newrepublic--2020-04-23--What Happens If Kim Jong Un Dies?

What Happens If Kim Jong Un Dies?

It was November 17 , 1986 , and the headline appeared on the New York Times front page , just above the fold : “ Kim Il Sung , at 74 , Is Reported Dead.
” But Kim , the founder of the Democratic People ’ s Republic of Korea , was alive , and would rule for nearly another eight years before passing on .
His son and political successor , Kim Jong Il , got the reverse treatment on December 19 , 2011 , when North Korean state media announced that Jong Il had died .
In fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ days earlier ; the outside world had no clue .
The health of the mercurial Kims has long been a subject of fascination and intrigue outside North Korea .
This week , Kim Il Sung ’ s grandson , Kim Jong Un , joined in the family tradition as rumors swirled that the portly dictator had expired suddenly during a cardiovascular procedure—a supernova of speculation that appears to have begun with a single-sourced report saying Kim was recovering from heart surgery .
If you ’ ve read this far looking for an answer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I ’ m sorry to disappoint ; reliable evidence remains scant .
Of all the carefully protected details about North Korea ’ s supreme leadership , or suryong , their personal health is one of the most tightly controlled .
But we can reason from precedent to some extent : The circumstances of Kim Il Sung ’ s and Kim Jong Il ’ s deaths—and how they were handled by the state information apparatus in North Korea—suggest that Kim Jong Un remains alive .
That doesn ’ t rule out the notion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a surgery or incapacitated in some way , but it does suggest that Americans should be concerned about what comes after Kim .
Despite North Korea ’ s reputation for overwhelming secrecy , the deaths of the previous Kims were reported immediately in the case of the first and with a delay of about 48 hours in the case of the second .
South Korean and American intelligence first learned of Kim Jong Il ’ s death when the North Koreans told the world , which should temper any impulse to trust initial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jong Un ’ s health .

After Trump claimed during an April 18 press briefing that he had received a “nice note” from Kim during a press briefing on Saturday, the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs fired back in a statement sharply denying that Kim had sent any notes since the two leaders had corresponded last in March. The statement also included a warning that the Trump-Kim relationship shouldn’t be exploited for political points. Even in North Korea’s stovepiped bureaucracy, it’s unlikely that the foreign ministry would make a statement tweaking Trump so directly. Kim may be resting, but he may still be signing off on orders.
Few images of totalitarianism are as powerful as the vision of a regime trying to conceal the demise of its cherished leader. Interestingly, the North Korean government has more practice attempting the opposite: That premature 1986 report of Kim Il Sung’s death actually originated with North Korea’s army, which blasted news of the death through loudspeakers in the Demilitarized Zone. That may have been a way for Pyongyang to game out how the U.S. and South Korean militaries would react to the leader’s sudden death. But there’s no particular reason to believe that North Korea is actively pulling a Weekend at Bernie’s now, as it reports Kim Jong Un’s mundane correspondence with other global leaders.
I expect the world to learn of Kim’s health when North Korea deems it fit to make an announcement, and not before. If he were to die, the precedents suggest a quick notification. This might be complicated in the current case, given the lack of an obvious male successor to continue North Korea’s mythologized “Paektu bloodline.” But Kim’s younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, appears to be one of his most trusted confidants and has risen quickly in the Korean Workers’ Party. Jo Yong’s selection as a new leader might be complicated in the DPRK’s highly patriarchal culture, but her status as a descendant of the founder would likely prevail.


newrepublic--2020-04-23--A New Age of Destructive Austerity After the Coronavirus

