things an African scholar can do is move to Europe to study Africa.\u0026rdquo; To commemorate completing my last economics class at Oxford:\n“One of the strangest things an African scholar can do is move to Europe to study Africa.” @Nanjala1 in the preface to her book Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Kenya https://t.co/Jj8Qc0o28S pic.twitter.com/sP5Q4GU85d\n\u0026mdash; David Evans (@DaveEvansPhD) February 15, 2019 ","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0018/","summary":"San Pedro Sula may not be well known, but from 2011 to 2014 it was the most violent city in the world. The only thing to do there is escape. The crime syndicates, which have complete control over the region and the power of life and death over its people, have in recent years plunged Honduras into an unofficial state of war…. President Trump talks about the migrant caravan as if it were an attempted invasion. In reality, Honduras and Central America have paid an enormous price precisely because of US policies.","title":"Corrective narratives of the migrant caravan and the American frontier; Sally Rooney's 'Marxist novel'; and 'Sabrina' by Nick Drnaso"},{"content":"The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells I\u0026rsquo;m not sure the title claim is advanced in the book or supported by the climate literature so some people may justifiably feel deceived (and maybe also by the cover; when the mass bee deaths feature, its connection to climate is dismissed). As far as I understand, certain parts of the world\u0026mdash;small island nations and some vulnerable coastal cities\u0026mdash;are on track to be submerged pending political intervention and others in South Asia and the Middle East will regularly have weather exceeding the limits of human survivability. But that\u0026rsquo;s just 30% of the world\u0026rsquo;s population for 20 days a year currently and maybe 48-74% of the population by 2100 depending on what we do. By then, that study estimates, many equatorial locations like Jakarta, Indonesia are expected to experience deadly heat 365 days a year . Luckily, the city will probably be completely below sea level anyway. So literally the entire Earth uninhabitable? Doesn\u0026rsquo;t seem likely. \u0026lsquo;Just\u0026rsquo; conducive to heat death on a daily basis for hundreds of millions thousands of miles away from political influence and the land inhabited by 5% of the world\u0026rsquo;s population will experience chronic submergence. And then the next century will start.\nTo be less flippant, the title serves mostly to make explicit the book\u0026rsquo;s origin as the author\u0026rsquo;s 2017 long-form (here \u0026rsquo;s a version annotated by scientists), which quickly became New York magazine\u0026rsquo;s most read article ever (though it\u0026rsquo;s since been unseated by a \u0026ldquo;Fire and Fury\u0026rdquo; excerpt). Many called the original article\u0026rsquo;s focus on and presentation of worst-case scenarios sensationalist, maybe most prominent among them the climatologist and climate science communicator Prof. Michael Mann. In Mann\u0026rsquo;s words , his problem with the article was \u0026ldquo;the fact that there were SCIENTIFIC INACCURACIES that PREFERENTIALLY fed a somewhat doomist narrative.\u0026rdquo; In contrast, with this book adaptation, \u0026ldquo;David has done his due diligence, vetted the science, and gotten it right.\u0026rdquo; Since the publication of the original article, Mann and Wallace-Wells have participated in a public conversation hosted by NYU to discuss the communication of climate science and have jointly promoted the book .\nTo me, the book is overwhelmingly a success and potentially an important leap forward in advancing how the public understands the enormity of the climate change problem. By \u0026lsquo;public\u0026rsquo;, I also mean to include academics from other disciplines and the op-ed intelligentsia who\u0026rsquo;ve decided to stake a claim of expertise in the area now that the Green New Deal proposal has made the topic politically relevant.\nPart of this contribution may be its updating the language of climate change. \u0026ldquo;97% consensus\u0026rdquo; and the questions of its happening and of human attribution are old . Here\u0026rsquo;s some new:\n250,000 additional deaths attributable to climate change every year, conservatively 200,000,000 as a median estimate for the number of (mostly intranational) migrants seeking refuge from climate by 2050. I\u0026rsquo;m being intentionally wordy because a \u0026ldquo;climate refugee\u0026rdquo; isn\u0026rsquo;t officially a thing yet . 70% of these will be from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. Climate change as \u0026ldquo;genocide,\u0026rdquo; as the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands put it The \u0026ldquo;catastrophic convergence\u0026rdquo; , the term introduced by journalist Christian Parenti in 2011 to describe the intersection of imperialism, neoliberalism, and climate change Environmental justice as a \u0026ldquo;climate caste system\u0026rdquo; , a Wallace-Wells coinage Climate reparations The main criticism I\u0026rsquo;ve seen levied against the book and similar ones has been that they are alarmist. While sometimes an appropriate epithet used to throw cold water on inappropriately extreme messaging (see the cloud study mentioned at the bottom of this post), it\u0026rsquo;s also had the effect of dismissing necessary attempts to bring the public up to speed with our current understanding of the consequences of climate change, which has advanced significantly in recent years. Wallace-Wells\u0026rsquo; work embraces the adjective: his recent NYT opinion piece adapted from the book uses the headline \u0026ldquo;Time to Panic.\u0026rdquo; The book\u0026rsquo;s first sentence, the same as the original article\u0026rsquo;s, is \u0026ldquo;It is worse, much worse, than you think.\u0026rdquo; And on page 138: \u0026ldquo;If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader.\u0026rdquo;\nThis gets to the heart of an outstanding issue with public engagement on the impacts of climate change. Any honest reading of the growing interdisciplinary literature on climate impacts should induce panic, a natural expression of empathy for the most vulnerable human beings on our planet. From my perspective, to admonish those who feel fear amounts to promotion of injustice and ignorance. Two climate journalists discuss that here .\nNoah Smith recently had what I think is a lazy take on the dangers of climate panic when comparing being upset by the prospects of climate impacts to the fear to itself be feared during the Great Depression:\nI think there\u0026#39;s something to this. FDR didn\u0026#39;t sell the New Deal by screaming about the dangers of total economic collapse. Climate change IS very scary, but we can\u0026#39;t afford to panic, because when we panic we tend to do silly, counterproductive things. https://t.co/GUybhptrha\n\u0026mdash; Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) February 26, 2019 To hone in on the Great Depression analogy, there is no meaningful parallel between the mass panic of bank runs collapsing the international economy to the supposed chaos that would ensue from learning what climate change does. When has high public concern ever led to commensurate or over-compensating policy ? As pointed out here , the metaphorical mapping would not have the concerned public playing the FDR role; it would be more like everyone but FDR noticing the stock market crashing and then pressuring the bumbling President to take action at an appropriately revolutionary scale. If made in good faith, it\u0026rsquo;s asilly if not harmful argument for Noah to half-ass for an important topic.\nIt also seems to be the opposite criticism to the typical one made about alarmism, which is that it induces political defeatism and paralysis. I realize I\u0026rsquo;m focusing on a single tweet, but Smith has over 135,000 Twitter followers and a Bloomberg column so his thinking out loud in 280 characters at a time to try to reconcile his staunch neoliberalism with the catastrophic embodiment of its shortcomings is unfortunately influential. A bit more on this later below.\nWe\u0026rsquo;ve lived with climate indifference for the past few decades and it hasn\u0026rsquo;t produced any meaningful policy. In contrast, the urgency of the young Democratic progressives made climate change maybe the defining issue of the 2020 Democratic primary before they were even sworn into Congress, this after none of the US presidential or vice-presidential debates from the last two races included a single question about climate change . To drive home the opportunities climate indifference has squandered, consider this hypothetical that Wallace-Wells presents:\n\u0026ldquo;If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year.\u0026rdquo;\nThe idea of fear inhibiting meaningful action is disputed in social movement theory and I hope I am not out of line in invoking civil rights movements :\nI want you to understand how overwhelming, how insurmountable it must have felt [in the Jim Crow South]. I want you to understand that there was no end in sight. It felt futile for them too. Then, as now, there were calls to slow down. To settle for incremental remedies for an untenable situation. They, too, trembled for every baby born into that world.\nYou don\u0026rsquo;t fight something like that because you think you will win. You fight it because you have to. Because surrendering dooms so much more than yourself, but everything that comes after you. Acquiescence, in this case, is what James Baldwin called \u0026rsquo;the sickness unto death.\u0026rsquo;\nWhat, now, do you have to lose? What else can you be but brave?\nIn 2017, 150 Indians carried the skulls of their fellow farmers \u0026mdash;some small subset of the 320,000 driven to suicide due to uncharacteristic climate-driven crop damage between 1995 and 2016\u0026mdash;and trekked to the capital Delhi to protest naked and sitting down for almost a month to demand a policy response: \u0026ldquo;We wanted to symbolically shame our leaders into action.\u0026rdquo; So the notion that the relatively wealthy and climate-insulated can\u0026rsquo;t be trusted to inform themselves about climate change because they might accidentally do too much out of fear is offensive, in my opinion. Maybe anti-alarmism is also part of the new climate denialism .\nIt is this notion of injustice that I think resonated most while reading this book and even while contributing the little I have to climate research. Wallace-Wells make the point that we\u0026rsquo;ve now expelled more greenhouse gases while aware of its contribution to the global greenhouse effect than we ever did in ignorance going back to the dawn of the industrial revolution. There is an intuitive unfairness now in \u0026ldquo;trying to bring many hundreds of millions more into the global middle class while knowing that the easy paths taken by the nations that industrialized in the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries are now paths to climate chaos.\u0026rdquo;\nThe legacy of colonialism, slavery, and Western exceptionalism permeate the narrative of climate change. The figure above shows that Saudi Arabia, India, Brazil, and Indonesia are expected to bear the largest share of economic growth impacts relative to their contribution of carbon emissions. For India and Brazil, this ratio is estimated to be roughly 4:1 (but maybe President Bolsonaro\u0026rsquo;s deforestation can swing the ratio towards equity ). The two biggest emitters\u0026mdash;the United States and China\u0026mdash;are net beneficiaries by this definition, China by a less than 1:4 ratio.\nThere is a normalized disregard for the well-being of those in vulnerable areas already suffering tremendously from climate change even among those prepared to embrace the science of climate. How else to interpet the Nobel committee approving the Nordhaus recommendation that 3.5 degrees of warming is optimal the same day that the devastating IPCC Report on 1.5 warming came out? How else to read these suggestions (tweets embedded to the right) that the brutal reality of climate change has finally arrived only now that it\u0026rsquo;s violently affected the United States in the last two years?\nThe only dimension along which climate change has been \u0026ldquo;far off\u0026rdquo; was in geography and political power. In 2013, even before Haiyan, 85% of Filipinos reported personal experience with climate change impacts, 54% of them describing them as \u0026ldquo;severe\u0026rdquo; . In 2015, 54% of Hispanic Americans rated global warming as \u0026ldquo;extremely or very important to them personally\u0026rdquo;. In 2017, monsoon-exacerbated floods affected 45 million in South Asia and submerged two thirds of Bangladesh, including parts of the makeshift hillside camps where nearly a million Rohingya refugees have been forced to settle at risk of death by disease or mudslides . When will developing countries or the vulnerable within developed countries get their say as frequently as do white op-ed writers or public intellectuals who command enormous platforms on seemingly any issue of their choosing regardless of experience or expertise? They haven\u0026rsquo;t yet. Anti-alarmism and Western exceptionalism would have you discount the value of those lives.\nOther than harrowing research findings, I think a problem in climate communications is its failure to capture the imagination. A small chapter in the book poses a question I\u0026rsquo;ve wondered myself: Where is the great climate-change novel? Land war, nuclear winter, artificial intelligence, and other generation-defining threats have inspired influential works of art, but none springs immediately to mind about climate change.\n\u0026ldquo;Mad Max: Fury Road\u0026rdquo;, while an action masterpiece, is only tenuously climate-related considering its desert dystopia was conceived before 1979. \u0026ldquo;Interstellar\u0026rdquo; was all right. I had been hoping from the trailer and its first half that \u0026ldquo;First Reformed\u0026rdquo; could be that movie, but I think it\u0026rsquo;s third act may have veered off message and it didn\u0026rsquo;t garner the Academy\u0026rsquo;s attention (not even an acting nomination for an outstanding entry by Ethan Hawke). Maybe \u0026ldquo;Woman At War\u0026rdquo; can be one.\nMusic-wise, I can only think of ANOHNI\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;4 Degrees\u0026rdquo; which was released in the context of the Paris Agreement. Thom Yorke, the vegetarian frontman of carbon-neutral Radiohead has said , \u0026ldquo;If I was going to write a protest song about climate change in 2015, it would be shit.\u0026rdquo;\nWallace-Wells offers some plausible explanations for its unique storytelling challenges, but I worry the answer may also be related to the aforementioned inequality.\nNext on the climate reading list: Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security by Todd Miller\nFederal disaster money favors the rich An NPR investigation has found that across the country, white Americans and those with more wealth often receive more federal dollars after a disaster than do minorities and those with less wealth. Federal aid isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily allocated to those who need it most; it\u0026rsquo;s allocated according to cost-benefit calculations meant to minimize taxpayer risk.\nPut another way, after a disaster, rich people get richer and poor people get poorer. And federal disaster spending appears to exacerbate that wealth inequality.\nThe UK\u0026rsquo;s CO2 emissions fell for the sixth consecutive year The longest run of reductions since the mid-19th century. Dr. Simon Evans points out this was driven entirely by reduction in coal demand, which comprise 7% of national emissions and is approaching zero in accordance with a 2025 timeline. Oil and gas-originated emissions have gone up.\nMann recently touched onthe recent article about the supercomputer simulation of climate-cloud formation feedback loops , which found global warming could soar by an additional eight degrees Celsius if a tipping point is breached. Mann cautions: \u0026ldquo;This effect only POTENTIALLY kicks in for CO2 levels of 1200+ ppm, much higher than we should EVER allow\u0026rdquo;\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0017/","summary":"I want you to understand how overwhelming, how insurmountable it must have felt [in the Jim Crow South]. I want you to understand that there was no end in sight. It felt futile for them too. Then, as now, there were calls to slow down. To settle for incremental remedies for an untenable situation. They, too, trembled for every baby born into that world. You don’t fight something like that because you think you will win. You fight it because you have to. Because surrendering dooms so much more than yourself, but everything that comes after you. Acquiescence, in this case, is what James Baldwin called \u0026rsquo;the sickness unto death.\u0026rsquo; What, now, do you have to lose? What else can you be but brave?","title":"'The Uninhabitable Earth' by David Wallace-Wells and the moral imperative of alarmism"},{"content":"Some second impressions on that statement signed by 3,300+ economists advocating for an American carbon dividend program, \u0026ldquo;the largest public declaration in the history of economics\u0026rdquo; .\nPutting a price on carbon is, as the number of signatories suggests, a fairly obvious and uncontroversial proposal that has been economic consensus for decades. In fact, a 1997 \u0026ldquo;Economists\u0026rsquo; statement on climate change\u0026rdquo; had a comparable 2,500 signatories though it also espoused a cap-and-trade scheme on top of the carbon tax. The rebate part proposed here is a surprising inclusion, but hardly revolutionary. Getting this many signatories was always going to be fairly easy and justifiable.\nHowever, it appears that what was originally a fairly uncontroversial opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal on behalf of the American economics academy has been co-opted by the Climate Leadership Council. There appear to be two homepages for the proposal: econstatement.org where assenting economists were directed and the CLC homepage , which claims ownership of the editorial and to have organized the proposal. Who are the CLC? This is from their website:\nThe Climate Leadership Council is an international policy institute founded in collaboration with a who\u0026rsquo;s who of business, opinion and environmental leaders to promote a carbon dividends framework as the most cost-effective, equitable and politically-viable climate solution.\nThe \u0026ldquo;who\u0026rsquo;s who of business\u0026rdquo; refers to these guys according to their website:\nHmm. Their prior work page is a pretty long list of editorials published in the most prominent American publications describing this same carbon dividend plan as a \u0026ldquo;Republican\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;conservative\u0026rdquo; plan against climate change.\nAccording to the FT , the CLC organized this \u0026ldquo;bipartisan effort that has united senior economists from both parties.\u0026rdquo;\nI find that odd. Nowhere on econstatement.org, where potential signatories were directed, does it mention the CLC, which is self-described as partisan. And nothing about a carbon dividend plan is particularly partisan unless you misrepresent this economic consensus as evidence the academy espouses a carbon dividend plan as a substitute for a Green New Deal-type stimulus program :\nBut Ms Yellen told the Financial Times the Green New Deal was costly, whereas the carbon tax, which would plough proceeds back to the public in dividend payments, would be the \u0026ldquo;most efficient way\u0026rdquo; to reduce emissions\u0026hellip; Ms Yellen said a carbon tax and dividend would be more \u0026ldquo;feasible\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;sensible\u0026rdquo; than the Green New Deal in its current form. \u0026ldquo;This is a plan that harnesses markets, it is much more efficient and less costly than methods proposed by the proponents of the Green New Deal,\u0026rdquo; she said.\nMarty Feldstein, a prominent Republican economist and former chief economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, said that economists agreed that carbon emissions were a serious problem. \u0026ldquo;Our current method of trying to control carbon emissions by complex regulations is a bad idea, we think it is better to use a price mechanism to do it,\u0026rdquo; said Mr Feldstein, also one of the signatories.\nMs Yellen is an adviser at the Climate Leadership Council, which organised the proposal. The group is backed by large companies including ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, General Motors and Unilever, as well as environmental groups such as the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund.\nTed Halstead, founder of the Climate Leadership Council, said that returning the proceeds of a future carbon tax directly to households was important to help make the plan \u0026ldquo;small government\u0026rdquo; friendly and revenue neutral. \u0026ldquo;The most significant part of the statement, is that for the first time in history, there is consensus on what to do with the money,\u0026rdquo; he said. Next he hopes to get carbon tax legislation introduced by both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, even though it may be unlikely to become law under the current administration. \u0026ldquo;I think it is fair to say that America has two choices, one is the route of the Green New Deal, one is the route recommended by the entire economic establishment, which is the carbon dividend plan,\u0026rdquo; he added.\nThe claims in bold are not at all what 3,300 economists agreed to by attaching their names to the statement. Nowhere in the statement did they suggest the proposed carbon dividend program be used as a substitute for more ambitious spending programs. Further, I haven\u0026rsquo;t looked at all into the details of the AOC draft of a Green New Deal proposal, but my understanding is that it would also include a progressive carbon tax scheme not unlike the ones these 3,300+ signatories endorse. This carbon tax scheme is precisely a \u0026ldquo;method proposed by proponents of the Green New Deal.\u0026rdquo; To misrepresent climate policy as a choice between the two seems like bad-faith argumentation if not intentional deception. As I understood it initially, Dr. Yellen and others organized the proposal independent of the CLC. Did all signatories know this wasn\u0026rsquo;t the case? I\u0026rsquo;m not sure. Did all signatories agree to this framing of their support as anti-Green New Deal? Clearly not, \u0026lsquo;cause here\u0026rsquo;s one:\n\u0026quot;Green New Deal\u0026quot; proposals would be a vast improvement over current policy. Extremely disappointed. Extremely.\n\u0026mdash; DeLong🖖 (@delong) February 18, 2019 Separately, I don\u0026rsquo;t know yet what to make of Dr. Bill Nordhaus\u0026mdash;who just accepted the Nobel Prize for his work in climate change economics just two months ago and was an advocate of carbon taxation as early as the 1970s\u0026mdash;not co-signing.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/posts/0001/","summary":"Economists espousing a minor carbon dividend plan isn\u0026rsquo;t surprising. But Janet Yellen, Marty Feldstein, and the oil-backed Climate Leadership Council seem to have purposely misappropriated and misrepresented the thousands of signatories\u0026rsquo; support to fabricate a non-existent consensus against complementary climate policy, namely green public works and subsidy programs.","title":"The 'Economists’ Statement on Carbon Dividends', an oil-funded Trojan horse?"},{"content":"The abolition of billionaires Noticed a funny dichotomy on the frontpage of the international edition of the Feb. 8 New York Times (pdf ). Two above-the-fold headlines on opposite sides: \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s high time we abolish billionaires\u0026rdquo; on the left and \u0026ldquo;Trump casts socialists as Americans\u0026rsquo; new threat\u0026rdquo; on the right. In between is an article about a growing trend of labor protests in the country with the second-most billionaires.\nThe content of the abolition article is pretty simplistic. Its author Farhad Manjoo is a veteran tech journalist, which is appropriate enough given his proximity to Silicon Valley tycoons, but the tech-centricity of the column maybe blunts the generality of the titular argument. In order, the industries that produce the most billionaires are finance, fashion and retail, real estate, manufacturing, and then tech. The part questioning the hypocrisy of tolerating \u0026ldquo;good\u0026rdquo; billionaires such as Tom Steyer\u0026mdash;who \u0026ldquo;ticks every liberal box\u0026rdquo;\u0026mdash;is interesting though. Vox had a more precise article on that topic in the context of the annual Gates letter\u0026rsquo;s recent publication. I disagree with its central argument.