Coronavirus is a once-in-a-lifetime historical crisis , but even under the most unprecedented of lockdown measures , scrolling through the news still produces an occasional shiver of déjà-vu .
On Monday , former UK chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne made headlines when he suggested his government compensate for pandemic spending by enacting new austerity measures .
Since the 2008 recession , when fiscal policies slashed funding worldwide for the very public services that have now been pressed into service in the battle against Covid-19 , austerity has become a dirty word .
Even the International Monetary Fund ( IMF @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Greece for prescribing a near-fatal dose of rack and ruin to its fragile economy .
Nevertheless , here we find ourselves , hearing the same old bad ideas that ravaged the Eurozone invoked as a solution to our present disaster .
Now that Mitch McConnell has called for a moratorium on further stimulus legislation , we won ’ t need to wait around to see austerity rhetoric at work here at home .
It is tempting to regard Osborne ’ s ideas as retrograde—the pronouncement of just another swamp creature , emerging from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ claim some sliver of political relevance .
Yet Osborne is hardly an outmoded public figure ( he ’ s editor of The Evening Standard ) , and other policymakers have similarly glommed onto the notion of austerity as the best economic recourse for post-lockdown governments .
Even as nations around the world spend and borrow in order to keep their citizens alive and their healthcare systems afloat , austerity politics looks poised for a resurgence .
In fact , as some note , the coronavirus pandemic allows these blinkered policies to slip into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of public safety .
In Germany—a country which has taken on debt for the first time since 2013 , and where a balanced budget is something of a fetish—the economic minister is already promising a return to austerity “ once the crisis is over.
” Dealings over the EU ’ s relief package , too , have been marred by fiscal moralism and a refusal to look beyond 2008-era playbooks .
Facing a “ tsunami of bankruptcies , ” EU policymakers have decided that each country must shoulder its debt on its own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ risk for the zone ’ s struggling southern states—Italy , for example , entered the pandemic over-leveraged , and is now essentially bankrupt—and likely involves austerity measures for those nations in the months to come .
The EU negotiations could have gone another way .
Nine of the group ’ s member countries had initially floated proposals for a “ coronabond , ” a mechanism that would have allowed the Eurozone to bear its debt collectively , each state in solidarity with the other .
This prospect was championed even by commentators who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Eurozone powerbrokers , nevertheless , duly shut it down .
Solidarity , after all , is anathema to austerity .
Rather than try and envision a more equitable and secure future for the region , Dutch minister Wopke Hoekstra reportedly called Brussels to investigate why some Eurozone countries didn ’ t have the economic surplus necessary for sticking out the pandemic .

Even as austerity talk rematerializes, it’s become increasingly evident that measures from our last recession have hurt countries’ coronavirus efforts by incapacitating health and social services around the globe. In the U.K., hospital bed availability hit a record low in 2019. The French system, buckling after years of austerity, has recently asked private citizens for donations. That today policymakers and investors are fretting over spending and inflation—at a time when these matters are hardly a matter of immediate concern—makes it clear that yesterday’s toxic doctrine, even when beaten back, can resurface with greater malignancy.
In the United States, critics of President Trump hold out hope that Covid-19 might spur positive change; that during these exceptional times, federal and state governments might be pressured to reinvest in the public trust and expand social safety nets. After the record amount of money provided by the most recent stimulus act, there have even emerged breathless media reports about GOP politicians who have belatedly come around to the appeal of big government. “The coronavirus will end conservative dogma about big government forever,” read one headline from The Washington Post—as if Rand Paul, now that he’s got the hang of fiscal spending, might never be able to stop.
Austerity is, after all, a politics by, of, and for opportunists.
It is pretty to think that the lessons learned from Covid-19 might put us on a glide path to a Keynesian conversion story, but the opposing interests of financial capital, as well as the reliable unwillingness of those in power to learn from history’s mistakes, should never be underestimated. Austerity is, after all, a politics by, of, and for opportunists. It doesn’t take much of a mental journey to recall how, in the wake of the 2008 recession, Tea Party libertarians assailed the existing order by clobbering Obama with budget numbers, only to abandon the obsession with a balanced bottom line once they’d retaken power. Should Joe Biden win in 2020, he can expect that a similar chorus of fiscal hawks will point to a quadrupling deficit in order to block Democrat-led spending. For politicians protecting fossil fuel interests, the debt we have now incurred offers another justification for why the U.S. can’t afford to waste money on lavish things like fighting climate change.