\nNick Gillespie, editor at large for Reason magazine, responds in a blog post titled \u0026ldquo;Should Paul McCartney and Other Billionaires Be \u0026lsquo;Abolished\u0026rsquo;?\u0026rdquo; although the URL says simply \u0026ldquo;destroy-all-billionaires\u0026rdquo;, which recalls this Silicon Valley scene . The \u0026rsquo;economic\u0026rsquo; arguments aren\u0026rsquo;t really worth addressing (the poor have washing machines), but most of all, I\u0026rsquo;m tired of libertarians only invoking the suffering of \u0026ldquo;the wretched of the earth\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;especially in the developing world\u0026rdquo; when convenient then ignoring their welfare in the moral calculus of anything else. Gillespie does it twice in that column when he considers the general improvement in living standards over time to be a convincing argument for no change.\nI found Business Insider\u0026rsquo;s offering to be better delineated than the Times column and much closer to definitive. They\u0026rsquo;ve been surprisingly strong on the topic as part of their Better Capitalism series.\nI think it\u0026rsquo;s interesting to think of how distinct this \u0026ldquo;millennial socialism\u0026rdquo; (The Economist\u0026rsquo;s term ) seems to be from Occupy Wall Street. When I was reading Jonathan Franzen\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Purity\u0026rdquo; last term, its repeated references to Occupy felt dated, written when expected it to have more staying power than it proved to have. I was living in downtown Manhattan attending a business school at the peak of the movement but still regularly forget it even happened. Other than the language of percentiles, it seems to have had disappointingly mild cultural influence.\nI\u0026rsquo;m finding other explanations for the generational shift to be unconvincing: The Economist repeatedly frames it asignorance of the Cold War , others chalk it up to the leadership of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I have some other ideas\u0026mdash;for example, I think it\u0026rsquo;s the inevitable conclusion as soon as you\u0026rsquo;re convinced that people shouldn\u0026rsquo;t die of poorness or that the prevailing variant of capitalism caused irrevocable climate change and provides no way out. Does it then follow that the incredible but less direct threat of climate change is more influential than the financial crisis in shaping this generation\u0026rsquo;s politics? Or if not climate change, then what?\nRelated: Some of the most specific progressive policy prescriptions I\u0026rsquo;ve seen from economists at prominent American universities (Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik, and Gabriel Zucman). Headline: \u0026ldquo;Economics after Neoliberalism\u0026rdquo;, a set of essays published in the Boston Review introducing their project, Economists for Inclusive Prosperity , self-described as \u0026ldquo;a network of academic economists committed to an inclusive economy and society.\u0026rdquo; I can\u0026rsquo;t say I really understand what this institution is.\nRelated: a recent comment in Nature, the super-rich and climate change Calculating the emissions from 0.54% of the wealthiest of the global population, according to our estimates, results in cumulative emissions equivalent to 13.6% of total lifestyle-related carbon emissions. In comparison, the world\u0026rsquo;s poorest 50% are responsible for about 10% of lifestyle consumption emissions.\nPhoebe Bridgers on the music industry\u0026rsquo;s #MeToo Published the day before the Times\u0026rsquo; summary of an investigation based on interviews with her and six women alleging sexual misconduct by Ryan Adams.\nEvery couple of months, something happens where, like, a dude in my periphery will make a very visible misstep, or say something inappropriate and you have to feel comfortable calling people out. Always. If someone really means a lot to you, you should be able to explain to them that they fucked up. And I\u0026rsquo;ve found that apologies are so easy, and [they\u0026rsquo;re] always well received. Not enough people apologize.\n\u0026hellip;Why is music\u0026rsquo;s #metoo moment so far behind that of fashion and film?\nA thought\u0026mdash;it\u0026rsquo;s pretty sinister\u0026mdash;but Harvey Weinstein, for example, he targeted women who would then become famous. But band-dude culture, a lot of the time it\u0026rsquo;s targeting a fan from, say, Wisconsin, that\u0026rsquo;s super young, someone you can sort of gaslight into believing it\u0026rsquo;s not abuse or who might be such a big fan that it\u0026rsquo;s not that hard for you to get them to shut up\u0026hellip; that fan is so isolated.\nIf 15 supermodels come out and say \u0026lsquo;fuck that guy\u0026rsquo;, people are more inclined to listen to them than if it\u0026rsquo;s a young girl from butt-fuck-nowhere, being like, \u0026lsquo;Hey, this one thing made me feel uncomfortable\u0026rsquo; as the musician just moves on to play a gig in the next town.\nhey so pic.twitter.com/P911Dvnfq3\n\u0026mdash; traitor joe (@phoebe_bridgers) February 17, 2019 The USA Gymnastics scandal was not a story of victims breaking their silence It has by the fall of 2018 become commonplace to describe the 499 known victims of Larry Nassar as \u0026ldquo;breaking their silence,\u0026rdquo; though in fact they were never, as a group, particularly silent. Over the course of at least 20 years of consistent abuse, women and girls reported to every proximate authority. They told their parents. They told gymnastics coaches, running coaches, softball coaches. They told Michigan State University police and Meridian Township police. They told physicians and psychologists. They told university administrators. They told, repeatedly, USA Gymnastics. They told one another. Athletes were interviewed, reports were written up, charges recommended. The story of Larry Nassar is not a story of silence. The story of Larry Nassar is that of an edifice of trust so resilient, so impermeable to common sense, that it endured for decades against the allegations of so many women.\nThe Rappler\u0026rsquo;s statement on the arrest warrant served to Maria Ressa Ressa, the Rappler\u0026rsquo;s executive editor and prominent critic of President Duterte\u0026rsquo;s violent drug war, was named one of Time\u0026rsquo;s People of the Year two months ago.\nNelson Mandela under incarceration A review of his recently published prison letters:\nToday\u0026rsquo;s familiar figure, enormously self-controlled, morally towering, and powerfully eloquent\u0026mdash;the man who would ultimately drive South Africa\u0026rsquo;s peaceful transition to full democracy\u0026mdash;was largely shaped during his decades of confinement. Those qualities were forged, deepened, or revealed during years of hard labor and deprivation of many basic human needs, such as a warm blanket and a mattress. During his first several years behind bars on Robben Island, where he would remain until he was transferred in 1982, Mandela was assigned a so-called D Grade, the lowest classification of South African prisoner, with fewer rights and more restrictions than even the most violent criminals. He and his codefendants in the trial that had resulted in his life sentence were regularly subjected to humiliating anal searches in front of other inmates.\nThis is the picture that emerges with remarkable force from The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela, which draws on hundreds of letters to loved ones, friends, and, in surprising numbers, to the authorities who confined him\u0026hellip; They reveal a man who grew wiser and more resourceful behind bars, who developed a monk-like self-awareness and stoic discipline, and who became both more strategically astute and increasingly generous of spirit toward others, including, ultimately, the men who presided over the country\u0026rsquo;s morally repugnant government.\nDie, My Love, Ariana Harwicz (h/t Charlotte) Selection 5 in our college\u0026rsquo;s book club\nSam read half of this in its original Spanish. With hateful writing this vivid, I wonder what I missed out on, especially after reading this article on the art of translation Not a lot of action takes place in this short book (124 pages in my copy), but it still felt cinematic throughout\u0026mdash;a lot of disorientation, mid-paragraph time skips, abrupt metamorphizing into natural imagery, implicit perspective changes, and no names. I said that if I were a theater actor, this would be great material\u0026mdash;I found myself having fun just reading some passages out loud while reading\u0026mdash;and Meredith mentioned Harwicz was previously a screenwriter.\nI think we spent two hours talking about this one and it was probably the book that had the most diversity in responses. For example, I did not have the sympathetic and feminist reading of the violently misanthropic main character that others did.\nInstead, I kept thinking of \u0026ldquo;No Children\u0026rdquo; by The Mountain Goats:\nAnd I hope when you think of me years down the line\nYou can\u0026rsquo;t find one good thing to say\nAnd I\u0026rsquo;d hope that if I found the strength to walk out\nYou\u0026rsquo;d stay the hell out of my way\nI am drowning\nThere is no sign of land\nYou are coming down with me\nHand in unlovable hand\nAnd I hope you die\nI hope we both die\nA timelapse of a single cell becoming a complete organism (h/t Tim) ","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0016/","summary":"It has by the fall of 2018 become commonplace to describe the 499 known victims of Larry Nassar as \u0026lsquo;breaking their silence,\u0026rsquo; though in fact they were never, as a group, particularly silent. Over the course of at least 20 years of consistent abuse, women and girls reported to every proximate authority. They told their parents. They told gymnastics coaches, running coaches, softball coaches. They told Michigan State University police and Meridian Township police. They told physicians and psychologists. They told university administrators. They told, repeatedly, USA Gymnastics. They told one another. Athletes were interviewed, reports were written up, charges recommended. The story of Larry Nassar is not a story of silence. The story of Larry Nassar is that of an edifice of trust so resilient, so impermeable to common sense, that it endured for decades against the allegations of so many women.","title":"The abolition of billionaires; music's #MeToo in the music industry; framing the US gymnastics scandal; and 'Die, My Love' by Ariana Harwicz"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s all about climate change. You can touch it in Somaliland\u0026mdash;it is real, it is here.\u0026rdquo; A prolonged drought has killed 70 percent of the area\u0026rsquo;s livestock in the past three years, devastating the region\u0026rsquo;s pastoral economy and forcing tens of thousands of families to flee their grazing land for urban camps, according to authorities.\nIn such circumstances, efforts to find solutions can feel futile but Somaliland has some ideas. The government wants to settle 2 million people on the coast\u0026mdash;where fish stocks remain abundant\u0026mdash;by 2030 and reduce the rural population, currently at 50 percent, by half to take the pressure off the land, Shire says. At the same time, the country will try to develop its \u0026ldquo;blue economy\u0026rdquo;\u0026mdash;fishing, aquaculture and shipping\u0026mdash;and begin a reforestation program, he adds.\n\u0026ldquo;We are a global village now\u0026mdash;what is affecting one country is affecting every country and, if the impact of climate change in the less developed countries is not addressed, then we will all be in a big, big mess. There will be more displacement, there will be huge migration, and there will seriously be more insecurity.\u0026rdquo;\nRelated: With the government shutdown over, NOAA and NASA finally affirm 2018 was the fourth-warmest year in recorded history : \u0026ldquo;The five warmest years in recorded history have been the last five... 18 of the 19 warmest years have occurred since 2001\u0026rdquo;\nRelated: An overview of American climate policy in the last 30 years . See also this montage of the last 12 years of the United States stalling on climate change (embedded below). Climate change did not come up in the recent State of the Union or in the 2012 or 2016 presidential and vice-presidential debates, but looks to be a principal part of the 2020 Democratic primary. I don\u0026rsquo;t know much about the Green New Deal proposal at the moment other than that on its face, this seems to be an irresponsible way to evaluate it.\nRelated: The New Yorker on the false choice between economic growth and climate policy , quoting my Stanford supervisor and discussing our paper from last year demonstrating substantial economic benefits from climate change mitigation.\nClimate change and border militarization An interview of Todd Miller whose book Storming the Wall was mentioned in my last post .\nAll of the assessments about climate change\u0026mdash;whether coming from the United Nations, the private sector, the Department of Defense, or the Department of Homeland Security\u0026mdash;are talking about accelerating migration, displacement of people, and how it will \u0026ldquo;challenge stability.\u0026rdquo; Already, 22.5 million people are already being displaced per year, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center , with projections ranging between 150 million and one billion by 2050. There\u0026rsquo;s a lot of talk about risk, and that slips easily into talk about \u0026ldquo;terrorism,\u0026rdquo; they talk about conflict, and so on. A significant part of today\u0026rsquo;s border militarization exists in a context where it isn\u0026rsquo;t about today or the immediate present, but rather anticipating future events that could happen. DHS and others are planning 30 years into the future\u0026mdash;for what they believe will happen\u0026mdash;and climate is definitely on their minds.\nMentioned in the link is that the legality of helping migrants stay alive is on trial:\nTrump administration prosecutors argued this week that members of the borderland faith-based organization No More Deaths broke the law by leaving jugs of water and cans of beans for migrants trekking through a remote wilderness refuge in the Sonoran Desert. The arguments came in the first of a series of high-profile federal trials in Tucson, Arizona, where humanitarian aid volunteers are facing prosecution under a litany of charges.\nAssistant U.S. Attorney Anna Wright, who is currently spearheading multiple cases against members of the humanitarian group, assured Magistrate Judge Bernardo P. Velasco that the evidence would clearly show that on the afternoon of August 13, 2017, four No More Deaths volunteers\u0026hellip; broke the law when they drove onto the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, just outside the tiny town of Ajo, Arizona, and left humanitarian aid supplies for migrants passing through the region.\nThe most serious charges have been leveled against Scott Warren, a 36-year-old academic, whom the government charged with three felony counts of harboring and conspiracy, for providing food, water, and a place to sleep to two undocumented men over three days last January. Warren faces 20 years in prison if convicted and sentenced to consecutive terms.\nThe land manager of the Arizona refuge where more than 70 \u0026ldquo;sets of human remains\u0026rdquo; were found between 2015 and 2017:\n\u0026ldquo;Even worse,\u0026rdquo; he said in the email. \u0026ldquo;They are now putting our [sic] protein shakes and canned foods. This is beyond saving lives, as the added food can help energize folks to hike another day or two, thus continue their journey.\u0026rdquo;\nIdentity politics The Friday before her response to President Trump\u0026rsquo;s State of the Union address, Stacey Abrams published a response to Francis Fukuyama\u0026rsquo;s criticism of identity politics. In Fukuyama\u0026rsquo;s words:\nWhat we call identity politics grew out of the social movements of the 1960s, around the demands of African Americans, women, gays and lesbians and other marginalized groups for recognition of their dignity and concrete remedies to social disadvantages. These demands have evolved over the years to displace socio-economic class as the traditional way that much of the left thinks about inequality. They reflect important grievances but in some cases, began to take on an exclusive character where people\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;lived experiences\u0026rdquo; determined who they were. This created obstacles to empathy and communication. \u0026mdash; (Source: WaPo )\nThe reason I wrote this book on identity was that you\u0026rsquo;ve now seen the rise of a right-wing identity politics. If you want to know what that means, just look at the behavior of Donald Trump before the Nov. 6 midterm election. He was advised to campaign on his tax cuts and the fact that the economy was doing great. And instead, all we heard about was this horrible migrant caravan and taking away birthright citizenship and sending the military to the border to protect us from these terrorists trying to get into the country. I mean that\u0026rsquo;s really an example of what we mean by identity politics are shifting the conversation away from economic policy to these identity issues, where essentially your identity is fixed by your birth \u0026mdash; by the ethnicity and the religion and the characteristics of your parents. And I just think it\u0026rsquo;s very hard to have a democracy under those conditions. It feeds the polarization in the country, which I think is our single biggest vulnerability right now. (Source: PRI )\nAbrams' response :\nThe facile advice to focus solely on class ignores these complex links among American notions of race, gender, and economics. As Fukuyama himself notes, it has been difficult \u0026ldquo;to create broad coalitions to fight for redistribution,\u0026rdquo; since \u0026ldquo;members of the working class who also belong to higher-status identity groups (such as whites in the United States) tend to resist making common cause with those below them, and vice versa.\u0026rdquo; Fukuyama\u0026rsquo;s preferred strategy is also called into question by the success that the Democratic Party enjoyed in 2018 by engaging in what he derides as identity politics. Last year, I was the Democratic Party\u0026rsquo;s gubernatorial nominee in Georgia and became the first African American woman in U.S. history to be nominated for governor by a major political party. In my bid for office, I intentionally and vigorously highlighted communities of color and other marginalized groups, not to the exclusion of others but as a recognition of their specific policy needs.\n\u0026hellip;Beyond electoral politics, Fukuyama and others argue that by calling out ethnic, cultural, gender, or sexual differences, marginalized groups harm themselves and their causes. By enumerating and celebrating distinctions, the argument goes, they give their opponents reasons for further excluding them. But minorities and the marginalized have little choice but to fight against the particular methods of discrimination employed against them. The marginalized did not create identity politics: their identities have been forced on them by dominant groups, and politics is the most effective method of revolt.\nThe New York Review also published a response to Fukuyama and Mark Lilla, the Columbia professor whose op-ed titled \u0026ldquo;The End of Identity Liberalism\u0026rdquo; was the New York Times\u0026rsquo; most-read political op-ed of the election year 2016:\nThere are no pre-identity politics, just as there are no pre-identity economics, in a country in which political, economic, and legal rights were only ever granted to some identity groups and not to others. The only thing new about \u0026ldquo;the omnipresent rhetoric of identity\u0026rdquo; is the voices that have been added to it, reshaping it in ways that alarm and affront those who used to be its sole authors. But it was always omnipresent.\nVirtually every major event in the long and troubled history of the United States was a direct consequence of identity politics. Start whenever you think America begins, and power struggles based on identity will be staring you in the face, starting with the genocide and forced resettlement of indigenous peoples by European migrants\u0026hellip; That\u0026rsquo;s identity politics.\nBlack people were enslaved, white people were free: it takes a colossal set of blinders to keep from seeing that as identity politics. Political judgments and legal decisions based on identity underwrote white supremacy from the start: measuring African Americans as three-fifths of a human is identity politics, a logic that led to the one-drop rule, the Dred Scott decision, Jim Crow segregation, and the Birther movement\u0026hellip; Electoral colleges were established in order to solve the \u0026ldquo;problem of the Negroes,\u0026rdquo; as James Madison put it, rigging the number of electors a state received in order to put a white supremacist thumb on the constitutional scale. Insofar as identity politics helped elect Donald Trump, electoral colleges seem a more proximate cause than debates over gender-neutral bathrooms.\nThat The Economist did not even notice that its checklist of identity politics skipped gender altogether is both ironic and typical. In 1776, Abigail Adams famously pleaded with her husband to \u0026ldquo;Remember the Ladies\u0026rdquo; in drafting the nation\u0026rsquo;s new code of laws\u0026hellip; John Adams replied by telling her thanks, but he preferred male privilege: \u0026ldquo;We know better than to repeal our masculine systems.\u0026rdquo;\nHow undermining abortion rights became such a defining stance for the white evangelical right When Governor Ronald Reagan signed \u0026ldquo;one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country\u0026rdquo; in 1967, evangelicals were largely supportive or indifferent to legalization. The year before Roe v. Wade, 68% of Republicans \u0026ldquo;believed abortion to be a private matter between a woman and her doctor. The government, they said, should not be involved.\u0026rdquo; In fact, it wasn\u0026rsquo;t until 1979\u0026mdash;a full six years after Roe\u0026mdash;that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right\u0026rsquo;s real motive: protecting segregated schools.\nAmerican access to abortion services has as expected been targeted by the Trump administration and (unlike climate change) did feature in the State of the Union address :\nThe ongoing assault on Americans\u0026rsquo; constitutional right to access abortion care is nothing new, though efforts to curtail that right have taken on a different sense of urgency since President Donald Trump became president. In 2017, 19 states passed 63 legal restrictions on abortion access, the largest number of anti-abortion laws enacted since 2013, according to the Guttmacher Institute. During the 2016 presidential election, then-candidate Trump promised to appoint Supreme Court judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade; a promise he has certainly kept.\nIndeed, just recently, in the State of the Union address, the president regurgitated outright lies about abortions that occur later in pregnancy, evoking the image of a mother holding a newborn in an attempt to demonize not only the act of abortion but the people who have them. \u0026ldquo;There could be no greater contrast to the beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child than the chilling displays our nation saw in recent days,\u0026rdquo; he said, before intentionally misrepresenting New York state\u0026rsquo;s newly passed law that codifies Roe v. Wade and allows abortion past 24 weeks gestation in the case of severe fetal abnormality or a threat to the patient\u0026rsquo;s life, as well as Virginia Governor Ralph Northam\u0026rsquo;s recent comments about end-of-life infant care.\nRelated: Speaking of Northam, why blackface just won\u0026rsquo;t go away An open letter from Philadelphia high school students to sociologist Alice Goffman (h/t Claire) From May of last year. 2016 NYT article for context .\nOn the Run purports to provide an ethnographic \u0026ldquo;account of the prison boom and its more hidden practices of policing and surveillance as young people living in one relatively poor Black neighborhood in Philadelphia experience and understand them.\u0026rdquo;\nWe identify your published, widely lauded, easily obtainable book as dangerous, Prof. Goffman, because it divulges tactics that the subjects of your inquiry intentionally coded for surviving life under siege\u0026hellip; And it does so in a manner that erases the pervasive structures of white supremacy and racial colonial capitalism that created the material conditions described above in the first place. You position your \u0026ldquo;findings\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;new,\u0026rdquo; largely ignoring decades-worth of Black scholarship that has taken up \u0026ldquo;fugitivity,\u0026rdquo; carceral logics, and militarized surveillance.\nWe wonder, who did you understand your intended audience to be, Prof. Goffman? It could not have been people from West Philadelphia. Not Mike, not Chuck, nor any of the other young men, women, and children from \u0026ldquo;6th Street\u0026rdquo; whom you wrote about but with whom you admittedly maintain minimal contact. Your book could not have aimed to benefit materially Black communities in Philadelphia, or similar ones throughout the larger country.\nDid you write On the Run for people like yourself? For white researchers, scholars, and educators, to provide them a voyeuristic view into realities they never otherwise see? Did you ever consider that people such as these historically have (and continue to) ignore and perpetrate the very same violence against Black communities which you claim to bring to light?\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0015/","summary":"Prosecutors argued this week that members of the borderland faith-based organization No More Deaths broke the law by leaving jugs of water and cans of beans for migrants trekking through a remote wilderness refuge in the Sonoran Desert\u0026hellip; The most serious charges have been leveled against Scott Warren, a 36-year-old academic, whom the government charged with three felony counts of harboring and conspiracy, for providing food, water, and a place to sleep to two undocumented men over three days last January. Warren faces 20 years in prison if convicted and sentenced to consecutive terms.","title":"Climate change, here and now; identity politics, everywhere and always"},{"content":"When the suffrage movement sold out to white supremacy This was my first time coming across the speech by suffragist and writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to the Eleventh National Women\u0026rsquo;s Rights Convention in New York on May 1, 1866 : We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the negro. You pressed him down for two centuries; and in so doing you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country. When the hands of the black were fettered, white men were deprived of the liberty of speech and the freedom of the press. Society cannot afford to neglect the enlightenment of any class of its members.\n\u0026hellip;I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent.\n\u0026hellip;.Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on. It is a normal school, and the white women of this country need it. While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.\nI\u0026rsquo;m disheartened by the defensiveness of the NYT reader comments; there is value in the type of introspection these challenges evoke. Critically revisiting our shortcomings and identifying our blind spots are the purposes of events like Black History Month (this month in the States) or LGBT month (this month here in the UK). Addressing ongoing struggles should be uncomfortable; let\u0026rsquo;s not sterilize and misremember the details for palatability and peace of mind. Sorry if this paragraph reads as trite, but I\u0026rsquo;ve been feeling this a lot lately and wouldn\u0026rsquo;t mind erring on the side of trite enunciation.\nI hold with Wordsonfire from Minneapolis who wrote:\nI\u0026rsquo;m struck by all the defensiveness and whataboutism in the responses to this column. Cloaking responses in \u0026ldquo;what was possible at that time,\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;black men did it too only worse,\u0026rdquo; suggests that it\u0026rsquo;s harder to just accept history and those flawed individuals who came before us as they were.\nFew are willing to say what needs to be said: \u0026ldquo;That was wrong. Let\u0026rsquo;s strive to do better.\u0026rdquo;\nSo little was required of the readers of this column and yet they were unable to demonstrate even the smallest bit of remorse or solidarity with black women.\nAmerica, an empire in decline It\u0026rsquo;s only mentioned as a supporting example in the article, but the American occupation of the Philippines tends to be mischaracterized, especially by younger Filipinos, as one of a benevolent variety despite itsbrutality and hyper-racialization . This occupation was the origin of the \u0026ldquo;white man\u0026rsquo;s burden.\u0026rdquo; Something on the order of 250,000 Filipinos died, the Philippines' culture and institutions were Americanized , and a very prevalent internalization of American \u0026lsquo;superiority\u0026rsquo; persists.\nSo to relate this back to the thrust of the article, I\u0026rsquo;d just say I find its depiction of America as a contradictory nonterritorial empire pretty convincing. Foreign Policy had a complementary reframing of the postwar world order, though I only skimmed it.\n(Photo taken from this Filipino-American morning-show panel discussion on the legacy of American colonization)\nAgainst \u0026rsquo;new optimism \u0026rsquo; Who does the most to make people richer, healthier, happier, and less likely to be killed by lightning? Is it those who accentuate the positive or those who accentuate the negative? Rosling notes that progress in human rights, women\u0026rsquo;s education, catastrophe relief, and many other matters is often largely thanks to activists who believe things are getting worse, though he speculates that they might achieve even more if they were readier to recognize improvements. Bill Gates, in his call to optimism, acknowledges that to improve the world, \u0026ldquo;you need something to be mad about.\u0026rdquo; Focusing on bad cases is indeed no mere cognitive malfunction. Voltaire would hardly have waged his campaign against clerical abuses of power if he had been struck by the fact that, statistically speaking, most priests were perfectly decent chaps.\nWhen he coined \u0026ldquo;the new optimism,\u0026rdquo; George Patrick argued that dissatisfaction with the state of the world was not a defect. It was instead \u0026ldquo;the voice of progress proclaiming its discontent with the present and demanding improvement.\u0026rdquo; Perhaps new optimists should not forget to thank old pessimists for the fruits of their discontent.\nI find these optimists usually don\u0026rsquo;t define a meaningful counterfactual and that when they are convincing, the change in perspective is usually that things were worse before not that things seem better now. In that framing, new optimism would seem an argument for complacency and usually a validation of the (neoliberal ) status quo. We don\u0026rsquo;t evaluate, say, civil rights movements this way by asking oppressed people to be grateful for the gains they\u0026rsquo;ve made; we ask why they couldn\u0026rsquo;t be afforded them sooner and why injustices persist today:\nI wonder what a new-optimist response might be to the finding in Alesina, Stantcheva, and Teso (2017) that \u0026ldquo;pessimists [about social mobility] are far more supportive of redistributive welfare policies\u0026rdquo; because to me, new optimism comes from a place of privilege. New optimism feels like an extension of the reactionary denial of the effectiveness of protest, of labor militancy, of the necessary and productive violence of anticolonial and antiracist movements around the world. It\u0026rsquo;s also a paternalistic denunciation of the right of the disadvantaged to react to their reality, which may indeed be grim. As Amia Srinivasan has written, sometimes anger is apt and is self-justifying independent of a condescending consequentialist frame evaluating how \u0026lsquo;productive\u0026rsquo; it is.\nI also haven\u0026rsquo;t seen one meaningfully approach the topic of the coming climate refugee crisis that could imperil billions . But do let me know if you come across a new optimist from a developing country. Here\u0026rsquo;s The Nation on Steven Pinker\u0026rsquo;s perspective on climate change :\nBut even if we grant that in many domains human life has indeed improved enormously over the past two centuries, there remains a simple question: Can we count on the progress continuing? What, for instance, about climate change? Pinker is no climate-change denier, and admits that \u0026ldquo;the challenge is daunting.\u0026rdquo; But then he quickly pivots from his position that things are getting better and better to say that we can avoid the looming doom if only we start taxing carbon emissions, increase the use of nuclear power, and engage in deliberate climate engineering to lower global temperatures.\nHe largely disregards the fact that the political will to move in any of these directions is wholly lacking and will remain so as long as the party that controls the White House and Congress refuses to admit that a problem even exists. When it comes to his favored technological solution, nuclear power, Pinker also seems determined to ignore the problem that the people who manage plants do not always follow their own safety procedures and cannot plan for every possible natural disaster (as Fukushima showed all too dramatically). The industry, he insists, has learned from its mistakes.\nThe 2020 Democratic candidates are sorry A review of Bad Blood, John Carreyrou I added \u0026ldquo;Bad Blood,\u0026rdquo; John Carreyrou\u0026rsquo;s book on Theranos to my to-read list. This review made it a quick sell. Its title \u0026ldquo;A chemistry is performed\u0026rdquo; comes from this:\nUntil they were ready to go public, Holmes ruled that Theranos was to operate in \u0026lsquo;stealth mode\u0026rsquo;: no published papers open to peer review, no demonstrations to anyone who hadn\u0026rsquo;t signed a non-disclosure agreement. All visitors had to be accompanied at all times, even to the loo. Holmes\u0026rsquo;s corner office \u0026ndash; modelled on the Oval Office, and with the same arrangement of desks, sofas and armchairs \u0026ndash; had windows made from bulletproof glass\u0026hellip; To reporters, to investors, Holmes would say that her technological breakthroughs were a \u0026rsquo;trade secret\u0026rsquo;, like the recipe for Coca-Cola.\n\u0026hellip;But as for how it all worked, Holmes would only say that \u0026lsquo;a chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.\u0026rsquo;\nSo good. There is also a brutal invokation of Paulo Coelho\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;The Alchemist\u0026rdquo; at the end. An Adam McKay adaptation of the book is already in development.\nThe music of If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), I was finally able to catch Barry Jenkins\u0026rsquo; follow-up to Moonlight. I\u0026rsquo;m still processing my thoughts, but the music:\nHi, I’m me. And when I found out film scholars announced today that they restored an **1898** microfilm they believe is the earliest cinematic depiction of African-American love\ndid you fucking think that I *wouldn’t* immediately score it using IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK? pic.twitter.com/tI3k3HV7xq\n\u0026mdash; kyle alex brett (@kyalbr) December 14, 2018 ``` ### [Tony Romo's sensational color-commentary genius](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/jan/24/tony-romo-cbs-nfl-analyst-dallas-cowboys) I don\u0026rsquo;t think an NBA player could replicate Romo\u0026rsquo;s intuition for basketball broadcasts\u0026mdash;the pace of a football game and the breaks between plays allowe these types of pre-action analyses and I think it\u0026rsquo;s an analytical skill quarterbacks need to develop much better than do point guards.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0014/","summary":"I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent\u0026hellip; Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on. It is a normal school, and the white women of this country need it. While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.","title":"White supremacy in the suffrage movement; the United States as an empire in decline; Tony Romo; and the music of 'Beale Street'"},{"content":"The review of Roma I\u0026rsquo;ve been looking for Written by Alma Guillermoprieto. I posted previously about how unsatisfactory I found the critical reception to my favorite movie of last year, even as they\u0026rsquo;re mostly positive. This review stands apart and is a prime example of why diversity matters. It\u0026rsquo;s not enough to make note of the hierarchy or power dynamics of the society depicted. A movie this compassionate calls for more:\nCuarón is not interested in portraying Cleo anthropologically: he wants to show us what she was to him, and to tell the story of Mexico City and what happened to Cleo the year that his own family shattered.\nWith the attention bestowed upon it by a Best Picture nomination, this film is too rare, important, and (above all) good to not be talked about with the specificity and insight Guillermoprieto provides.\nI once interviewed a couple of dozen domestic servants about their work. It was hard to get young empleadas to talk to me, particularly if they were from the countryside\u0026hellip; But the older women had plenty to say. A surprising number stated that they were happy with their families\u0026hellip;\nBut what I heard most frequently was the rage they felt at previous employers who had fired them with no warning or thought for their feelings. What about the children? they would ask. They fire us, we have to abandon them, and then you have to learn to love a new set of children, and you\u0026rsquo;re always afraid you\u0026rsquo;re going to be fired all over again and lose them. One woman cried as she explained this. \u0026ldquo;They never think about the fact that we love the children,\u0026rdquo; she said.\nThat the women I interviewed could love the children they cared for\u0026mdash;and love them, in fact, to the point of heartbreak\u0026mdash;was to me nothing short of miraculous.\u0026quot;\nCalling racism racism Same topic also covered by the AP (headline: \u0026ldquo;Say it with me: Racism\u0026rdquo;) and the Atlantic (headline: \u0026ldquo;Just Say It\u0026rsquo;s Racist\u0026rdquo;).\nA 1956 profile of Georgia senator Herman Talmadge called him \u0026ldquo;an advocate of \u0026lsquo;White Supremacy\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; and noted that \u0026ldquo;he makes no bones about this.\u0026rdquo; Talmadge and his southern white colleagues did not shy away from racist language. For example, at the 1948 breakaway States\u0026rsquo; Rights Democrats (aka Dixiecrats) convention, South Carolina\u0026rsquo;s Strom Thurmond claimed, \u0026ldquo;There\u0026rsquo;s not enough troops in the army, to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.\u0026rdquo; There was nothing \u0026ldquo;racially tinged\u0026rdquo; about Thurmond\u0026rsquo;s comments. He saw no need to hide his racism, and journalists, accordingly, saw no need to describe it in euphemistic terms. When Thurmond filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act, an article about it in the San Rafael Independent Journal was surrounded by pieces with the headlines \u0026ldquo;Racists Hit Rights Bill as \u0026lsquo;Vicious\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;Racists Rally in Nashville.\u0026rdquo; These straightforward descriptions may shock modern readers accustomed to the imprecise language of \u0026ldquo;racial provocateurs\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;nakedly racial\u0026rdquo; actions.\n[Journalists offer predictions for journalism in 2019](http://www.niemanlab.org/collection/predictions-2019/ )\nWriting with climate change as a given There were four books in the box. They are very different from one another, but as a whole they represent a generational break with the climate change books before them. This is because not one of them is strictly about the topic at hand. Not one of them bothers to argue that climate change is real. Not one bothers to explain how societies can work to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Not one gets hung up on atmospheric science or computer models or the Paris Agreement. Instead, they simply take for granted that temperatures will rise and that the world as we know it will soon be fundamentally altered. The migration scholar writes about migration and the seed scientist about seeds and the ecosocialist about urban capitalism, but climate change \u0026ndash; the biggest, most pervasive ongoing event in the world \u0026ndash; is always present in the background. This is by necessity. Climate change is and will be everywhere. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t stand apart from our daily existence, not any more.\nTwo of the cities I\u0026rsquo;ve lived in the longest come up in Extreme Cities by Ashley Dawson:\nDawson\u0026rsquo;s book is about the way responses to climate change are being shaped by the entrenched interests of capital. He takes aim at the comfortable notions of \u0026lsquo;resilience\u0026rsquo; and \u0026lsquo;green growth\u0026rsquo; pushed by \u0026ndash; among others \u0026ndash; the former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and his cast of visiting Dutch architects, questioning post-Hurricane Sandy projects like the Big U seawall proposed for lower Manhattan: it would attract tourists and protect Wall Street, but displace storm surge waters to surrounding, poorer neighbourhoods. \u0026lsquo;Under present social conditions,\u0026rsquo; he writes, such schemes are \u0026rsquo;likely to be employed by elites to create architectures of apartheid and exclusionary zones of refuge\u0026rsquo;. For Dawson, New York is the \u0026rsquo;extreme city\u0026rsquo; problem in microcosm.\n\u0026hellip;The $40 billion, Dutch-built Great Garuda seawall in Jakarta, soon to be the biggest in the world, will displace thousands of shack-dwellers on an existing seawall and put tens of thousands of fishermen out of work \u0026ndash; but it will give developers a chance to profit from selling luxury homes on artificial islands. The Eko Atlantic development on a peninsula off the coast of Lagos is patrolled by heavily armed guards and surrounded by shanty towns built on stilts where the chefs and nannies live. \u0026lsquo;Both Eko Atlantic and the Great Garuda,\u0026rsquo; Dawson writes, with excusably escalating rhetoric, \u0026lsquo;offer visions of the extreme social injustice of emerging neoliberal urban phantasmagoria in a time of climate change.\u0026rsquo;\nMy home country in Todd Miller\u0026rsquo;s migration-oriented Storming the Wall:\nOne important revelation in Miller\u0026rsquo;s book is that climate change science is wholly uncontroversial inside the military and security establishment, even high up in the Trump administration. It\u0026rsquo;s widely accepted that the warming world will soon see many more refugees \u0026ndash; 50 million, 250 million, a billion, nobody can say for sure \u0026ndash; even if climate migrants can\u0026rsquo;t formally be called refugees under present international law\u0026hellip; He shares Dawson\u0026rsquo;s concern that we\u0026rsquo;re hurtling ever more rapidly towards a world of haves and have-nots. \u0026lsquo;More dangerous than climate disruption was the climate migrant. More dangerous than the drought were the people who can\u0026rsquo;t farm because of the drought. More dangerous than the hurricane were the people displaced by the storm.\u0026rsquo;\nMiller tells the story of Yeb and A.G. Saño, two Filipino brothers whose hometown was largely destroyed by 2013\u0026rsquo;s Super Typhoon Haiyan and whose home region was arguably destroyed by the police state that rose in the typhoon\u0026rsquo;s wake. The brothers marched a thousand miles on foot across the Alps to arrive in Paris for the start of the 2015 UN Climate Summit, with Miller joining them for the last few kilometres. But the climate talks took place just weeks after Islamic State\u0026rsquo;s attack on the Bataclan concert hall, and Paris was in a state of emergency when the marchers entered the city. The brothers \u0026ndash; foreign, brown, idealistic \u0026ndash; put their arms around each other outside a café for a photo op, and a man came out and yelled at them, thrusting a newspaper with an image commemorating Bataclan in their faces. \u0026lsquo;People here in France are not concerned about climate change,\u0026rsquo; he told them. \u0026lsquo;The people of France are concerned about terrorism.\u0026rsquo; The next day, Miller walked alongside protesters demanding carbon cuts, running when they were attacked by riot police. It\u0026rsquo;s a blunt but effective metaphor. \u0026lsquo;As I ran,\u0026rsquo; he writes, \u0026lsquo;I realised I had arrived at the true climate summit.\u0026rsquo;\nNew Yorker profile of Marlon James His third novel won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, the first for a Jamaican writer. He describes his upcoming novel as the first part of a planned \u0026ldquo;African Game of Thrones\u0026rdquo; trilogy:\nSeveral years ago, after a frustrating argument with a friend about the all-white cast of \u0026ldquo;The Hobbit,\u0026rdquo; James had an impulse \u0026ldquo;to reclaim all the stuff I like\u0026mdash;court intrigue, monsters, magic,\u0026rdquo; he told me. \u0026ldquo;I wanted black pageantry. I wanted just one novel where someone like me is in it, and I don\u0026rsquo;t have to look like I just walked out of HP Lovecraft, with a bone in my hair, and my lips are bigger than my eyes, and I\u0026rsquo;m saying some shit like \u0026lsquo;Oonga boonga boonga.\u0026rsquo; Or else I\u0026rsquo;m some fucker named Gagool and I\u0026rsquo;m thwarting you as you get the diamonds.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026hellip;When it comes to feedback on his own work, James is headstrong and malleable by turns. But, if someone offers an astute correction, he never forgets it. For most of his career, he\u0026rsquo;s been working off a note that the Trinidadian novelist Elizabeth Nunez gave him in 2002. \u0026ldquo;She told me that I was talented, but that I didn\u0026rsquo;t know how to write women,\u0026rdquo; he said. \u0026ldquo;I didn\u0026rsquo;t know how women related to each other, how they processed the unthinkable.\u0026rdquo; He reread Iris Murdoch, Alice Walker, and Muriel Spark, and concluded that Nunez was right.\nAs if accepting a challenge, he set his second novel entirely in the world of the feminine unthinkable\u0026hellip; \u0026ldquo;I really tried to get my Jane Austen on!\u0026rdquo; he said.\nThere\u0026rsquo;s also a great discussion in there invoking Chinua Achebe, VS Naipaul, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the topic of non-Western writers Westernizing their work out of shame. I can relate to that: when I\u0026rsquo;d write short stories as a kid growing up in Indonesia, the addresses in my stories would be named \u0026ldquo;Main Street\u0026rdquo; and would feature characters named \u0026ldquo;Mark Johnson\u0026rdquo; or similar. (You internalize these feelings when neither the works in your syllabi nor the adults with the authority to teach them are from the continent you live in.)\nThe Paris Review revisits the Animorphs series The series ran from 1996 to 2001 and consisted of fifty-four books plus spin-offs, all credited to \u0026ldquo;K.A. Applegate\u0026rdquo; (in reality, they were written by the husband-and-wife team Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, with ghostwriters taking over after Book 25)\nSad to learn that all these years later. Still, I felt like the writer is overapologizing for liking these books. It was a legitimately fun series with an iconic gimmick! Plus this series and Tomorrow, When The War Began were the first Western books I\u0026rsquo;d come across that had non-white characters regarded romantically. That was a mild revelation for me at that age though it seems I\u0026rsquo;m not the only one who read a lot into those books:\nConsequently, today\u0026rsquo;s Animorphs apologias share a tendency to assert that the series wasn\u0026rsquo;t really about five teenagers morphing into animals to fight aliens\u0026mdash;that it was really about something else, though there\u0026rsquo;s no consensus on precisely what. Matt Crowley of the AV Club argues that the whole thing was a metaphor for puberty. Meghan Ball of Tor and Lindsey Weedston of The Mary Sue play up its feminist message. Tres Dean of Geek.com claims that Applegate was a \u0026ldquo;prophet\u0026rdquo; whose books anticipated 9/11 and the Iraq War. Many fans, including me, find a compelling transgender narrative in the character of Tobias, who chooses to remain in the body of a red-tailed hawk forever rather than continue living as a boy. In drafting this essay, I briefly considered making the argument that the series was really about the experience of being a child inappropriately entrusted with an adult secret.