newrepublic--2020-04-23--A Lonely Fight Against Sexual Harassment in Tech

Susan Fowler grew up in deep poverty in rural Yarnell , Arizona , one of seven children of a preacher and his wife in the 1990s .
She once overheard her mother say the family had made just $ 5,000 that year ; there were times when there was no food in the refrigerator or when they had no running water , electricity , or functioning sewer .
She was homeschooled by her mother until her early teens , at which point her mother had to go to work and , thanks to mysterious red tape , she had to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t enroll her .
Fowler is self-taught in almost everything she knows .
It ’ s clear that she believed , and still believes , strongly in the idea that someone who works hard can pave her own path through life toward the goals she sets for herself .
In the introduction to her book Whistleblower : My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber , she quotes the philosopher Isaiah Berlin : “ I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself , not on external forces @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be the instrument of my own , not of other men ’ s , acts of will .
I wish to be a subject , not an object ; to be moved by reason , by conscious purposes , which are my own.
” To which she adds , “ This book is the story of my journey to become the subject , not the object , of my own life.
” It ’ s a refrain—subject , not object—throughout the book , a guiding concept as she tries to make life decisions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tell , and the genre in which she ’ s working , this is far from straightforward .
Whistleblower grew out of a blog post she wrote in February 2017 , detailing her harassment as an employee at Uber and the way she was mistreated after she took her complaints to H.R .
The book is a # MeToo memoir , the latest entry in a genre largely authored by prominent , white-collar women who found their careers derailed by abuse and discrimination , from Ellen Pao , who wrote about discrimination at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Fox and Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson , who has described the culture of sexual harassment at Fox News .
It ’ s an inherently dicey genre , which has to recognize the severity of things that were done to the narrator—as an object—but which , in order to provide the sense of an ending , has to show the narrator regaining control of the narrative , becoming the hero of her own story .
Each of these books tries to dissolve that tension by positioning itself not as a recounting of trauma @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with uplifting titles like Pao ’ s Reset : My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change and Carlson ’ s Be Fierce : Stop Harassment and Take Your Power Back .
Fowler ’ s own book is framed as a broad fight for equality , an act of resistance for all women , yet it ’ s a distinctive form of struggle—closely linked to the idea of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps .
Fowler ’ s focus is resolutely individualistic ; her sources of inspiration are willpower , aptitude , and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Whistleblower shows starkly how gender discrimination warps women ’ s careers , it also struggles to admit that this idea of meritocracy was a farce to begin with .

In her freshman year, she excels at physics. But a male student joins her class at the end of her second semester and begins to fixate on her. He confesses to romantic feelings for her and threatens to kill himself if she doesn’t feel the same way. When she reaches out to professors and other administrators, they tell her to focus on helping him through his mental health crisis. “This is your job now,” his adviser tells her. Because her presence upsets him, the school moves her to a different research group and bars her from taking the same classes as him, with the result she’s no longer able to complete the research and coursework to get into grad school.
Fowler has learned to code, so she decides to go into technology. “While I’d dreamed of becoming a violinist, an architect, a writer, a physicist, and a philosopher, I’d never felt that being a software engineer was my calling,” she writes. But she needs money. So she takes a job at a startup called Plaid, which is “half company, half frat house.” When she begins, she is the only woman in the office in a technical role. She eventually learns male co-workers make about $50,000 more than her while working fewer hours, but when she asks for a raise she is denied. She quits six months after she started. At her next job, with another startup called PubNub, she works for a boss who shames her for wearing jeans and a T-shirt and comments that all women are “just like” his wife and just want to have babies and depend on men for money. She leaves for a job at Uber.
She hopes that “this job at Uber could end up being more than just a job,” that it could finally be “the beginning of a real career in engineering.” Yet on her first day there, her manager, Jake, regales her with stories of his sex life and bluntly propositions her. “I started to feel sick to my stomach when I realized what was going on,” she writes. “I’d work so hard—for what? To be sexually harassed by my new manager on my first day on his team?” Every time she or her female co-workers complain to H.R., they are told the same thing: The offender is a “high performer,” it is his “first offense” (it’s not), and they don’t want to ruin his career. Instead, the punishment is meted out on the women themselves. Fowler is reassigned to a new team, and H.R. tries to convince her she’s the real problem. Her male manager gives her low performance reviews to keep her from advancing to another team.