\nNone of these readings are wrong. But none of them feel exactly right to me, either\u0026mdash;not as an explanation of what made the books great. I don\u0026rsquo;t think we loved them for their allegorical resonance. We loved them because they were exactly what they appeared to be: a series about five teenagers morphing into animals to fight aliens.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0013/","summary":"They fire us, we have to abandon them, and then you have to learn to love a new set of children, and you\u0026rsquo;re always afraid you\u0026rsquo;re going to be fired all over again and lose them. One woman cried as she explained this. \u0026lsquo;They never think about the fact that we love the children.\u0026rsquo; she said. That the women I interviewed could love the children they cared for\u0026mdash;and love them, in fact, to the point of heartbreak\u0026mdash;was to me nothing short of miraculous.","title":"How we write about other cultures, how we write about racism, how we write about climate change, and how we write about the Animorphs"},{"content":"Guillermo Del Toro on Roma (2018) A tweet thread on his countryman and friend\u0026rsquo;s masterpiece now nominated for Best Picture:\n10 personal musings about ROMA. 1) The opening shot suggests that earth (the shit-infested ground) and heaven (the plane) are irreconcilably far even if they are joined -momentarily- and revealed, by water (the reflection). All truths in ROMA are revealed by water.\n\u0026mdash; Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) January 14, 2019 5) In every sense, ROMA is a Fresco, a Mural, not a portrait. Not only the way it is lensed but the way it \u0026quot;scrolls\u0026quot; with long lateral dollies. The audio visual information (context, social unrest, factions \u0026amp; politics / morals of the time) exists within the frame to be read.\n\u0026mdash; Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) January 14, 2019 Robert Caro on his research process It pairs nicely with Seymour Hersh\u0026rsquo;s memoir, Reporter, which I\u0026rsquo;ve mentioned in this space before.\nFinally, he raised his head. \u0026ldquo;I didn\u0026rsquo;t know someone from Princeton could do digging like this,\u0026rdquo; he said. \u0026ldquo;From now on, you do investigative work.\u0026rdquo;\nI responded with my usual savoir faire: \u0026ldquo;But I don\u0026rsquo;t know anything about investigative reporting.\u0026rdquo;\nAlan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. \u0026ldquo;Just remember,\u0026rdquo; he said. \u0026ldquo;Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page.\u0026rdquo; He turned to some other papers on his desk, and after a while I got up and left.\nCaro is best known for the obsessive research underlying his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. The latter has been a four-volume project (publications in 1982, 1990, 2002, and 2012) with a fifth and concluding volume characteristically overdue. His next book, \u0026ldquo;Working\u0026rdquo;, is a memoir and is due out in a few months:\nWhy am I publishing these random recollections toward a memoir while I\u0026rsquo;m still working on the last volume of the Johnson biography, when I haven\u0026rsquo;t finished it, while I\u0026rsquo;m still\u0026mdash;at the age of eighty-three\u0026mdash;several years from finishing it? Why don\u0026rsquo;t I just include this material in the longer, full-length memoir I\u0026rsquo;m hoping to write?\nThe answer is, I\u0026rsquo;m afraid, quite obvious.. I am well aware that I may never get to write the memoir, although I have so many thoughts about writing, so many anecdotes about research, that I would like to preserve for anyone interested enough to read them. I decided that, just in case, I\u0026rsquo;d put some of them down on paper now.\nI also recommend listening to his appearance last year on the New Yorker Radio Hour (embedded below), which he at the end calls the best interview he\u0026rsquo;s ever had. Read also this interview with the New York Review . I have not read any of his books.\nCalifornia, the creepy progressive dreamland of contradictions dominated by the real-estate lobby A reply to the New York Review article on the rise of the European right I have interviewed a number of the characters Mark Lilla cites in his essay\u0026rsquo; \u0026lsquo;Two Roads for the New French Right\u0026rsquo;. Lilla\u0026rsquo;s account fails to confront the white supremacy at the heart of a movement he ultimately describes as a \u0026lsquo;coherent worldview\u0026rsquo;.\u0026rsquo; Although he is correct that there are important evolutions underway on the French and European right, he overlooks an implacable bigotry that remains the essence of the project. Any responsible discussion of the movement\u0026rsquo;s new developments must begin and end there.\nAnd Lilla replies:\nWriting about the political right has never been harder. Different kinds of right-wing ideologies and political formations are proliferating and shaking liberal governments around the world\u0026hellip; This makes it difficult to keep track of all the developments, distinguish them, and establish the connections between them. At the same time, liberal and left forces that want to resist these developments are increasingly hostile to learning anything that does not conform to their settled ideas about the right.\nA reader of McAurley\u0026rsquo;s letter who had not seen the piece might come to a different conclusion: that it was intended to whitewash Marion [Maréchal ] (or her grandfather, or right-wing forces everywhere; it\u0026rsquo;s unclear which) and ignore the real animating forces on the right, which are \u0026lsquo;white supremacy,\u0026rsquo; \u0026lsquo;hatred of the other,\u0026rsquo; \u0026lsquo;bigotry,\u0026rsquo; and \u0026lsquo;an ideology of exclusion,\u0026rsquo; all whipped up by the phantom of immigration. In other words, never mind all the things that seem new, forget the writings about family and sexuality, forget all the talk about organic community, forget the lashing out against neoliberalism and tech giants, forget Pope Francis. It all comes down to hatred: \u0026lsquo;Any responsible discussion of the movement\u0026rsquo;s new developments must begin and end there.\u0026rsquo;\nThe NYR article was previously linked to on here\nA new study advances non-line-of-sight imaging (That refers to the technology of using shadows to photograph objects outside direct line of sight. Obviously.)\nThe study claims it can take these photographs by only requiring a single photograph and a standard digital camera. It is also path-breaking in being the first paper I know of to include a Super Mushroom from the Super Mario series. In fact, in appears three times (Figures 1,2, and 4).\nFigure 1: \u0026ldquo;Controlled by a laptop PC, the standard digital camera obtains a snapshot of the irradiance distribution on a visible imaging wall, which is induced by the penumbra of an occluding object owing to light emanating from a scene of interest. The scene of interest is displayed on an LCD monitor for ease of performing experiments with many scenes. The snapshot is fed through a computer algorithm to recover an image of the scene of interest and an estimate of the position of the hidden occluder.\u0026rdquo;\nFrom: \u0026ldquo;Computational periscopy with an ordinary digital camera \u0026rdquo;, Nature 565, 435-436 (2019)\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0012/","summary":"\u0026lsquo;I didn\u0026rsquo;t know someone from Princeton could do digging like this,\u0026rsquo; he said. \u0026lsquo;From now on, you do investigative work.\u0026rsquo;","title":"Robert Caro's research process and non-line-of-sight imaging"},{"content":"Facebook\u0026rsquo;s libertarian business model, a threat to democratic movements everywhere By now it should be obvious that Facebook\u0026rsquo;s so-called pro-democracy rhetoric has been fundamentally damaging to real democracies and to democratic movements around the world. It has also directly benefited authoritarian regimes, which have relied on the platform to spread untruths in order to control and manipulate their citizens. In the Philippines, as content moderators busily remove posts and pictures according to a bespoke metric developed by \u0026ldquo;mostly twenty-something-year-olds\u0026rdquo; in Menlo Park, California, the president, Rodrigo Duterte, is busy on Facebook too, using paid followers to spread falsehoods about his critics and his policies. The journalist Maria Ressa, whose news organization, Rappler, has been keeping a database of the more than twelve million Facebook accounts that have attacked critics of Duterte and have been traced back to the president, has been a target of those accounts as well, at one point getting as manmy as ninety hate messages an hour via Facebook\u0026mdash;messages like \u0026lsquo;I want Maria Ressa to be raped repeatedly to death.\nIn countries like the Philippines and Myanmar, where the vast majority of people access the Internet through Facebook, not using the platform is likely not an option. Indeed, establishing an equivalence between Facebook and the Internet is one of the payoffs of Free Basics, an app Facebook created that provides purposefully limited Internet access\u0026mdash;there is no stand-alone e-mail server and Facebook is the only social media platform\u0026mdash;to people in developing countries who wouldn\u0026rsquo;t otherwise be able to afford to go online.\nThere was a special futility in my mailing my overseas ballot against Duterte in 2016 when I lived three minutes from Facebook\u0026rsquo;s East Palo Alto \u0026ndash;gentrifying campus. Like even though I could well have been the only voter in the Philippine elections living in this historically disenfranchised American city still suffering from its legacy of redlining, racial segregation, crime, violence, and public neglect, the net contribution of my small neighborhood to my home country 7000 miles away was nothing less than the corrosion of its democracy.\nSophie Smith on \u0026lsquo;academic freedom\u0026rsquo; (h/t Junho) Hatred might not come into it for Finnis, but there is little doubt that hating, disliking, maligning gay people \u0026ndash; and creating the conditions under which gay people come to loathe themselves \u0026ndash; follow from his proposals\nWhen I read my straight colleagues telling everyone else to give Finnis the \u0026lsquo;respect\u0026rsquo; of engaging with his opinions, to \u0026lsquo;make arguments\u0026rsquo; in response, I wonder how many times they have had to \u0026lsquo;make the argument\u0026rsquo; for their happiness, for their home and their partner, for the life they\u0026rsquo;ve built with the people they love. At times, I\u0026rsquo;m not even sure what I am meant to be making the argument for. It does not matter if my gayness was innate or chosen, it is so deeply a part of me, such a root cause of any fulfilment that I feel and any good that I do, that it becomes clear that what really follows from Finnis\u0026rsquo;s view is that I should stop existing as me. I should retreat into some other Sophie, who lives without the woman who makes her a better teacher, listener, thinker. Finnis thinks my good would be actualised in an unhappy marriage with a man. But almost everything I know about the virtues, I learned from my experiences as a gay woman: courage, constancy, generosity, love. I can engage, certainly, I can make arguments in response, but there is also a sense, at a deeper level, in which there is nothing I can say.\nComplements Amia Srinivasan on political epistemology, previoiusly linked here Vice (2018), dir. Adam McKay Didn\u0026rsquo;t like it As with McKay\u0026rsquo;s The Big Short, the movie is defined by its narration, dark comedy, and hyper-stylized editing. I\u0026rsquo;m all for that and bought in the instant the trailer was released. It just wasn\u0026rsquo;t done nearly as well in the final product. Definitely some highlights, but if you take on Cheney and the neoconservative world order on this large a platform, you have a responsibility to do so thoughtfully. That\u0026rsquo;s not a criticism of the stylization or comedic take of the film; I just mean that if you\u0026rsquo;re going to take on this subject and license the recency, pain, and footage of real events, you should submit a product that demonstrates more effort went into its formulation. Everything about this felt unfinished. For one thing, the two-hour movie couldn\u0026rsquo;t decide whether it was going to be a biopic or an exploration of the cruelty of the Bush-Cheney Iraq War. The first half runs through Cheney\u0026rsquo;s life, but he\u0026rsquo;s already a diabolical opportunist from the outset: early scenes include him unbothered by a colleague\u0026rsquo;s shattered leg and only choosing to identify as a Republican for its career advantages. This isn\u0026rsquo;t a character study then; he\u0026rsquo;s the same person the entire movie, there is no development which makes it hard to make a compelling narrative biopic. Given the above, if the second half of the movie is supposed to be about the cruelty of the Bush-Cheney administration during the Iraq War, why did we spend the entire first half on a mostly-irrelevant overview of Cheney\u0026rsquo;s career path? The movie\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;Where Are They Now?\u0026rdquo; epilogue suggests McKay\u0026rsquo;s movie is \u0026lsquo;about\u0026rsquo; the cost of the unnecessary Iraq War; if that\u0026rsquo;s the takeaway of the movie, then humanizing Cheney and spending time on anything more than the broad strokes of his non-political life story shouldn\u0026rsquo;t occupy nearly as much time as it did. Also it used its ending monologue to accuse the audience of complicity in Cheney\u0026rsquo;s empowerment. That would be OK if there were any lead-up to it, but the movie showed he was unelectable whenever he ran at the front of a ticket and entered the private sector because of it. Cheney\u0026rsquo;s power came from unprecedented diminution of a president behind the scenes and away from public scrutiny. How then is Cheney\u0026rsquo;s foreign policy the public\u0026rsquo;s fault? Just felt completely out of left field for that to be presented as the message of the movie. The narration is awful. It\u0026rsquo;s somehow indignantly sanctimonious and condescending while also not explaining enough what was wrong. It spent a lot of time re-emphasizing the same point about the Unitary Executive Theory\u0026mdash;not that complicated a concept from what I can tell\u0026mdash;while glossing over the exact details of how it was exploited. We had a very cool montage of Cheney installing his men in different sections of government, but we never actually see how he used the machine he built to create the war he wanted other than when they mention he had a lot of offices. Yes, we see that Halliburton influenced his Iraq policy\u0026mdash;very subtle: on election night, Cheney reads his wife a text saying they got \u0026ldquo;double what we expected\u0026rdquo; as their exit bonus\u0026mdash;but other than a map of oil wells and a spreadsheet of energy companies, we don\u0026rsquo;t know what the administration actually did for them in Iraq. At one point, Rumsfeld asks Cheney whether they\u0026rsquo;d be indicted and the audience doesn\u0026rsquo;t even really know what those hypothetical charges would be. Sam Rockwell in the wake of last year\u0026rsquo;s Oscar win turns in a bad SNL impression as George W. Bush. Similarly lazy: at some point McKay asked himself how to convey Steve Carrell\u0026rsquo;s Donald Rumsfeld\u0026rsquo;s evil and decided the answer was to have someone ask him what his values are and have him laugh and shut the door on them. Come on now, how are you going to spend all that runtime on Cheney\u0026rsquo;s pre-political years but not spend time on Rumsfeld\u0026rsquo;s brand of evil? \u0026ldquo;Vice\u0026rdquo; as in \u0026lsquo;vice president\u0026rsquo; and \u0026ldquo;Vice\u0026rdquo; as in \u0026lsquo;bad\u0026rsquo; because the vice president was bad Rare instance where the Reddit comments are generally on point All in all, my frustration stems from seeing an argument I sympathize with being made poorly and without focus or sense of story-telling. The movie is a correct opinion argued poorly, which can be more devastating to an argument than a good counterargument. If you wanted a ridiculously over-the-top challenge to the moral corruption of the crony capitalist elite, the WWE did it better: Non wrestling fans who are wondering what’s up with wrestling, check this shit out pic.twitter.com/lxmWIQxl2S\n\u0026mdash; Orin (@orinanne) January 23, 2019 AFAIK, the first mainstream challenge to Kamala Harris\u0026rsquo; prosecution record of this Democratic primary seasond The conservative obsession with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez When people of color enter elite spaces, they make those with unearned advantages conscious of how they\u0026rsquo;ve been favored by the system. That poses a choice to those whose access to such cloistered communities is unquestioned: They can recognize that others might also succeed given the right circumstances, or they can defend the inequities of that system in an effort to preserve their self-image, attacking the new entrant as a charlatan or the group they belong to as backwards.\nSpotify\u0026rsquo;s new revenue-sharing system is dumb Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov No relevant link here but the third selection in our college book club. Also my first time reading Nabokov, which I learned I\u0026rsquo;ve been pronouncing wrong (but still better than Sting) .\nHave aliens found us? The interview is a mess but even more enjoyable when you imagine Dr. Avi Loeb as the scientist in a B movie whose calculations correctly predict an incoming alien invasion but everyone ignores him because his hair is messy and he keeps clumsily dropping papers of printed-out spreadsheets and then a high-ranking bureaucrat who\u0026rsquo;s in cahoots with the aliens sneeringly tells him that they\u0026rsquo;re cutting his funding and confiscating his desktop computer.\nConan O\u0026rsquo;Brien contemplating his legacy (h/t Junho) The context is his late-night show was restructured from an hour to a 30-minute format\nCalvin Coolidge was a pretty popular president. I\u0026rsquo;ve been to his grave in Vermont. It has the presidential seal on it. Nobody was there.\nI had a great conversation with Albert Brooks once. When I met him for the first time, I was kind of stammering. I said, you make movies, they live on forever. I just do these late-night shows, they get lost, they\u0026rsquo;re never seen again and who cares? And he looked at me and he said, [Albert Brooks voice] \u0026ldquo;What are you talking about? None of it matters.\u0026rdquo; None of it matters? \u0026ldquo;No, that\u0026rsquo;s the secret. In 1940, people said Clark Gable is the face of the 20th Century. Who [expletive] thinks about Clark Gable? It doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter. You\u0026rsquo;ll be forgotten. I\u0026rsquo;ll be forgotten. We\u0026rsquo;ll all be forgotten.\u0026rdquo; It\u0026rsquo;s so funny because you\u0026rsquo;d think that would depress me. I was walking on air after that.\nRelevant: his recent appearance on the Comedy Bang Bang podcast. The style of the podcast is often absurdist, fast pace, and highly improvisational. Associating Conan with the late-night monologuing format that I\u0026rsquo;ve long found trite, I was really impressed by his ability not just to keep up with host Scott Aukerman. It\u0026rsquo;s a strange duality that I frequently confront with Conan, Late Show-era Stephen Colbert, and the best SNL alumni: their undeniable innate talent and intelligence contrasted against the mediocrity of their TV shows.\nTwo-time Oscar-nominated actor-director Jonah Hill in conversation with Tony-nominated Broadway star Michael Cera Apparently they know each other from a movie they were in as teenagers\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0011/","summary":"When I read my straight colleagues telling everyone else to give Finnis the \u0026lsquo;respect\u0026rsquo; of engaging with his opinions, to \u0026lsquo;make arguments\u0026rsquo; in response, I wonder how many times they have had to \u0026lsquo;make the argument\u0026rsquo; for their happiness, for their home and their partner, for the life they\u0026rsquo;ve built with the people they love. At times, I\u0026rsquo;m not even sure what I am meant to be making the argument for\u0026hellip; I can engage, certainly, I can make arguments in response, but there is also a sense, at a deeper level, in which there is nothing I can say.","title":"Facebook and my vote in the 2016 Philippine election; on 'academic freedom'; and Vice (2018)"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;A permanent zone of exception\u0026rdquo; A former Border Patrol guard reflects on life at the American-Mexican border, a \u0026ldquo;permanent zone of exception\u0026rdquo; with a man-made \u0026ldquo;disregard for human life\u0026rdquo;:\nThe borderlands have slowly become a place where citizens are subject to distinct standards for search and detention, and where due process for noncitizens is often unrecognizable by normal American standards. It is a place where migrants are regularly sentenced at mass hearings in which the fates of as many as seventy-five individuals can be adjudicated one after another in a matter of minutes, after which they are funneled into a burgeoning immigration incarceration complex. It is a landscape often written off as a \u0026ldquo;wasteland\u0026rdquo; that is inherently \u0026ldquo;hostile\u0026rdquo;\u0026mdash;without recognition that it has, in fact, been made to be hostile. Violence does not grow organically in our deserts or at our borders. It has arrived there through policy.\n\u0026hellip;[the former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service]\u0026rsquo;s damning admission\u0026mdash;that the loss of hundreds of lives on America\u0026rsquo;s doorstep each year was not enough to cause the government to reevaluate its policy\u0026mdash;reveals the extent to which the desert has been weaponized against migrants, and lays bare the fact that the hundreds who continue to die there every year are losing their lives by design*. Deterrence-based enforcement has steered the immigration politics of every administration since that of President Clinton, and has resulted in an official tally of more than six thousand migrant deaths along the southern border between 2000 and 2016. This figure, it should be said, does not account for the thousands more who have been reported as missing and never found, not to mention those whose disappearances are never reported in the first place.*\n\u0026hellip;Standing at an altar assembled from remnants of wooden refugee boats, Pope Francis looked out over the port of Lampedusa and asked his audience, \u0026ldquo;Has any one of us grieved for the death of these brothers and sisters? Has any one of us wept?\u0026rdquo;\nViktor Orbán\u0026rsquo;s \u0026ldquo;constitutional coup\u0026rdquo; The New Yorker, with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, on the Hungarian prime minister\u0026rsquo;s campaign against immigration and refugee asylum and his rising European influence in the run-up to May\u0026rsquo;s European Parliamentary elections. The article includes parts of the author\u0026rsquo;s conversations with Orbán himself and Steve Bannon. Politico also had a primer on the topic.\nPrinceton scholar Kim Lane Scheppele:\nThey do everything by law\u0026mdash;there will never be an illegal action. Any one law didn\u0026rsquo;t look that bad, but if you stack them together it creates this web. That\u0026rsquo;s why the EU is unable to cope. They look at one thing at a time, but Orbán is a systemic thinker\u0026hellip; it\u0026rsquo;s absolutely ingenious.\nCentral European University rector Michael Ignatieff on CEU\u0026rsquo;s forced relocation to Vienna:\nIn Hungary, the law is a tool of power. It looks like a law, sounds like a law, walks and talks like a law, but it\u0026rsquo;s just a piece of arbitrary discretion.