newrepublic--2020-04-23--Biden’s Path to Party Unity Begins With Concessions

Prominent as it was , health care was not the only issue in the primary .
The coronavirus crisis promises lingering consequences—tens of millions unemployed and the possibility of a depression—which the next president will have to address .
The pandemic has also heightened the visibility of the class divide , between those who can comfortably work from home and those who must continue to put themselves in danger .
Grocery store workers are dying .
Companies that sell closets and video games have deemed themselves essential , forcing their workers to risk infection and death .
Workers at a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ represented 44 percent of all cases in South Dakota last week : Work performed mostly by immigrants that is punishing under the best of circumstances has become a vector for a deadly virus .
The same has happened across the meatpacking industry , and employees at another Smithfield plant alleged the company covered up the number of infections and pressed workers to keep coming in to work .
Sanders ’ s proposal to force large companies to share profits with their workers and give them 45 percent of seats on their boards is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will likely be heeding the call of his well-heeled donors , who would not be at all keen to see profits so widely shared among the common people .
Still , the left could press for more from Biden on how he would protect workers .
As Hamilton Nolan recently noted , Biden ’ s first presidential fundraiser was co-hosted by Steve Cozen , co-founder of Cozen O ’ Connor , a law firm that represents companies trying to squash their unions .
In December , Biden ’ s campaign said it had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and a Center for Economic and Policy Research analysis from January found big donations to Biden ’ s primary campaign from more than 10 other employees just of Cozen O ’ Connor .
This is not compatible with Biden ’ s supposed promise to go after union-busting firms more aggressively , even pledging to hold executives who intentionally ( as opposed to unintentionally ? )
interfere with union activity criminally liable .
If Biden wanted to show he was serious about this promise , he could return donations from union-busting lawyers and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worker ownership .
The problem of Biden ’ s donors and bundlers goes beyond Steve Cozen .
Biden has raised money from all sorts of unsavory people ; one of his top aides is a former lobbyist for a number of drug companies and the American Hospital Association .
Unlike Sanders , Biden simply does not seem to see the problem with allowing lobbyists and plutocratic interests to worm their way inside his campaign .
As Sam Adler-Bell and David Segal argued , Biden merely making policy promises is not good enough ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the left can trust to implement these ideas .
At the very least , he could return donations from lobbyists right now .
This is something that , sadly and incredibly , falls into the category of “ too much to expect ” for voters who ’ d like to see less corruption in high places .
In the interest of meeting even lower expectations , Biden could acknowledge the mistakes that the Obama administration made in lobbying reform and pledge to end the revolving door .
He clearly won ’ t disavow @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Warren couldn ’ t manage to do ; he could , however , promise not to hire anyone who has donated to it .
There is one policy that would be a minor gesture that would nevertheless have a great impact : Legalizing cannabis .
It ’ s a silly stereotype that young people can be motivated to get out to the polls just by promising them legal weed , but it could help at least a little , and the change that Biden would need to make to his own platform would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no reason not to .
Biden has previously said both that cannabis needs to be “ basically , legalized , ” and also that he is “ not prepared to [ legalize ] as long as there are serious medical people saying , ‘ We should determine what other side effects would occur , ’ ” at the same event .
Months before , he described marijuana as a gateway drug .
So to say that Biden ’ s position on the drug is a little unclear is an understatement .
He could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ those who care about the persecution of people of color under the guise of the war on drugs ) by firmly stating that he , like Bernie Sanders , would legalize cannabis as soon as he took office .
He doesn ’ t need to pretend he loves High Maintenance or attempt to offer an opinion on the best kind of vape pen to do this ; but there ’ s no reason in the world why Biden ’ s position can ’ t be as progressive as Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker ’ @ @

Prominent as it was, health care was not the only issue in the primary. The coronavirus crisis promises lingering consequences—tens of millions unemployed and the possibility of a depression—which the next president will have to address. The pandemic has also heightened the visibility of the class divide, between those who can comfortably work from home and those who must continue to put themselves in danger. Grocery store workers are dying. Companies that sell closets and video games have deemed themselves essential, forcing their workers to risk infection and death. Workers at a single Smithfield pork plant in Sioux Falls represented 44 percent of all cases in South Dakota last week: Work performed mostly by immigrants that is punishing under the best of circumstances has become a vector for a deadly virus. The same has happened across the meatpacking industry, and employees at another Smithfield plant alleged the company covered up the number of infections and pressed workers to keep coming in to work.
Sanders’s proposal to force large companies to share profits with their workers and give them 45 percent of seats on their boards is popular with voters. However, Biden will likely be heeding the call of his well-heeled donors, who would not be at all keen to see profits so widely shared among the common people. Still, the left could press for more from Biden on how he would protect workers. As Hamilton Nolan recently noted, Biden’s first presidential fundraiser was co-hosted by Steve Cozen, co-founder of Cozen O’Connor, a law firm that represents companies trying to squash their unions. In December, Biden’s campaign said it had raised at least $25,000 from Cozen, and a Center for Economic and Policy Research analysis from January found big donations to Biden’s primary campaign from more than 10 other employees just of Cozen O’Connor. This is not compatible with Biden’s supposed promise to go after union-busting firms more aggressively, even pledging to hold executives who intentionally (as opposed to unintentionally?) interfere with union activity criminally liable. If Biden wanted to show he was serious about this promise, he could return donations from union-busting lawyers and promise to at least study plans for worker ownership.
The problem of Biden’s donors and bundlers goes beyond Steve Cozen. Biden has raised money from all sorts of unsavory people; one of his top aides is a former lobbyist for a number of drug companies and the American Hospital Association. Unlike Sanders, Biden simply does not seem to see the problem with allowing lobbyists and plutocratic interests to worm their way inside his campaign. As Sam Adler-Bell and David Segal argued, Biden merely making policy promises is not good enough; he must also commit to installing personnel the left can trust to implement these ideas. At the very least, he could return donations from lobbyists right now. This is something that, sadly and incredibly, falls into the category of “too much to expect” for voters who’d like to see less corruption in high places. In the interest of meeting even lower expectations, Biden could acknowledge the mistakes that the Obama administration made in lobbying reform and pledge to end the revolving door. He clearly won’t disavow his super PAC, something even Elizabeth Warren couldn’t manage to do; he could, however, promise not to hire anyone who has donated to it.