\nAlso:\nAround ninety per cent of Hungarian media is now owned or controlled by people with personal connections to Orbán or his party, and eighty per cent of Hungarians who listen to the radio or watch television hear only news that comes from the government.\nA selection of the New York Times\u0026rsquo; visualizations and multimedia stories from 2018 Sally Rooney profiled by The New Yorker The article mentions how well technology is integrated into her work, which I alluded to in my last post discussing her second novel, Normal People. I had considered elements like texting and social media to be too clunky and distractingly of-this-era to incorporate well into a book or even a movie, but I\u0026rsquo;m realizing maybe it\u0026rsquo;s just that older people and Jonathan Franzen are bad at it in the same way fan fiction botches sex scenes. The article gives this sentence as an example of Rooney doing it well:\n\u0026ldquo;I didn\u0026rsquo;t feel like watching the film on my own so I switched it off and just read the Internet instead.\u0026rdquo;\nAn older novelist might have written \u0026ldquo;surfed the Internet\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;looked at the Internet,\u0026rdquo; but \u0026ldquo;read the Internet\u0026rdquo; has the ring of native digital literacy. There\u0026rsquo;s also something current about the flatness of Rooney\u0026rsquo;s tone; like \u0026ldquo;breaking the Internet,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;reading the Internet\u0026rdquo; makes a little joke of the juxtaposition of a puny active verb and the vastness of the thing upon which it is acting.\nSearching (2018), dir. Aneesh Chaganty The movie\u0026rsquo;s gimmick is that all footage is set on a computer or phone screen of some sort. Also incorporates modern technology extremely well and convincingly. Recommended!\nA Greek poem translated six ways Including as a microwave oven instruction manual\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0010/","summary":"Pope Francis looked out over the port of Lampedusa and asked his audience, \u0026lsquo;Has any one of us grieved for the death of these brothers and sisters? Has any one of us wept?\u0026rsquo;","title":"The cruelty at the US-Mexico border and Viktor Orbán's constitutional coup"},{"content":"The asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction Like everyone, I was aware it was the prevailing explanation but had always been taught to beware it was unsettled science and never learned the basis for its favored status. Too interesting that the theory\u0026rsquo;s originator also contributed to the Manhattan Project and the design of the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki.\nIf one assumes the typical pace of accumulation, a large amount of iridium would suggest it had taken a long time, indicating that the extinction process may also have been lengthy; a small amount would suggest that a quick event had overtaken the Earth. But the samples contained a surprise: huge amounts of iridium, so much that it would have taken tens or hundreds of millions of years to deposit at background rates. What could explain it? The Alvarezes came to a radical conclusion: the high concentration of iridium in the band must have come from outer space, and it must have been delivered in bulk by a colossal asteroid strike \u0026ndash; an event destructive enough to have triggered the end-Cretaceous extinction. The iridium-rich clay band at Gubbio was the shroud of dust and debris that had eventually settled on a devastated world.\nAs the same iridium anomaly began to be detected at sites around the world, the Alvarezes\u0026rsquo; notion of an asteroid strike followed by the blotting out of the sun was substantiated. It also had an influence beyond palaeontology; when Brusatte describes the aftermath of the impact as being like a nuclear winter, he is gently reverse-engineering the concept, for the idea of a nuclear winter \u0026ndash; the darkening and cooling of the world by the dust thrown into the atmosphere after a nuclear exchange \u0026ndash; was explored and popularised in the 1980s partly with reference to the Alvarez hypothesis. Meanwhile, the iridium testing and the hypothesis itself came of the Alvarezes' connections to nuclear science. Luis Alvarez had been a key player in the Manhattan Project, and had helped design \u0026lsquo;Fat Man\u0026rsquo;, the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.\nThe title of the article derives from the author contemplating the modern-day relevance of the end-Cretaceous event, whatever it was, eliminating all dinosaurs but not other animals: \u0026ldquo;When there is sudden global environmental and climate change, what lives and what dies?\u0026rdquo; And before you reject the assumption there, it acknowledges \u0026ldquo;the realisation that birds are dinosaurs is probably the single most important fact ever discovered by dinosaur palaeontologists.\u0026rdquo;\nStill, there are a small minority of holdouts in the debate, such as Prof. Gerta Keller of Princeton, who is a proponent of the Deccan Traps explanation, which attributes dinosaur extinction mostly to a series of volcanic eruptions in West India. The Atlantic had a lengthy article last year on the academic debate surrounding the end-Cretaceous event titled \u0026ldquo;The Nastiest Feud in Science\u0026rdquo; featuring some ad hominem attacks and cross-disciplinary antagonism with dissenters fearing for their careers, which makes the natural and social sciences seem not so different after all. It\u0026rsquo;s more a fascinating portrait of academic hostility on an apolitical topic than an educational one that reliably weighs the balance of evidence, I think. I myself am partial to this theory:\nsaddest thing I’ve drawn pic.twitter.com/gm9TVa2dye\n\u0026mdash; Nathan W Pyle (@nathanwpyle) November 27, 2018 Deeply upsetting to learn that narwhals were\nnamed rather ungallantly for the Old Norse word nar*, meaning \u0026lsquo;corpse\u0026rsquo;, and* hvalr*, \u0026lsquo;whale\u0026rsquo;, after their mottled grey markings.*\nCan you imagine discovering a species of literal water unicorns and decides to name them after their skin blemishes instead of their absurdly prominent and functionally inexplicable horns?\nI was a cable guy. I saw the worst of America. (h/t Tim) An eight-part New York Times series identifies a trend of American courts eroding mothers\u0026rsquo; rights The ghost statistic that haunts women\u0026rsquo;s empowerment (h/t Helena) The New Yorker investigates the frequently cited statistic that women spend 90% of their income on their children, while men spend 30-40%. It seems an original source can\u0026rsquo;t be found.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0009/","summary":"The samples contained a surprise: huge amounts of iridium, so much that it would have taken tens or hundreds of millions of years to deposit at background rates. What could explain it? The Alvarezes came to a radical conclusion: the high concentration of iridium in the band must have come from outer space, and it must have been delivered in bulk by a colossal asteroid strike – an event destructive enough to have triggered the end-Cretaceous extinction. The iridium-rich clay band at Gubbio was the shroud of dust and debris that had eventually settled on a devastated world.","title":"The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event and the etymology of narwhals"},{"content":"Re-imagining Homer\u0026rsquo;s women Two recent books imagine the lives of the overlooked female characters in Homer\u0026rsquo;s Iliad and Odyssey respectively. I actually did a similar exercise in high school writing a metrical poem depicting a dream of Penelope\u0026rsquo;s that is only alluded to in Book XIX.\nThe legacy of Atticus Finch Written in light of the December premiere of an Aaron Sorkin Broadway adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird, which is apparently directly influenced by the revelations of Go Set A Watchman and the events in Charlottesville.\nPerhaps his perfection was only ever as a father, and not as a civil-rights crusader. He teaches Scout and Jem a kind of radical empathy that he himself cannot sustain but that they might grow up to embody. That is the version of Atticus still beloved by many of the book\u0026rsquo;s readers: not a noble lawyer on a par with actual civil-rights heroes such as Pauli Murray, Thurgood Marshall, or Morris Dees but a compassionate, courageous single dad raising his children as best he can.\nNot everyone, however, was inclined to agree, and not long after Rudin announced that Sorkin\u0026rsquo;s play would première in December, 2018, the estate of Harper Lee filed a lawsuit, alleging that the adaptation violated the spirit of \u0026ldquo;To Kill a Mockingbird.\u0026rdquo; At the heart of the dispute was a disagreement about the essential nature of Atticus. According to the estate, the character, as written by Lee, was \u0026ldquo;a model of wisdom, integrity, and professionalism,\u0026rdquo; while Sorkin had made him into an \u0026ldquo;apologist for the racial status quo.\u0026rdquo;\nIn this new production, the empathy for which Atticus has always been celebrated\u0026mdash; his belief, as Sorkin sees it, in the \u0026ldquo;goodness in everyone, even homicidal white supremacists\u0026rdquo;\u0026mdash;would be his fundamental flaw. Of course, framing Atticus in this way compounds the complication of putting him at the center of the story: the tragedy, it suggest, isn\u0026rsquo;t that a black man loses his life, but that a white man loses his case.\u0026quot;\nReporter, Seymour Hersh Very apt one-word title; Hersh despite or because of his hard-headedness comes across as the living embodiment of the profession at its best. Would recommend to anyone with any interest in or respect for investigative journalism.\nIt inspires mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, his career is a monumentally successful story that follows a copyboy from the South Side of Chicago who finds his calling and thrives amid a culture of self-censorship, conformity, and hierarchy led by his idealism and work ethic. His work exposed protected secrets of institutions as powerful as the military, the White House, Capitol Hill, and to a smaller extent, Wall Street and the mafia.\nOn more than one occasion, Hersh refers to himself as a \u0026ldquo;lone wolf\u0026rdquo;. It is remarkable how single-handedly his successes come in an industry run on self-censorship, publication prestige, personal vendettas, and competitive one-upmanship. His Pulitzer-winning work uncovering the My Lai massacre came as a freelance journalist. When his agent refuses his request to approach the New Yorker about any writing vacancies, Hersh visits its editor\u0026rsquo;s office without an appointment, secures a job on the spot, then fires his agent. Even when he finds secure work in The New York Times and The New Yorker, the arrangements seem more like the hiring of a truth-seeking mercenary than an employee. But the results speak for themselves and the reader cannot help but admire that Hersh\u0026rsquo;s body of work has come largely on his own terms, without compromise of his integrity, objectivity, or values. What cynical lessons there for success in other industries like academia?\nDespite his breakthrough successes in the 1980s, Hersh paints a pessimistic image of modern journalism. A common thread in Hersh\u0026rsquo;s work is empathy for the powerless, which he sees as rarely matched by his peers. At his first reporting job, he is keen to break the story of a horrifying murder of a Chicago family by arson, but relaying the details to his editor, he is asked: \u0026ldquo;Ah, my good, dear, energetic Mr. Hersh. Do the, alas, poor, unfortunate victims happen to be of the Negro persuasion?\u0026rdquo; Hersh answers in the affirmative and the story is reduced to a single sentence along the lines of \u0026ldquo;Five Negroes died in a fire last night on the Southwest Side.\u0026rdquo;\nHersh attributes his uncommon compassion, staunch pacifism, and skepticism of power to his upbringing among minorities in the South Side. I found it difficult to resist the thought that were it not for this man\u0026rsquo;s unlikely ascent to the media elite, the brutal rapes of murders of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians and the clandestine bombing of Cambodia would have not just been unquestioned, but entirely unknown, the Abu Ghraib abuses underreported. These works mostly went unpunished and he laments that for all the work that can go into an investigation, its intended impact is repeatedly dulled by public disinterest, the industry declining to follow up a competitor\u0026rsquo;s story, a newspaper\u0026rsquo;s reach, a public refutation of fact, or irresponsible coverage.\nUnderpinning all this pessimism is the certainty that the landscape of investigative journalism is much worse now than in Hersh\u0026rsquo;s heyday. Hersh alludes to this in the introduction, perhaps because reflecting on the sad state of affairs in an epilogue would sour the mood:\nIt\u0026rsquo;s very painful to think I might not have accomplished what I did if I were at work in the chaotic and unstructured journalism world of today. Of course I\u0026rsquo;m still trying.\nRelated: This more pessimistic sentiment pairs nicely with James Meek\u0026rsquo;s review of former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger\u0026rsquo;s new memoir \u0026ldquo;Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now\u0026rdquo; and the LRB\u0026rsquo;s article on the mismanagement of the BBC Related: the review that put me onto the book Normal People, Sally Rooney (h/t Helena) Really enjoyed this and am finding it difficult to say why without referring to specific details of my personal life. The excellent pacing made it a breeze to read despite its narrative unfolding over several years and it was interesting how modern and accessible the writing was. It\u0026rsquo;s set in Ireland but with an absence of distinguishing detail or idiosyncratic diction, it could just as well have been set in any Western country.\nMy mom read it after me and found it hard to forgive the melodrama that could have been easily avoided with a basic standard of communication. I see that perspective but also recognize easily avoidable miscommunications in my own life. I\u0026rsquo;m also just a sucker for stories, like Richard Linklater\u0026rsquo;s films, that realistically depict relationships inflected by the passage of time and featuring a pattern of multiple reconnections at different stages of life.\nTwo Roads for the New French Right Something new is happening on the European right, and it involves more than xenophobic populist outbursts. Ideas are being developed, and transnational networks for disseminating them are being established\n\u0026hellip;In countries as diverse as France, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Italy, efforts are underway to develop a coherent ideology that would mobilize Europeans angry about immigration, economic dislocation, the European union, and social liberalization, and then use that ideology to govern\u0026hellip; France is a good place to start.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0008/","summary":"Perhaps his perfection was only ever as a father, and not as a civil-rights crusader. He teaches Scout and Jem a kind of radical empathy that he himself cannot sustain but that they might grow up to embody.","title":"'Reporter' by Seymour Hersh; 'Normal People' by Sally Rooney; and Atticus Finch today"},{"content":"Can the world stop genocide? The Rwandan genocide in 1994 seemed to mark a turning-point. Hutu officers organised most adult Hutus to slaughter their Tutsi neighbours. Perhaps 500,000 people were hacked or beaten to death in 100 days. A small un “peacekeeping” force in the capital, Kigali, stood by. By the time the West decided that something needed to be done, the genocide was over, having been stopped by an army of Tutsi rebels. Afterwards, Western leaders vowed never to let anything like it happen again.\nMacron’s Marie Antoinette Moment I appreciated this piece on the Yellow Vest protests not framing the movement out of context as an indicator of the viability of climate policy.\nFor a story actually about rural citizens taking to a city for a dramatic protest explicitly about climate (smooth segue), look to India where more farmers and farm workers than ever are killing themselves over damaged crops\u0026mdash;320,000 since 1995\u0026mdash;attributable to decreased average rainfall, more frequent extreme events, drier seasons, and later and shorter monsoons. In April 2017, 150 farmers “sat for almost a month at Delhi’s protest hub of Jantar Mantar. They sat buck-naked, holding the bones of neighbors who had committed suicide.\u0026quot;\nStriking video and visuals from the New York Times last year Blog post from Tamma Carleton about her study mentioned in both these links attributing crop-damaging temperatures to farmer suicide Most farmers, though, aren’t really changing their methods to adapt to a warming climate and water scarcity. Instead, they are boring into the ground 200 feet to find water—but, even at that depth, they often find none. Or they’re growing conventional crops that have guaranteed government prices, even though they use too much water and provide fewer nutrients. Rice and wheat are seriously affected by climate change but still dominate cultivation.\nRelated: the New York Times’ year in climate journalism How McKinsey \u0026amp; Co. has helped raise the stature of authoritarian governments Related: A brief history of Islam in China , contextualizing the ongoing detention, torture, and surveillance of an estimated one million Uighur Muslims and other Muslim groups in the Xinjiang region\nMetaphor-blindness in the Bible, Wittgenstein, Robert Frost, and Shakespeare Related and timely: I was just re-reading the Paris Review’s objection to misappropriation of “slouching towards X” as an idiom leading to “the widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions to WB Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’”\nNotes on trap music (h/t Junho) I’m not convinced of all points but don’t know enough to confidently disagree. Quick selling point: it pairs quotes from WEB Du Bois with 21 Savage and Young Thug with bell hooks. It compares “Mask Off” to “A Raisin in the Sun”, Migos to Napoleon. Archive of the Harvard professor author’s cultural writing here .\nTrap is a form of soft power that takes the resources of the black underclass (raw talent, charisma, endurance, persistence, improvisation, dexterity, adaptability, beauty) and uses them to change the attitudes, behaviors, and preferences of others, usually by making them admit they desire and admire those same things and will pay good money to share vicariously in even a collateral showering from below. This allows the trap artist to transition from an environment where raw hard power dominates and life is nasty, brutal, and short to the world of celebrity, the Valhalla of excess, lucre, influence, fame — the only transparently and sincerely valued site of belonging in our culture. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that insofar as you’re interested in having a good time, there’s probably never been a sound so perfectly suited to having every kind of fun disallowed in conservative America.\nThe \u0026lsquo;We\u0026rsquo; in \u0026lsquo;How We Missed The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism\u0026rsquo; When \u0026quot;We\u0026quot; means \u0026quot;White Media,\u0026quot; perhaps white media ought to introspect why indeed it didn\u0026#39;t cover the rise of white supremacist terrorism, a phenomenon deeply embedded within the US, while nonwhite media \u0026amp; nonwhite sources repeatedly did. 6+ years ago: https://t.co/ZbFYA9nL75\n\u0026mdash; @attackerman.bsky.social (@attackerman) December 13, 2018 Ok...it’s time to have the conversation (again) about how “we missed it” really means you don’t see evidence or predictions from people of color as legitimate: a quick thread.\n‘The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It - The New York Times’ https://t.co/BrrVMVJQM1\n\u0026mdash; . (@MsPackyetti) December 13, 2018 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, dir. Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, Bob Persichetti Not really a thing I \u0026ldquo;read” (I should change the name of this blog series), but I watched “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” this week. It turned out to be one of the best movies I’ve watched from this year and easily the most fun. I can’t remember the last time a movie positively defied my expectations this much; I was expecting it to be a direct-to-TV production based on its title and its featuring a talking-pig character, plus this is the studio (Sony) that bungled the live-action Spider-Man franchise and last year gave us the “Emoji Movie”. This blew me away, so much so that I’ll bullet-point some superlatives below:\nIt might be the funniest movie to come out this year. I found the humor in The Death of Stalin to be far beneath Armando Iannucci\u0026rsquo;s other work. I have not seen Vice, Sorry to Bother You, Girls Trip, Eighth Grade, or mid90s. It’s the best superhero movie since at least The Dark Knight if you don’t count the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy. Which you should. Not only does Caesar definitely qualify as a superhero (I got into a weirdly heated argument about this where I also found myself also embracing the implication that by analogy, Jesus is a superhero too), he\u0026rsquo;s the best superhero ever put to screen It’s the best animated movie since either Rango Kung Fu Panda 2, or Toy Story 3. I liked Zootopia and Kubo and the Two Strings, but this year’s Spider-Man is just better and visually more creative. For all the praise Pixar gets for its increasingly realistic animation, Spider-Man (and to a lesser extent, the Kung Fu Panda series) make compelling counter-arguments for animation that doesn’t pretend to not be animation. Had more to share, but this post was long enough.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0007/","summary":"Trap is a form of soft power that takes the resources of the black underclass and uses them to change the attitudes, behaviors, and preferences of others, usually by making them admit they desire and admire those same things and will pay good money to share vicariously in even a collateral showering from below. This allows the trap artist to transition from an environment where raw hard power dominates to the Valhalla of excess, lucre, influence, fame, the only sincerely valued site of belonging in our culture. It doesn’t hurt that insofar as you’re interested in having a good time, there’s probably never been a sound so perfectly suited to having every kind of fun disallowed in conservative America.","title":"Les gilets jaunes; notes on trap music; and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;I was a Western journalist traveling freely on my powerful passport, paid to document the misery of people whose passports trapped them in poverty and war.\u0026rdquo; Three comic artists illustrate the Syrian exodus (paywalled):\nIn her essay \u0026ldquo;We Refugees\u0026rdquo;, Hannah Arendt wrote, \u0026ldquo;Nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings\u0026mdash;the kind that are put into concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends.\u0026rdquo; Nearly eighty years later, the world has come no closer to ensuring the rights of a human without a country. Mostly, governments propose quarantine. Internment camps grow in Tornillo, Texas, in Lesbos, in Zaatari, and in Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar in Bangladesh. It won\u0026rsquo;t work. Each year, the world grows warmer. The oceans rise. Wars are fought for ever-scarcer resources. If the wealthy West worries about one million Syrians, what will it do with millions of climate refugees?\u0026quot;\nHow secondary-school history textbooks under BJP rule are compromised It was odd, on a visit this spring to a school in the Indian state of Rajasthan, to hear a Muslim teacher, Sana Khan, ask her entirely Muslim eight-grade social science class, \u0026ldquo;Was there anything positive about Mughals?\u0026rdquo;\u0026hellip; The textbooks\u0026rsquo; promotion of an essentially Hindu history provides a foundation for slowly remaking India into an essentially Hindu country.