newrepublic--2020-04-24--I Left Academia and Became a Climate YouTuber

As I wandered the corridors of San Francisco ’ s immense Moscone Center , my heart sank deeper and deeper .
This was my first international conference—the American Geophysical Union ’ s 2013 Fall Meeting—and I felt lost among the thousands of attendees .
I dipped in and out of darkened seminar rooms , learning of accelerating ice losses , increased extreme weather risks , and temperature targets slipping out of reach—all of this delivered in careful , measured tones as if we were talking about a scientific curiosity , perhaps a peculiar new rock .
I didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This was not the first time I had felt overcome with anxiety about climate change .
I had decided to undertake a doctorate so that I could help combat—in some small way—one of the greatest threats humanity has ever faced .
Month after month , I whittled away at my thesis .
The more I worked , the more papers I read and the more seminars I attended .
And the larger the problem loomed .
I had thought that all we needed to solve climate change was a clearer picture of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ during my doctorate I met countless fantastic researchers who were skillfully filling in the blanks .
But the deepest issues were elsewhere : the chasms between our scientific understanding and public understanding ; between planetary necessity and political “ feasibility.
” While I learned of groundbreaking new techniques and technologies , I also learned of politicians who denied long-settled science .
The deeper I looked , the deeper this divide appeared and the deeper my sense of despair .
I also began to realize something else .
When I would meet someone and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with my life , we would often end up in a discussion about climate change .
In some ways this was a familiar feeling : as an undergraduate I had loved sharing fantastical physics with my arts student friends .
But now sharing knowledge took on a new dimension—this information wasn ’ t just interesting , it was fundamentally important .
And I felt considerably more calm in these conversations than I did in the midst of my research .

Realizing I felt both more productive and more peaceful discussing climate research than conducting it, I decided to pivot. Ever the physicist, I concluded that optimizing to talk to as many people as possible meant creating a YouTube channel. I aimed to make playful videos that embraced the medium and happened to be about climate change, rather than create dry scientific talks that happened to be on YouTube. I hoped this would not only reach new audiences, but also make an overwhelming topic slightly less daunting to discuss.
Today, some five years after I completed my thesis, my aim is still to talk about climate change as much as I can. As a science journalist and climate change YouTuber, I make videos and podcasts and write about climate change. While just as much of my life is dedicated to the topic as it was during my doctorate, communication feels more constructive than adding my small offering to the mountainous body of research that is already ignored by much of the world. What’s more, talking about climate change allays my anxiety—so successfully, in fact, that I’m not discouraged by hateful comments from riled-up climate contrarians. Given how much I adore approval, this is no mean feat.
I’m not arguing that this is the sole solution to escaping climate anxiety. When Joan Baez told us that “action is the antidote to despair,” I’m certain she didn’t mean we should all start YouTube channels. Different despair requires different antidotes. For some of my friends, the cure is policy. Others take to the streets. Many still research. We need all of these approaches to fight climate change.


newrepublic--2020-04-24--When Art Becomes Self-Help

When Art Becomes Self-Help

In a moment perhaps better consigned to the mists of television history , Bravo once produced a reality TV show called Work of Art : The Next Great Artist , which had its two seasons in 2010 and 2011 .
It came between the decline of cable and the rise of streaming , when niche shows were only found on channels like Bravo instead of straight-to-Netflix , where they are now more easily ignored .
Work of Art was a visual-art version of Project Runway , in which contestants vied to produce the best portraits , collages , and installations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for a prize of $ 100,000 and an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum .
Contestants ranged from a guy named the Sucklord , who made satirical custom-designed toys , to Judith Braun , an older painter who already had some success in the formal gallery ecosystem .
The works produced on assignment—create a piece of Pop art , turn part of a Fiat 500 car into a sculpture ( get that sponsorship money ) —were mediocre at best .
The one memorable part of the show was the participation of Jerry Saltz , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ critic , as a judge .
Saltz , fatherly and charismatically unpretentious , doled out both tough advice and encouragement .
His message seemed to be that , with the right guidance , anyone could make a piece of art worthy of a theoretical museum show .
Saltz later disavowed Work of Art : “ I failed at practicing criticism on TV , ” he wrote , though he would gladly try again .
Still , the show gave him a new visibility not just as a magazine critic but a translator of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and , to a lesser extent , vice versa .
In 2018 , he received a Pulitzer Prize for his reviews .
Saltz ’ s new book , How to Be an Artist , his first original after previous collections of criticism , follows the principle of the TV show .
It gives a series of short instructions or prompts , some banal and others provocative , on both looking at and making art , for audiences of any level of art fluency .
The appetite for this kind of advice has only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the art world ( and market ) has become more visible to the wider public .
With social media , we ’ re hyperaware of the kind of daily aesthetic decision-making that was once the province of people in the art industry—creating a tasteful image and broadcasting it to a set of followers .
Now anyone with an iPhone has the tools to create and publish a soft-focus portrait photo or frenetically cut video clip ; TikTok posts recall nothing more than Ryan Trecartin ’ s video art circa 2006 .
Saltz participates @ @ @ @ @ @ @ high volume of hand-scrawled notes and anti-Trump memes on his Facebook page , which has become a kind of digital salon .