\nRoma (2018), dir. Alfonso Cuarón I attended an advanced screening of what\u0026rsquo;s expected to be a strong awards contender. I don\u0026rsquo;t know how autobiographical it is but the movie just breathes love and gratitude. Set in 1970s Mexico City, its depiction of the relationship between a privileged middle-class family and their live-in maid and the contradictions of such a relationship I imagine would be resonant with many from the Global South. I liked the Washington Post\u0026rsquo;s review but in general the mainstream takes I\u0026rsquo;ve come across are bizarrely uninteresting. In the face of an obviously intimate film depicting a complex familial dynamic, they seem to use technical observations (positive or negative) as a crutch for an inability to comment on the unfamiliar reality depicted. That\u0026rsquo;s just bad art criticism beyond just demographic underrepresentation. It reminds me of when I watched Moonlight and the group of friends I went with came out of it clearly uncomfortable and unable to offer a positive or negative opinion on anything more specific than that they \u0026ldquo;couldn\u0026rsquo;t relate to it.\u0026rdquo; Imposing some standard of relatability is such a restrictive and stupid way to experience art to me, it still pisses me just thinking about it. That said, credit to Brooklyn-based Remezcla for soliciting Latino critics\u0026rsquo; responses. One recommends the 2015 film \u0026ldquo;Que horas ela volta? (The Second Mother)\u0026rdquo; out of Brazil as a more thorough exploration of the maid-family dynamic. On the topic of domestic staff, recommending some excellent but heartbreaking reading:\nMy Family\u0026rsquo;s Slave , written by a Filipino Pulitzer Prize winner and published posthumously. The article was a very big deal among Filipinos at the time.\nThe response to it by a Filipino message board and general message board .\nThe Cost of Caring A 2015 history of Brazil Newly updated and translated to English, rebuts prevailing views that the slave trade has not left a racist legacy akin to the United States'\nThe development of neural prosthetics Especially timely for me as someone who recently completed Doc Ock\u0026rsquo;s storyline on Spider-Man on the PS4. Schwartz\u0026rsquo;s biotech falls short of Octavius\u0026rsquo;s sentient metallic limbs but to his credit, he better achieves Octavius\u0026rsquo;s original goal of helping amputees. An engrossing science and technology story here but the patient, Jan Scheuermann, quickly steals the show with her personality:\n\u0026ldquo;They said, \u0026lsquo;You know this includes voluntary brain surgery?\u0026rsquo; I said, \u0026lsquo;Yup, that\u0026rsquo;s OK. I\u0026rsquo;m going to move that robotic arm!\u0026rsquo; They said, \u0026lsquo;Well, these two pedestals will stick out of your head, about three-quarters of an inch, and it will be that way until we take them out.\u0026rsquo; and I said \u0026lsquo;OK, sure. I want to move that robotic arm with my mind!\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo;\n*Protruding from the top of her head were the two pedestals: cylinders reminiscent of Frankenstein\u0026rsquo;s monster, each the diameter of a quarter, and capped to prevent moisture from getting into the contact points. Scheuermann vowed to embrace them. She told herself they were instruments of exploration, and named them Lewis and Clark.**\n\u0026ldquo;Then they asked me if I had a goal. I sensed they wanted me to say that I wanted to touch my children, or my husband. I said, \u0026lsquo;Yeah, I have a goal. I want to feed myself chocolate.\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;I flew a plane today. I freaking flew a plane today! I am 54 years old, I\u0026rsquo;ve been a quadriplegic for 14 years, and I flew a plane today! In my mind, I\u0026rsquo;m still flying.\u0026rdquo;\nHer quote to end the piece is a tear-jerker. And here\u0026rsquo;s a 60 Minutes segment on the same patient from five years ago. I admire her commitment to the Times crossword.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0006/","summary":"\u0026lsquo;I flew a plane today. I freaking flew a plane today! I am 54 years old, I’ve been a quadriplegic for 14 years, and I flew a plane today! In my mind, I’m still flying.\u0026rsquo;","title":"Refugees, illustrated; Roma (2018); and neural prosthetics"},{"content":"Milkman, Anna Burns (h/t Helena) Our book club\u0026rsquo;s selection for this month. I found it a chore to get through and what little action takes place is usually accompanied by the narrator’s lengthy and purposely anti-climactic tangents that remove the reader from the action for several unindented pages at a time My reading of the depicted setting divided characters into “shinies”\u0026ndash;those made to be outcasts by often harmless idiosyncrasies\u0026mdash;and characters who personify the oppressive and violent setting of the time speaking and acting like video-game NPCs, working collectively as a shame-weaponizing ecosystem to combat the shinies in a manner I think I will be the first to compare to the Shimmer in Annihilation. The novel eschews names for its characters and the defining events, parties, and even countries and cities of its 1970s Troubles setting, which to me contributed to a compellingly sinister and hyper-simplified, almost science-fictionalized version of a specific place in history. Most in our book club saw it as far more realistically grounded than I did, but I really prefer the Cary Fukunaga/Hiro Murai-inspired television adaptation that played in my head while reading. It’s sinister and disturbing at times and delightfully weird at other points. Overall, I would hesitate to recommend because of the effort required to read it even though the writing is bleakly funny in several places. I’ve already told a friend to deprioritize it on his reading list, but at the same time, its selection has improved my opinion of the Man Booker committee. An LRB for Southeast Asia (audio) At just over three years old, the Southeast Asia-focused literary quarterly is thriving. A New York Times profile from last year :\nMinh Bui Jones\u0026hellip; saw the magazine as a vehicle for cross-border connections in a region that lacks a sense of a shared historical narrative.\nAccording to Mr. Bui Jones, it also aims to be for Southeast Asia what he said The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books had been since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: “brave, trenchant critics of their respective governments.”\nThe Mekong Review is a long shot on many levels, not least because it covers a region where English literacy is patchy, postal systems are unreliable and newspapers that are not controlled by governments tend to struggle against censorship and chronic financial constraints.\n\u0026hellip;Then he must arrange delivery of the magazine’s 2,000-copy print run to Southeast Asian cities that are hundreds of miles apart. Mr. Bui Jones said he has an ad hoc distribution system that relies on friends who “mule” copies by plane, bus, tuk tuk and motorbike, and that he also moonlights as a deliveryman when he visits the region.\nTheir recent interview with Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s 93-year-old prime minister (paywalled) Viet Thanh Nguyen, MacArthur fellow and author of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner The Sympathizer, has contributed a piece about Vietnamese-American literature (paywalled) Twitter and caste-based discrimination Doc Rivers reflects on 20 years as a head coach in the NBA We have a lot of black players without fathers. And to me that’s a story that needs to be talked about, because it’s difficult for the black coach sometimes. The black male figures in a lot of these guys’ lives have burned them. So, being coached by us, some people think it’s easier when actually it’s harder.\nThe best album of 2018 Mitski\u0026rsquo;s Be the Cowboy, according to Consequence of Sound , Vulture , and The Line of Best Fit . It ranks second for the New York Times and NPR . (Update: also #1 for Pitchfork ) I was at the same London show as the Best Fit writer. I would venture a guess that at least a third of the crowd were LGBTQ couples, which was surprising to me because Mitski’s music neither lyrically nor sonically make for an obvious union of indie and queer subcultures. Even within the broad indie rock genre, hers is a less accessible sound, her previous album pretty much defined by its distorted guitar (the Guardian recently called her work “the emotional Tough Mudder of indie rock\u0026quot;\u0026hellip; OK, sure). I find myself liking a lot of Mitski-adjacent artists but neither Puberty 2 nor this album have hit for me, what am I missing? I do like \u0026ldquo;Two Slow Dancers\u0026rdquo; off this album and “Your Best American Girl” off Puberty 2 was one of my favorite songs of 2016. There’s a great episode of the Song Exploder podcast about the last one. Mitski on the Daily Show in September: \u0026ldquo;The cowboy myth is so appealing to me especially because I\u0026rsquo;m an Asian woman. That idea of not having to apologize is so American: riding into town, wrecking shit, and then walking out like he\u0026rsquo;s the hero.\u0026rdquo; Time lapse of the 32 days of filming required to shoot the sushi scene in Wes Anderson’s stop-motion Isle of Dogs (2018) IODs - Sushi Making Scene Timelapse from Andy Biddle on Vimeo.\nNot really a fan of Wes Anderson\u0026rsquo;s movies except for The Fantastic Mr. Fox but the final product is one of my favorite scenes of the year:\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0005/","summary":"The Mekong Review aims to be for Southeast Asia what he said The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books had been since 9/11: \u0026lsquo;brave, trenchant critics of their respective governments.\u0026rsquo; It\u0026rsquo;s a long shot on many levels, not least because it covers a region where English literacy is patchy, postal systems are unreliable and newspapers that are not controlled by governments tend to struggle against censorship and chronic financial constraints. Editor in chief Minh Bui Jones moonlights as a deliveryman when he visits the region.","title":"The Mekong Review; Mitski; and stop-motion sushi"},{"content":"Julia Bell remembers her Oxford entrance interview This is the shrinking Kingdom of the English, who subjugated Wales and Scotland and Ireland. The biggest problem of elite cliques is myopia. The country is far more brittle and divided than they can see. They are the believers who still, somewhere, think that the map of the world is pink. But they forget their Classics lessons; what happens when an empire falls? With no one else to dominate, the establishment turns on its own people. We become subjects, not of the British Empire, but of the last dregs of the English upper classes. A report into undergraduate admissions earlier this year found that in 2017 Oxford admitted more pupils from Westminster School than black students, a glaring piece of evidence about how the knot is being tightened even more firmly around the bag of family silver.\nI wonder now about all the other kids like me, the ones at odd angles, the queer and working class and black, or even just Northern, or Welsh, or provincial. This is not a place for them, however loudly they might be knocking on the door.\n\u0026ldquo;I was just a small piece in a whole fathom of lies\u0026rdquo; (h/t Meredith) The New York Times investigated a small-town Louisiana school that made waves placing its underprivileged student body in elite universities\nIn reality, the school falsified transcripts, made up student accomplishments and mined the worst stereotypes of black America to manufacture up-from-hardship tales that it sold to Ivy League schools hungry for diversity. The Landrys also fostered a culture of fear with physical and emotional abuse, students and teachers said. Students were forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement, and were choked, yelled at and berated.\nKemba Walker\u0026rsquo;s superstar turn A member of what was the worst team in NBA history rewrites his career in large part to maybe \u0026ldquo;the single most remarkable transformation of a jump shot in the history of the sport.\u0026rdquo;\nI\u0026rsquo;m writing about dragons as a black woman, and it\u0026rsquo;s fucking political. (h/t Junho) Part of why Jemisin is viewed as \u0026lsquo;political\u0026rsquo; is the mere fact that she writes about things like dragons and planets at all. Since at least the early 1900s, when people began using \u0026lsquo;fantasy\u0026rsquo; to signify a certain type of literature, the genre has been dominated by white male authors and their nostalgia for the pastoral European past, a time of kings and queens and wizards, all of them white. The heroes in these tales are often intent on saving that traditional order from some alien force\u0026mdash;an invading army of orcs, an evil sorcerer.\nJemisin flips that formula on its head. The Broken Earth, her latest and most famous trilogy, begins with an oppressed man, an escaped slave of sorts, setting off an earthquake that rips the land in two, toppling cities and covering the realm in a cloud of ash that will linger for thousands of years. In Jemisin\u0026rsquo;s telling, this isn\u0026rsquo;t necessarily a bad thing. As one character tells another, \u0026lsquo;Some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don\u0026rsquo;t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.\u0026rsquo;\nFrom August, Jemisin accepting her third consecutive Hugo Award:\nThis is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers, every single mediocre insecure wanna-be who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage; that people like me cannot possibly have earned such an honor; and that when they win, it\u0026rsquo;s meritocracy, but when we win, it\u0026rsquo;s identity politics. I get to smile at those people and lift a massive shining rocket-shaped finger in their direction.\n\u0026lsquo;I had seen trauma before, but never an entire traumatized nation\u0026rsquo; Last week, the two surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge were finally found responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians. Seth Mydans reflects on decades of reporting on the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge:\nI reminded myself regularly that all the adults I met were survivors or former killers, who now had to try to live with what they had seen or done. Almost everyone, survivor or killer, had lost family members. They carried around inside themselves millions of tiny worlds of suffering.\nBarry Jenkins writes about adapting James Baldwin\u0026rsquo;s If Beale Street Could Talk And yet so rarely has a protest novel contained within it as soaring a love as that between Tish and Fonny. To put it simply, the romance at the center of this novel is pure to the point of saccharine. It\u0026rsquo;s no wonder that, amongst the more scholarly of his readers, the book is held in lesser esteem. And yet even this is a testament to the magic trick Baldwin pulls here, and a key reason for the tone of our adaptation. We don\u0026rsquo;t expect to treat the lives and souls of black folks in the aesthetic of the ecstatic. It\u0026rsquo;s assumed that the struggle to live, to simply breathe and exist, weighs so heavily on black folks that our very beings need be shrouded in the pathos of pain and suffering.\nIt is this need, this desire to render blackness in hues of dread and sorrow, that leads some to reject rapturous renderings of black life as inauthentic. This misconception would be trivial if it didn\u0026rsquo;t trivialize an unquestionable fact about black life, for who else has wrested as much beauty from abject pain? Who else has manifested such joy despite outsized suffering? Somewhere, an Earth, Wind \u0026amp; Fire song is playing in a living room where portraits of Maya Angelou and a blue-eyed Jesus share a wall. The Rapture will be televised. And I\u0026rsquo;ll be damned if it won\u0026rsquo;t involve a cookout and somebody\u0026rsquo;s auntie leading an Electric Slide. I chose Beale Street because I felt the novel, more than any of his other works, represented the perfect blend of Baldwin\u0026rsquo;s dual obsessions with romance and social critique, as sensual a depiction of love as it is a biting observation of systemic injustice.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0004/","summary":"I reminded myself regularly that all the adults I met were survivors or former killers, who now had to try to live with what they had seen or done. Almost everyone, survivor or killer, had lost family members. They carried around inside themselves millions of tiny worlds of suffering.","title":"Reporting on the Khmer Rouge; Kemba Walker's jumpshot; and NK Jemisin's worldbuilding"},{"content":"\u0026ldquo;I need Squirrel Hill to return to its right size.\u0026rdquo; News crews from around the world are positioned across from Tree of Life, on the east side of the building, at Shady and Wilkins, cameras aimed at the tall, thin stained-glass windows\u0026hellip; On Monday night, at a barricade half a block from Tree of Life Synagogue, I overheard University of Pittsburgh students telling a reporter from Le Monde that the neighbourhood is \u0026lsquo;rich\u0026rsquo;. When I heard the word \u0026lsquo;rich\u0026rsquo;, I felt the cityscape close in. A story would go to press that people around the world would read in a few hours\u0026rsquo; time. Glued to the details of a senseless massacre, would they find some kind of sense in a description of \u0026lsquo;rich\u0026rsquo; Jews?\nIt feels weirdly out of scale at the moment, like an enormous parade balloon version of itself. Every cable news crawl has the words ‘Squirrel Hill’ in it. I am trying to shrink the neighbourhood back down, in my mind, to the place where I have picked my son up from preschool, from circus camp, from swimming lessons, leading him out of the tiled Jewish Community Center hallway to the tiny parking garage where I always narrowly miss denting another exhausted parent’s car.\n\u0026ldquo;Did that advance the field? Maybe. Is it the right thing to do? Absolutely not.\u0026rdquo; A brief history of artificial hearts, a technology not nearly as well-developed as I had thought. It reads like some of the middle chapters of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s excellent history of cancer The Emperor of All Maladies in that it has a practitioner framing the egos and recklessnesses of researchers as driving medical advancement, \u0026ldquo;challenging the binary characterization of therapeutics as either successes or failures.\u0026rdquo;\nDrop Facebook. It’s cleaner. While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.\nA review of \u0026ldquo;My Struggle: Book 6. The End.\u0026rdquo; What kind of book? Well, it’s 1153 pages long, it interrupts itself midway with a 400-page essay on young Adolf Hitler, it’s the sixth volume of a series and takes place in the real-life aftermath to to the first volume, and beyond that, its readers can’t seem to agree on any more specific a descriptor.\nI believe [the book’s readers] cannot tell you whether they think it is good or not either, but also that they all agree it exercises a certain fascination that keeps you reading. This fascination is what a proper reviewer would have to analyse. Otherwise, you are reduced to the status of the art teacher, moving from pupil to pupil and saying, this part is really good, there is something wrong with the anatomy of this figure, there’s something missing in the lower left part of the picture, that part has an interesting colour combination, etc. I’m afraid I will have to do that too, since I agreed to review this book.\nNo-longer-deaf people of Reddit, what’s something you thought would have a certain noise but were surprised it doesn’t? I had a friend who was surprised to find out that people have different sounding voices.\nI had a deaf girl ask me if ice cream made a sound when it melted.\nThe SEO Saga Presents: 2 Sequel 2 Titles: The Crimes of Brandening Part II: A Franchise Boogaloo Story One last thing with no relevant link, but the new movie in the Harry Potter spinoff series comes out this weekend and has the title \u0026ldquo;Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald” despite apparently not featuring any fantastic beasts. Also screening this week is the sequel to the movie adaptation of \u0026ldquo;The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo\u0026rdquo;, which has the full title of \u0026ldquo;The Girl in the Spider’s Web: A New Dragon Tattoo Story.\u0026rdquo;\nOK, one link here:\nThis is how I chose to spend my 30 minutes of free time tonight pic.twitter.com/WxjmG8AOSE\n\u0026mdash; Bridger Winegar (@bridger_w) November 9, 2018 ","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0003/","summary":"I need Squirrel Hill to return to its right size. It feels weirdly out of scale at the moment, like an enormous parade balloon version of itself. Every cable news crawl has the words ‘Squirrel Hill’ in it. I am trying to shrink the neighbourhood back down, in my mind, to the place where I have picked my son up from preschool, from circus camp, from swimming lessons, leading him out of the tiled Jewish Community Center hallway to the tiny parking garage where I always narrowly miss denting another exhausted parent’s car.","title":"Things I've Been Reading and Where to Find Them IV: A New Dragon Tattoo Story"},{"content":"Nikil Saval and Pankaj Mishra on \u0026ldquo;the painful sum of things\u0026rdquo; NS: Now that he has died, the preparation feels insufficient: the uneasiness remains. I suspect you feel it as well: how to speak about a writer whose work has been meaningful\u0026mdash;\u0026ndash;in my case, profoundly so; I could not imagine my life without it\u0026mdash;\u0026ndash;as well as a source of frustration or real pain. I have admired Naipaul as much as I have found him difficult to admire, a murky admixture that I find difficult to explain or clarify, and which I find with no other writer, to anything like the same degree. (Edward Said referred to his \u0026ldquo;pained admiration,\u0026rdquo; and dissonant phrases of that kind are scattered through appreciations of his work.)\nPM: For many aspiring writers from modest backgrounds, in the West as well as in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, he was the first writer who made us think that we, too, had something to say, and that we, too, had an intellectual claim upon the world\u0026hellip; In societies and cultures where the idea of a whole life devoted to writing and thinking is confined to the privileged members of the population, Naipaul\u0026rsquo;s example\u0026mdash;that of a man making himself a writer through sheer effort\u0026mdash;was a great boost.\nNS: It is the nature of the societies we live in never to let you forget your luck, to point to any success as a sign of its ultimate justice; to make your rage against them seem like ingratitude. In the end, to an extent that I find debilitating, Naipaul was grateful. I know that the sense of personal injury, of grievance, that I feel in recalling these fundamental aspects of his life and art are disabling, feelings that one day might be transmuted into something different; a necessary distance. But I have yet to manage it.\nSeptember 19-28, 2018 in Donald Trump\u0026rsquo;s America Milkman, by Anna Burns Winner of this year\u0026rsquo;s Man Booker Prize for fiction. Opening paragraph:\nThe day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man. Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, \u0026lsquo;knew me to see but not to speak to\u0026rsquo; and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was 18 and that he was 41\u0026hellip; It had been my fault too, it seemed, this affair with the milkman. But I had not been having an affair witht he milkman. I did not like the milkman and had been frightened and confused by his pursuing and attempting an affair with me.\nSocial media and the Rohingya crisis Facebook commissioned an independent assessment of the human rights impact of the social network in Myanmar . It finds that it \u0026ldquo;has become a useful platform for those seeking to incite violence and cause offline harm.\u0026rdquo;\nOn the topic of the Rohingya refugee crisis, a book I\u0026rsquo;ve been in the middle of for a couple of months now is Myanmar\u0026rsquo;s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim \u0026lsquo;Other\u0026rsquo; by Francis Wade. It is a little bit dated since it was published in December 2017, but Wade seems to be the best Anglosphere reporter on the topic and relatedly the most compassionate. I recommend his July LRB article \u0026ldquo;Fleas We Greatly Loathe\u0026rdquo; whenever I can.\nBill Gates, unimpressed by effective altruism\u0026rsquo;s focus on existential risk Ezra Klein: 99.99 percent of all the humans who\u0026rsquo;ll ever live have yet to be born. If that\u0026rsquo;s true, then even very small reductions in the danger of those future lives not happening begins to outweigh large improvements in the value of life now.\nBill Gates: Well, if you said there was a philanthropist 500 years ago that said, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m not gonna feed the poor, I\u0026rsquo;m gonna worry about existential risk\u0026rdquo;, I doubt their prediction would have made any difference in terms of what came later. You\u0026rsquo;ve got to have a certain modesty.\n\u0026hellip;If somebody thinks there\u0026rsquo;s a magic thing they can do today that helps all those future lives, in a free economy, they have a chance to build whatever it is they think does that. We do have a few things like climate change where you want to invest today to involve problems tomorrow. I\u0026rsquo;m always a little surprised there\u0026rsquo;s not more engagement on that issue. Pandemic risk, weapons of mass destruction.\nBut\u0026hellip; there\u0026rsquo;s not many that we really understand with clarity, and so somebody who says, \u0026lsquo;Okay, let\u0026rsquo;s just let a million people die of malaria because I\u0026rsquo;m building this temple that will help people a million years from now\u0026rsquo;, I wonder what the heck they\u0026rsquo;re building that temple out of.\nEK: A lot of people have become very focused on the question of AI risk. I\u0026rsquo;m curious how you weight that as a risk to future human life?\nBG: And so they think that\u0026rsquo;s more important than kids dying of malaria?\nEK: \u0026hellip;I don\u0026rsquo;t want to put words in other people\u0026rsquo;s mouths, but as I understand it, the idea is there are a lot of good people working on malaria, and AI is so dangerous that it\u0026rsquo;s better for people on the margin to be working on AI risk now than to be\u0026mdash;\nBG: But most of those people aren\u0026rsquo;t working on AI risk. They\u0026rsquo;re actually accelerating progress in AI\u0026hellip; They like working on AI. Working on AI is fun. If they think what they\u0026rsquo;re doing is reducing the risk of AI, I haven\u0026rsquo;t seen that proof of that.\nPurity, by Jonathan Frenzen (h/t Eszter) The inaugural selection for our unofficial grad-student book club here at Nuffield College. I didn\u0026rsquo;t like it and not knowing Franzen outside of this work, I found myself distrusting him with the subject matter. I couldn\u0026rsquo;t help thinking of this tweet from the @GuyInYourMFA novelty account:\nstory idea: a married man is so complicated and interesting that he sleeps with a 22 year old\n\u0026mdash; AUTHOR In Your MFA (@GuyInYourMFA) October 21, 2017 I\u0026rsquo;m not prudish about what I read, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t feel nearly enough reward for indulging 560+ pages of exhausting characters. I can appreciate the choice to use a cast of unlikeable in a novel called Purity, but the unlikeability of the author seeps through too much to justify the length.\nSpoiler alert, I also made this chart trying to chronologize the sequence of events in this novel, which jumps abruptly between chapters across space, time, and character perspective:\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0002/","summary":"Now that he has died, the preparation feels insufficient: the uneasiness remains. I suspect you feel it as well: how to speak about a writer whose work has been meaningful—\u0026ndash;in my case, profoundly so; I could not imagine my life without it—\u0026ndash;as well as a source of frustration or real pain. I have admired Naipaul as much as I have found him difficult to admire, a murky admixture that I find difficult to explain or clarify, and which I find with no other writer, to anything like the same degree.","title":"'The painful sum of things'; social media and the Rohingya crisis; and 'Purity' by Jonathan Franzen"},{"content":"Thomas Laqueur on the legacy of American lynchings The United States sometimes seems to be committed to amnesia, to forgetting its great national sin of chattel slavery and the violence, repression, endless injustices and humiliations that have sustained racial hierarchies since emancipation. Stevenson has said that, visiting Germany, he was struck by the number of memorials to the victims of the Holocaust: the Stolpersteine, or \u0026lsquo;stumbling stones\u0026rsquo;, set in the ground in their thousands to mark the names of the murdered in the places where they once lived; the Holocaust Memorial near the Brandenburg Gate and its subterranean museum; the thousands of other reminders all over the country of the evils done in the name of Germany \u0026ndash; maps, monuments, plaques, preserved concentration camps. Similarly, the Apartheid Museum in South Africa bears witness to the racist system that dominated that country\u0026rsquo;s history; monuments and plaques outside the constitutional court in Johannesburg recognise those who suffered. There is no remotely comparable memorial culture in the United States to the legacy of slavery.\nPhD student Andrea Long Chu on \u0026rsquo;transsexuality as separatism\u0026rsquo; It must be underscored how unpopular it is on the left today to countenance the notion that transition expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire\u0026hellip; I doubt that any of us transition simply because we want to \u0026ldquo;be\u0026rdquo; women, in some abstract, academic way. I certainly didn\u0026rsquo;t. I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone\u0026rsquo;s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my makeup in the bathroom flanked like Christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts.\nFirst-year undergrad Daniel Kodsi interviews Amia Srinivasan Impressively well written and I particularly like this bit at the end:\nPolitical theorists envision the public sphere as a place of the free exchange of reasons as if that free exchange of reasons is supposed to be conducive to general knowledge, political and moral knowledge. That just seems wrong to me if you and I don\u0026rsquo;t even acknowledge the same considerations as reasons.\nThe project, then, is to work towards a better model, most centrally one which would stop people from losing knowledge in the face of bedrock disagreement. The model that emerges, it is already clear, will be in conflict with another liberal program, JS Mill\u0026rsquo;s. \u0026lsquo;Mill believed in the living truth\u0026rsquo;, Srinivasan explains. \u0026lsquo;He thought that even when you know something, you\u0026rsquo;re better off defending your argument against sceptics because that will heighten the justification for your belief. I actually think the opposite can happen. It can particularly happen in cases\u0026hellip; where there\u0026rsquo;s deep practical disagreement coupled with power differentials.\u0026rsquo; As an example, she gives the case of a black person in a society like the US, who has knowledge that the cops in his town are racist in virtue of his repeated interactions with them but, when pushed by a sceptic, is unable to counter every argument with which he is presented. Srinivasan thinks that such a person is \u0026lsquo;at risk of losing his knowledge\u0026rsquo;, not because his evidence is defeated or he loses his justification, but because he might feel psychologically that he needs to give up his view.\nIt was recently announced Srinivasan has a book deal to extend her excellent LRB article \u0026ldquo;Does anyone have the right to sex?\u0026rdquo; ","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/reads/0001/","summary":"\u0026lsquo;Mill believed that even when you know something, defending your argument against sceptics will heighten the justification for your belief,\u0026rsquo; Srinivasan explains. \u0026lsquo;I think the opposite can happen, particularly in cases where there\u0026rsquo;s deep practical disagreement coupled with power differentials.\u0026rsquo; She gives the case of a black person who has knowledge that the cops in his town are racist in virtue of his interactions with them but, when pushed by a sceptic, is unable to counter every argument with which he is presented. Srinivasan thinks such a person is \u0026lsquo;at risk of losing his knowledge\u0026rsquo;, not because his evidence is defeated or he loses his justification, but because he might feel psychologically that he needs to give up his view.","title":"Monuments to chattel slavery; 'transsexuality as separatism'; and the risk of losing one's knowledge"},{"content":"wm.alampaydavis@gmail.com matthew.davis@nuffield.ox.ac.uk alampay.davis@columbia.edu ","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/contact/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"mailto:wm.alampaydavis@gmail.com\"\u003ewm.alampaydavis@gmail.com\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003ca href=\"mailto:matthew.davis@nuffield.ox.ac.uk\"\u003ematthew.davis@nuffield.ox.ac.uk\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003ca href=\"mailto:alampay.davis@columbia.edu\"\u003ealampay.davis@columbia.edu\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"video-wrapper\" style=\"padding-bottom: 75%;\"\u003e\n\u003ciframe src=\"https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m18!1m12!1m3!1d2469.9083487410903!2d-1.2660716864924833!3d51.752999471752865!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x4876c6a48dbb5f1f%3A0x3d54442c88768f01!2sNuffield%20College!5e0!3m2!1sen!2sph!4v1760336046113!5m2!1sen!2sph\" allowfullscreen=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer-when-downgrade\"\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e","title":"Contact"},{"content":"General Cheatsheet of R commands for data work . Data cleaning: dplyr and tidyr Figures: ggplot2 Working with character/word vectors: stringr If you plan on using R Notebooks: rmarkdown Original source Cheatsheet of Stata commands for data work Original source Workshop 1: script-writing See my econometrics notes below for a refresher on R, R Notebooks, and for an intro econometrics refresher. R: fixest for running regressions (as opposed to lm or plm) faster estimation flexible formula writing allows simultaneous estimation of many similar regression models, much simpler and more convenient inclusion of leads, lags, and differences of variables, and intuitive specification of standard errors its etable function provides a nice pipeline for creating very customizable tables automatically (better in my opinion than the usual suggestion, which is the stargazer package) R: magrittr for very intuitive and readable script-writing especially for data processing. An intro here . Stata: an intro to data cleaning functions Workshop 2: project-oriented workflows A guide to code and data for researchers R-specific:\nWhy use R Projects? (the other chapters here are great too) A more basic guide here Relative filepaths using the here package A guide to R Notebooks A bit more advanced: R profiles Setting seeds for replicability Stata-specific:\nStata\u0026rsquo;s equivalent of R\u0026rsquo;s here package for relative filepaths Workflows for automating tables More advanced: Stata\u0026rsquo;s equivalent of R Profiles More advanced: Jupyter Notebooks for Stata Setting seeds for replicability Additional topics Topics I\u0026rsquo;d cover with more time\nDebugging tips: how to identify bugs in your code Using ChatGPT as a coding resource. It is quite error prone (especially for Stata since it isn\u0026rsquo;t open source) but invaluable when it does work. Some things I use it for: \u0026ldquo;How do I do [task] in Stata?\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;How do I implement [task] in R using [package, e.g. the tidyverse]?\u0026rdquo; Copy and paste a chunk of code and then ask what each line is doing [pasted code] What\u0026rsquo;s a more efficient way of accomplishing the same thing?\u0026quot; \u0026ldquo;This is my code: [pasted code]. I get an error that says [error]. Where is my mistake?\u0026rdquo; Writing your own functions A guide in R A guide in Python Implementing different kinds of regressions (I do this a little bit in my econometrics notes) Customizing regression tables Data visualization R: see the ggplot2 cheatsheet Stata: see the commands in the cheatsheet and here \u0026rsquo;s a guided introduction Other possibly helpful research resources: Trello for keeping notes, maintaining to-do lists, storing relevant documents, summarizing research meetings, etc. Sychronizes across all devices. How to present an applied micro paper Browser extensions EZProxy Redirect to access online resources that Columbia has subscriptions to when away from university internet and without using a VPN Simple Mass Downloader to download all files contained in a web page Literature review Google Scholar search is obvious but also click on the \u0026ldquo;Cited by\u0026rdquo; link under a search result to find other relevant and possibly more up to date papers and methods or see if someone’s already done what you want to do ","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/teaching/research-ta/","summary":"\u003ch3 id=\"general\"\u003eGeneral\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"/teaching/research-2023/tidyverse-cheatsheet.pdf\"\u003eCheatsheet of R commands for data work\u003c/a\u003e\n.\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eData cleaning: \u003cstrong\u003edplyr\u003c/strong\u003e and \u003cstrong\u003etidyr\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eFigures: \u003cstrong\u003eggplot2\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWorking with character/word vectors: \u003cstrong\u003estringr\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIf you plan on using R Notebooks: \u003cstrong\u003ermarkdown\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://posit.co/resources/cheatsheets/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eOriginal source\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"/teaching/research-2023/tidyverse-cheatsheet.pdf\"\u003eCheatsheet of Stata commands for data work\u003c/a\u003e\n\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://geocenter.github.io/StataTraining/portfolio/01_resource/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eOriginal source\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"workshop-1-script-writing\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"/teaching/research-2023/Workshop1-Slides.pdf\"\u003eWorkshop 1: script-writing\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSee my \u003ca href=\"/teaching/#introduction-to-econometrics\"\u003eeconometrics notes below\u003c/a\u003e\n for a refresher on R, R Notebooks, and for an intro econometrics refresher.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eR: \u003ca href=\"https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/fixest/vignettes/fixest_walkthrough.html\" target=\"_blank\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003efixest\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n for running regressions (as opposed to lm or plm)\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003efaster estimation\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eflexible formula writing allows simultaneous estimation of many similar regression models, much simpler and more convenient inclusion of leads, lags, and differences of variables, and intuitive specification of standard errors\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eits \u003cem\u003eetable\u003c/em\u003e function provides a nice pipeline for creating very customizable tables automatically (better in my opinion than the usual suggestion, which is the stargazer package)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eR: \u003ca href=\"https://magrittr.tidyverse.org/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003emagrittr\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n for very intuitive and readable script-writing especially for data processing. An intro \u003ca href=\"https://www.datacamp.com/tutorial/pipe-r-tutorial\" target=\"_blank\"\u003ehere\u003c/a\u003e\n.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eStata: an intro to \u003ca href=\"https://geocenter.github.io/StataTraining/part2/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003edata cleaning functions\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"workshop-2-project-oriented-workflows\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"/teaching/research-2023/Workshop2-Slides.pdf\"\u003eWorkshop 2: project-oriented workflows\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/CodeAndData.pdf\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eA guide to code and data for researchers\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eR-specific:\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Data/Research TA Resources"},{"content":"Political economics and possibilism A 1971 essay by Albert Hirschman on the absence of politics in economists’ analysis:\nEconomists continue to identify scientific progress with the elimination of ‘exogenous’ forces from their constructs\u0026hellip; Speculation about connections between economics and politics becomes much more profitable when one focuses not on the roughest outline, but on the finer features of the economic landscape. This can of course best be done by the economist who knows about them; the trouble is that his professional interests do not ordinarily lie in this direction. At the same time, the political scientist who has the motivation to look for such connections lacks the familiarity with economic concepts and relationships that is required. Hence the field is happily left to a few mavericks like myself.\nRelated:\nOliver Kim on Albert Hirschman Economics with a moral compass? Welfare economics: past, present, and future Video link here , in particular, the conversation starting at 01:12:20 on the disappearance of welfare considerations in economics:\nDeaton: \u0026ldquo;Welfare economics seemed to have some chance of coming back, but if you look at where we are now, most economic departments—including top departments—have no teaching of welfare economics. That subject has just completely vanished.\u0026rdquo; Sen: \u0026ldquo;I think economists tend to ignore philosophy in general, but the idea of welfare in particular\u0026hellip; More particularly, there is no progress here, especially in dealing with inequality or poverty, and we are stuck with just the distribution-indifferent Pareto principle. Note that the Bengal famine might have been a compensation test victory, because quite a lot of people gained a lot in 1943, and they could have compensated the new destitutes. They did not have to do it—and the destitutes mostly died—but was there a social improvement there? How could Kaldor and Hicks support it? The answer probably is that both were trying to do welfare economics without having the real courage to go beyond the Pareto principle—without taking on the real problems of distribution, inequality, and poverty.\u0026rdquo; Deaton: \u0026ldquo;I’m glad you can laugh about it. I’m surprised it doesn’t make you angry because it’s a very serious matter. Bad things are happening to people because of these bad ideas. This central enterprise of bringing serious philosophy and welfare back into economics has not been a success, in some sense.\u0026rdquo;\nRelated:\nThe Strange Disappearance of Welfare Economics (Atkinson, 2001) The Restoration of Welfare Economics (Atkinson, 2011) ","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/other/","summary":"\u003ch3 id=\"political-economics-and-possibilism\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://academic.oup.com/princeton-scholarship-online/book/18029/chapter-abstract/175891463?login=false\u0026amp;redirectedFrom=fulltext\" target=\"_blank\"\u003ePolitical economics and possibilism\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA 1971 essay by Albert Hirschman on the absence of politics in economists’ analysis:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eEconomists continue to identify scientific progress with the elimination of ‘exogenous’ forces from their constructs\u0026hellip; Speculation about connections between economics and politics becomes much more profitable when one focuses not on the roughest outline, but on the finer features of the economic landscape. This can of course best be done by the economist who knows about them; the trouble is that his professional interests do not ordinarily lie in this direction. At the same time, the political scientist who has the motivation to look for such connections lacks the familiarity with economic concepts and relationships that is required. Hence the field is happily left to a few mavericks like myself.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Other"},{"content":" I am a political economist working at the intersection of environmental, development, and welfare economics. My research empirically examines how environmental change shapes social welfare, broadly construed. A recurring theme in this work is that while the climate is governed by complex biophysical systems, its welfare impacts are distributed through social systems which can enforce, exacerbate, and reify patterns of social inequalities and deprivation. This agenda ultimately seeks to refine the economic analysis of climate change and inform the design of equitable climate and development policy. By necessity, my work draws from interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations across the social and natural sciences. I also maintain a secondary interest in historical political economy as it pertains to the determination and persistence of social inequalities and deprivations. Working papers Global income distributions and social welfare under climate change Revision in progress, 2025 draft available upon request JMP version previously circulated with the title \u0026ldquo;Climate inequality\u0026rdquo; Understanding how climate change impacts global economic inequality is critical to the design of equitable and politically viable climate policy. Yet where evidence of this relationship is available, analysis is generally limited to coarse comparisons of country-level aggregates, remaining agnostic to disparities across individuals within those countries. This paper advances this literature using newly available distributional income data to incorporate within-country dimensions of this \u0026lsquo;climate inequality\u0026rsquo;. First, I document new evidence that temperature shocks persistently exacerbate inequalities within countries by disproportionately reducing income growth among the lowest income-earners, especially in warm-climate economies. Second, I use these empirical results to compare the historically observed distribution of global income to its counterfactual distribution had global warming been stabilized at 1980 levels. I estimate that systematic warming between 1980-2016 increased global income inequality by 4.0% [1.6,6.6], with absolute increases in between-country and within-country inequality contributing equally to this total effect. These contributions in turn correspond to proportional increases in inequality of 2.6% [0.0, 5.6] within countries and 8.7% [4.9, 13.3] between countries. To my knowledge, these distributional results constitute a novel contribution to the climate impacts literature and altogether offer the most comprehensive evidence yet of the globally regressive economic impact of climate change.\nTemperature, institutions, and the political climate Revision in progress, 2025 draft available upon request Despite widespread recognition of climate change as a threat to global stability, its political consequences remain undertheorized. This paper derives two competing hypotheses of how political preferences and institutions respond to environmental shocks by repurposing influential theories of demand-led political transition. The \u0026ldquo;mercury uprising\u0026rdquo; hypothesis posits that adverse climate shocks reduce the opportunity cost of contesting autocratic rule, thereby increasing pressure for democratic reform. In contrast, the `state of exception\u0026rsquo; hypothesis views these shocks as crisis events that prompt citizens to trade off negative liberties for perceived security, diminishing support for democracy and manifesting in autocratic drift. I test these hypotheses by estimating the dynamic impacts of identified temperature shocks on survey-based proxies for democratic demand and on institutional quality, using multi-valued and binary measures of democracy. Results indicate that economically adverse shocks reduce democratic sentiment and increase the risk of democratic backsliding. A 0.5$^\\circ$C shock reduces the annual probability of democratization in autocracies by 1.5–3.7 percentage points, depending on local climate and the democracy measure used. In warm-climate democracies, the same shock increases the risk of democratic reversal by 0.6–2.0pp, with no comparable effect in cooler, typically more developed contexts. These findings support the state of exception hypothesis and suggest that sufficient state capacity may insulate democracies from climate-driven political disruption.\nWork in progress Evidence of a drought effect on the hazard into spousal violence with Tanushree Goyal A write-up is available upon request. Results reported here are preliminary. This project investigates how droughts influence the onset of intimate-partner violence. We combine high-resolution precipitation data with duration data derived from household domestic violence surveys in India to estimate how negative income shocks impact the risk of marital violence. We find that a negative precipitation shock of a magnitude expected once every 4\u0026ndash;5 years \\textit{decreases} the probability of first-time spousal violence by 0.037 percentage points in the formative years of marriage, representing a 70% reduction from the unconditional baseline hazard. As a complementary analysis, we revisit a recent study linking similar drought shocks to child marriage, applying updated methods and improved data. We now find that droughts reduce the hazard into early marriage both in Indian contexts practicing dowry payments and in Sub-Saharan African settings with bride-price customs. These effects are also largest for marriages occurring later in life. Our findings suggest a much more consistent relationship between drought and the timing of marriage across cultural contexts and that child marriage is likely more culturally coerced than economically motivated.\nPublications Large potential reduction in economic damages under UN mitigation targets Marshall Burke, W. Matthew Alampay Davis, and Noah S. Diffenbaugh (2018)\nNature 557(7706): 549–553. We present a probabilistic framework for assessing aggregate economic impacts of anthropogenic warming. Our construction decomposes uncertainty associated with mid-century and end-of-century economic projections into distinct sources of uncertainty associated with i) econometric estimation of the economic effects of environmental change, ii) climate models of the spatial distribution of anthropogenic warming, iii) the projected schedule of greenhouse gas concentrations associated with a radiative forcing, and iv) the social discounting regime of choice. We apply this framework to characterize the economic benefits of climate policy, emphasizing how achieving the most ambitious mitigation targets of the 2015 Paris Agreement would obviate essentially certain economic calamity that will otherwise concentrate in developing countries.\nPaper materials and links Paper: official $\\cdot$ ungated Replication files Stanford ECHO Lab website Select citations New York Times $\\cdot$ The Guardian $\\cdot$ Governors of New York, California, and Washington $\\cdot$ IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15) $\\cdot$ MSNBC (TV) $\\cdot$ “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells $\\cdot$ Rezo $\\cdot$ Bernie Sanders $\\cdot$ US House Committee on Financial Services $\\cdot$ IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6-WGII) Select press Nature $\\cdot$ Stanford $\\cdot$ Bloomberg $\\cdot$ CBS (TV) $\\cdot$ The Guardian $\\cdot$ Reuters $\\cdot$ The Hill $\\cdot$ Yahoo $\\cdot$ Axios $\\cdot$ The New Yorker $\\cdot$ Business Insider $\\cdot$ Rolling Stone $\\cdot$ The Daily Show (TV) Combining satellite imagery and machine learning to predict poverty Neal Jean, Marshall Burke, Michael Xie, W. Matthew Alampay Davis, David B. Lobell, and Stefano Ermon (2016)\nScience 353: 790–794. Efforts to study and design policy addressing the challenges of global poverty and inequality are hampered by the infrequency and prohibitive expense of reliable measurement of welfare, particularly in the developing world. Here we demonstrate a scalable method for overcoming this data scarcity which works by extracting economic information from an unconventional but inexpensive source of data with increasingly frequent and essentially global coverage: high-resolution daytime satellite imagery.\nOur \u0026ldquo;transfer learning\u0026rdquo; pipeline proceeds by first assigning a convolutional neural network model pre-trained for generic image classification the task of identifying features in the daytime imagery predictive of night-time luminosity, a crude proxy for economic activity. In effect, the CNN learns to produce a nonlinear mapping from the unstructured images to a low-dimensional vector representation of its most economically informative features. Ridge regression models are then optimized to produce out-of-sample estimates of consumption expenditures and asset wealth. In an initial application to five diverse sub-Saharan African countries\u0026mdash;Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, and Rwanda\u0026mdash;our entirely open-source models are able to explain up to 75% of the variation in village-level outcomes as measured by household surveys, demonstrating potential to reduce misallocation costs in the administration of targeted social programs.\nPaper materials and links Paper: official $\\cdot$ ungated Replication files: code and data $\\cdot$ closed issues Authors\u0026rsquo; blog posts: summary $\\cdot$ genesis $\\cdot$ update Sustain Lab website Non-technical animated video summary Select press Science $\\cdot$ Stanford $\\cdot$ The Washington Post $\\cdot$ BBC $\\cdot$ Scientific American $\\cdot$ The Atlantic $\\cdot$ The Onion $\\cdot$ Bill Gates $\\cdot$ Center for Global Development ","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/research/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"intro-text\"\u003e\nI am a political economist working at the intersection of environmental, development, and welfare economics. My research empirically examines how environmental change shapes social welfare, broadly construed. A recurring theme in this work is that while the climate is governed by complex biophysical systems, its welfare impacts are distributed through social systems which can enforce, exacerbate, and reify patterns of social inequalities and deprivation. This agenda ultimately seeks to refine the economic analysis of climate change and inform the design of equitable climate and development policy.\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nBy necessity, my work draws from interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations across the social and natural sciences. I also maintain a secondary interest in \u003ca href=\"https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/44005\"\u003ehistorical political economy\u003c/a\u003e as it pertains to the determination and persistence of social inequalities and deprivations.\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"content-body\"\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"working-papers\"\u003eWorking papers\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"global-income-distributions-and-social-welfare-under-climate-change\"\u003eGlobal income distributions and social welfare under climate change\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRevision in progress, 2025 draft available upon request\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eJMP version previously circulated with the title \u0026ldquo;Climate inequality\u0026rdquo;\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUnderstanding how climate change impacts global economic inequality is critical to the design of equitable and politically viable climate policy. Yet where evidence of this relationship is available, analysis is generally limited to coarse comparisons of country-level aggregates, remaining agnostic to disparities across individuals within those countries. This paper advances this literature using newly available distributional income data to incorporate within-country dimensions of this \u0026lsquo;climate inequality\u0026rsquo;. First, I document new evidence that temperature shocks persistently exacerbate inequalities within countries by disproportionately reducing income growth among the lowest income-earners, especially in warm-climate economies. Second, I use these empirical results to compare the historically observed distribution of global income to its counterfactual distribution had global warming been stabilized at 1980 levels. I estimate that systematic warming between 1980-2016 increased global income inequality by 4.0% [1.6,6.6], with absolute increases in between-country and within-country inequality contributing equally to this total effect. These contributions in turn correspond to proportional increases in inequality of 2.6% [0.0, 5.6] within countries and 8.7% [4.9, 13.3] between countries. To my knowledge, these distributional results constitute a novel contribution to the climate impacts literature and altogether offer the most comprehensive evidence yet of the globally regressive economic impact of climate change.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Research"},{"content":" Using this space to collate academic resources I’ve personally found the most constructive. I make this qualification because plenty of advice I’ve seen widely circulated over the years absolutely would not work for me: my advice for reading advice is to feel emboldened to reject it. Preparing for grad school A guide to full-time research assistant positions (jobs now called “pre-docs”) as a stepping stone to quantitative social-science PhDs (Coly Elhai, Quan Le, Kai Matheson, and Carolyn Tsao) I\u0026rsquo;ve made notes from both my grad schools available on here in the past but Luke Stein’s put them to shame Research tools How to critique academic work, helpful for referee reports and seminar discussion (Macartan Humphreys) How to build an economic model in your spare time (Hal Varian) Most academics taught themselves how to code. Some tips here (specific to R) on remedying bad habits (Jennifer Bryan and Jim Hester , esp. sections 2-3) The anatomy of an applied micro talk (Jesse Shapiro) A style guide for mathematical writing (Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M. Roberts , esp. section 1) Claude Code for empirical workflows (Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham for Markus Academy ) Research advice Transitioning from coursework to research (Paul Niehaus) An alternative way to create structure is to focus on your system. By system, I mean the habits and routines you develop and practice on a regular basis. For example, attending the seminar each week, writing down three suggestions for ways to improve the paper, and meeting afterwards with a classmate to discuss your ideas is a practice you might incorporate into your system. In designing your system, your aim is to give yourself a high probability of eventually accomplishing your ultimate goal (come up with a great job market paper) even though you cannot predict with any certainty the sequence of events through which this will come about.\nFinding research ideas, co-authoring, submitting papers, among other insights (Susan Athey, int. Simon Bowmaker, pp. 6-8)\nMy econometric theory was very similar. I’d be working on an empirical paper, and I’d say, “How can I think about the conditions under which this empirical approach would work?” And I would read papers with informal descriptions of the reasoning, and I would be dissatisfied. And so I would say, “Let me write this down, and if I do it formally, maybe then I’ll understand.” As I started writing things down, I would realize that there was a deeper, more general idea. And I felt that other people would benefit from having that clarity of conceptual insights in their own empirical work, and so I wrote it into econometric theory papers. Almost all of my very theoretical papers have been motivated by trying to solve an applied theory problem, and realizing that I would have more clarity about the specific problem if I understood the generality.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/resources/","summary":"\u003cdiv style=\"opacity: 0.6; font-size: 80%;\"\u003e\nUsing this space to collate academic resources I’ve personally found the most constructive. I make this qualification because plenty of advice I’ve seen widely circulated over the years absolutely would not work for me: my advice for reading advice is to feel emboldened to reject it.\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"font-size: 70%;\"\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"preparing-for-grad-school\"\u003ePreparing for grad school\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA guide to full-time research assistant positions (jobs now called “pre-docs”) as a stepping stone to quantitative social-science PhDs \u003ca href=\"https://raguide.github.io/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003e(Coly Elhai, Quan Le, Kai Matheson, and Carolyn Tsao)\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eI\u0026rsquo;ve made notes from both my grad schools available on here in the past but \u003ca href=\"https://github.com/lukestein/steincoresummary\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eLuke Stein’s\u003c/a\u003e\n put them to shame\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"research-tools\"\u003eResearch tools\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHow to critique academic work, helpful for referee reports and seminar discussion \u003ca href=\"https://macartan.github.io/teaching/how-to-critique\" target=\"_blank\"\u003e(Macartan Humphreys)\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHow to build an economic model in your spare time \u003ca href=\"https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/how.pdf\" target=\"_blank\"\u003e(Hal Varian)\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eMost academics taught themselves how to code. Some tips here (specific to R) on remedying bad habits (\u003ca href=\"https://rstats.wtf/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eJennifer Bryan and Jim Hester\u003c/a\u003e\n, esp. sections 2-3)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe anatomy of an applied micro talk \u003ca href=\"https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shapiro/files/applied_micro_slides.pdf\" target=\"_blank\"\u003e(Jesse Shapiro)\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA style guide for mathematical writing (\u003ca href=\"https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematical_writing.pdf\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eDonald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M. Roberts\u003c/a\u003e\n, esp. section 1)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eClaude Code for empirical workflows (\u003ca href=\"https://paulgp.substack.com/p/getting-started-with-claude-code?utm_source=app-post-stats-page\u0026amp;r=2iog7\u0026amp;utm_medium=ios\u0026amp;triedRedirect=true\" target=\"_blank\"\u003ePaul Goldsmith-Pinkham for Markus Academy\u003c/a\u003e\n)\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"research-advice\"\u003eResearch advice\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTransitioning from coursework to research \u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@paul.niehaus/doing-research-18cb310529e0\" target=\"_blank\"\u003e(Paul Niehaus)\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Resources for academic economics"},{"content":" This page contains some of the material I've prepared and resources I've drawn from over my nine semesters teaching undergraduates at Columbia. Any and all errors are the fault of the students who did not point them out to me or the professors who taught me wrong. Senior honors thesis workshop Fall 2023 $\\cdot$ Spring 2024\nIn this role, I designed and administered workshops on applied research methods and project-oriented workflows for senior honors thesis undergraduate students. My responsibilities also included serving as a departmental consultant to economics students conducting empirical research (namely, undergraduate and master\u0026rsquo;s thesis students and part-time research assistants), meeting one-on-one for 2-8 hours each week. Some prepared materials are enumerated here. Student feedback \"Matthew is very organized, knowledgeable, and accessible. Even though he’s not a specialist in my area of research, he went above and beyond in familiarizing himself with my data, and he’s an expert at coding.\" Introduction to econometrics Fall 2020 $\\cdot$ Spring 2021 $\\cdot$ Fall 2021 $\\cdot$ Summer 2023\nECON-UN3412 introduces students to multiple regression and related methods for analyzing data in economics and related disciplines. Additional topics include regression with discrete random variables, instrumental variables regression, analysis of random experiments and quasi-experiments, and regression with time series data. Students will learn how to conduct and critique empirical studies in economics and related fields. Accordingly, the emphasis of the course is on empirical applications.\nText: Introduction to Econometrics, James Stock and Mark Watson (2019, 2020)\nColumbia traditionally teaches its undergraduates econometrics using Stata. I took the initiative to prepare supplementary material and solutions to provide students the option to instead use R, a freely available open-source alternative. After some initial trepidation about departing from the official software of instruction, students seemed to find its object-oriented programming more intuitive and appreciated its accessibility beyond the semester course. I continued teaching the course in R and Stata simultaneously over four semesters.\nSelect student feedback \"Literally the best TA I’ve ever had. Always open to answering questions. Has the best study guides for learning R which was a relatively new language for me. I could not have done it without him.\" — Fall 2021 \"Matt is a great TA who went above and beyond by making additional study notes that explained very clearly what some of the most difficult concepts meant.\" — Fall 2021 \"He was extremely helpful and his teaching may be improved only by posting video recordings of his recitations. His strength is posting really really clear notes on how to do the course in R.\" — Fall 2021 \"Matt is a great TA! As a student who used R, I depended heavily on Matt’s notes. He was always super responsive and helped us whenever we needed.\" — Spring 2021 \"He is very organized and helpful. He would prepare weekly R recitation notes and share them, which were a great help for problem sets.\" — Spring 2021 \"Matthew did a nice job going over practice problems during each recitation as well as explaining the significance of the concepts we were learning.\" — Fall 2020 \"Great TA. He goes through the Stata examples in detail. His solutions to the examples are clear and straightforward. Super intelligent! And he makes his recordings available. Thank you!\" — Fall 2020 \"Saved me for my midterm. Great real world examples in recitations.\" — Fall 2020 Below are weekly guides produced for the Summer 2023 iteration of my classes, which is accelerated and condensed relative to the regular semester course. These materials include a subset of practice problems but exclude material prepared for problem sets, exams, practice exams, and their solutions. Most datasets referenced are available for free here. Instruction here presumes no prior experience with programming other than installation of R and RStudio. It introduces and makes use of R Notebooks saved as R Markdown (.Rmd) files, a convenient way of integrating in-line R scripting with intuitive and customizable word processing to produce handsome problem sets and reports either as pdfs or HTML files. If you’re following on your own, open the Rmd files in RStudio to see the input and the pdf files to see what the resultant output looks like. If I were to update this material, I’d integrate .Rprofiles into the problem set pipeline to ease students\u0026rsquo; experience further.\n1. Introduction to R and R Notebooks | RMD\n2. Multicollinearity, joint hypothesis testing, and the tidyverse | RMD\n3. Exam 1 review\n4. Nonlinear regression | RMD\n5. Panel data methods and binary dependent variables | RMD\n6. Exam 2 review\n7. Instrumental variables and quasi-experiments | RMD\n8. Big data, time series and dynamic causal effects | RMD\n9. Exam 3 review\nIntermediate microeconomics Spring 2022 $\\cdot$ Fall 2022\nThe purpose of this course is to offer a solid, intermediate-level training in theoretical microeconomics. We will try to achieve a more in-depth understanding of how the standard theoretical models of microeconomics work. The course consists of three parts. We will start out by analyzing consumer decision-making. We then turn to the behavior of firms. Finally, the third part of the course studies the interaction of consumers and firms in goods markets.\nText: Intermediate Microeconomics with Calculus, Hal Varian (2014)\nSelect student feedback \"William Matthew Davis is one of the smartest people I have ever met. He is ridiculously prepared and extremely knowledgeable. The amount of resources which he gifts to students is astounding, and I am so grateful for his help.\" — Fall 2022 \"Really accessible guy who seems to really care about his TA work!\" — Fall 2022 \"Very clear TA with an emphasis on student experience\" — Fall 2022 \"I love him! Posted all his recitations online, which really helps.\" — Spring 2022 The slides below are weekly elaborations on a specific newly introduced concept and so do not represent comprehensive coverage of the course material. They’re also not necessarily self-contained; I sometimes supplemented my slides with blackboard work and conversation with students, which is not always captured in the annotations. Course material is also instructor-specific; if you’re reading this as a Columbia student taking the same course, it may not correspond to the treatment or selection of topics your particular instructor chooses to cover. For example, compared to my Spring 2022 coverage, the following material from Fall 2022 covers a wider range of topics but omits some material such as the method of Lagrange multipliers.\n1. Consumer optimization\n2. Hicksian demand and special well-behaved preferences\n3. Comparative statics and Slutsky decomposition of price effects\n4. Hicksian decomposition of price effects and introduction to welfare\n5. Producer Theory I: Cost minimization\n6. Producer Theory II: Profit maximization under perfect competition\n7. General equilibrium\n8. Exchange economies and the Edgeworth box\n9. Models of monopolistic and oligopolistic competition\n10. Comparing models of oligopolistic competition\nA1. Running log of student emails and corrections to weekly slides\nA2. Week 8: by student request, deriving IC equations for accurate graphing\nA3. Week 10: High-level summary and takeaways from the course\nThe global economy Spring 2023\nThis international economics elective is targeted towards non-economics majors, focusing on current events and the increasing international interdependence of the world economy. Topics incude: (i) why countries trade, what goods and services will be traded, how the gains from trade are distributed and the tools of commercial policy; (ii) the movement of labor and capital across borders; value of transnational countries and production processes across countries; (iii) international finance issues including exchange rates, balance of payments and open economy macroeconomic adjustment.\nSelect student feedback \"Great TA. He was always available for students, and made sure all the course material was understood\" \"His teaching during recitation is very clear and organized and easy to follow.\" I was not permitted to share material prepared for this course.\n","permalink":"https://wmadavis.com/teaching/","summary":"\u003cdiv class=\"intro-text\"\u003e\nThis page contains some of the material I've prepared and resources I've drawn from over my nine semesters teaching undergraduates at Columbia. Any and all errors are the fault of the students who did not point them out to me or the professors who taught me wrong.\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"content-body\"\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"senior-honors-thesis-workshop\"\u003eSenior honors thesis workshop\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFall 2023 $\\cdot$ Spring 2024\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn this role, I designed and administered workshops on applied research methods and project-oriented workflows for senior honors thesis undergraduate students. My responsibilities also included serving as a departmental consultant to economics students conducting empirical research (namely, undergraduate and master\u0026rsquo;s thesis students and part-time research assistants), meeting one-on-one for 2-8 hours each week. Some prepared materials are enumerated \u003ca href=\"/teaching/research-ta\"\u003ehere.\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Teaching"}]