A 144-page volume that deserves the cliché appellation of slim, How to Be an Artist exists at the intersection of a tiny corpus of art-criticism books and the booming genre of self-help-meets-lifestyle-inspiration. The pithy guide format is having a bestselling renaissance, including Marie Kondo’s cleaning manuals; Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and its various follow-ups; and the productivity porn of volumes collecting the morning routines of various artists and thinkers, as if we could write In Search of Lost Time by breakfasting like Proust. (Eat, Pray, Love might be the ancestor of the species.) Like others in its cohort, Saltz’s book is visually appealing, with plentiful color reproductions of artwork and portraits of artists. In the introduction, Saltz describes his goal as leading the reader “from wondering and worrying to making real art, even great art.” Then he adjusts expectations: The book can “at least help you live life a little more creatively.”
Art here suggests self-discovery and self- expression without risk; creativity means things you can Instagram.
Saltz was a painter before he became a critic. He has cultivated a relatable backstory that he repeats often: a stalled art career, a stint as a truck driver, writing his first piece for The Village Voice when he was in his forties. Leaning on the story, Saltz usually positions himself as a populist. If he can make a life in art, you can, too. The book charts a rough linear progression through the course of a career, from thinking like an artist, to maintaining a studio routine, to entering and then surviving the art world. (“Learn to deal with rejection.”) The studio is vital: Whether it’s a cleared-off kitchen table or white-walled warehouse, it’s a personal space in which to experiment, take chances, and create things that don’t exist. Saltz embraces the difficult, Bruce Nauman-esque idea that anything that happens in the studio (or the headspace of the studio) should be considered valid as art. You need to look at as much art as possible, follow your inclinations wherever they go, and be patient.
Interspersed are short exercises or assignments that double as art therapy, like making a “memory tree” that represents your life and showing it to someone else who then analyzes it; trying to copy the styles of different artists or movements; and making a drawing using only erasure. This final suggestion does not come with an explanation that Robert Rauschenberg once famously asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing of his and then laboriously erased it using any means necessary in a 1953 piece that presaged elements of Minimalist art. Though the book presents plenty of threads to follow if the reader wants to go deeper, it doesn’t fully connect the activities of the artist with their roots in art history or conceptual innovation.


newrepublic--2020-04-24--The Airy Ambivalence of the Moderate Politician

In the summer of 2015 , Josh Barro wrote a piece for The New York Times titled “ Donald Trump , Moderate Republican.
” The real estate magnate was “ anything but ideologically rigid , ” Barro wrote , “ and he certainly does not equate deal making with surrender.
” On such issues as taxation and immigration , Trump was “ flexible , ” vacillating between left and right .
The premise seems laughable now , but Barro had a point .
Trump is ideologically flexible—he has slashed taxes on the wealthy , but he has also deported fewer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his rival Barack Obama did .
So why does it seem so absurd to call Trump a moderate ?
It ’ s not because his politics are so far out of the mainstream—if they were , he wouldn ’ t be president .
Rather , his personality clashes with what moderates stand for—the emotional register they operate on .
This is an unwritten yet fundamental rule of American politics : Moderation is not a political persuasion but a mood .
Of all the candidates in the Democratic primary , Joe Biden has best @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has no signature policy positions .
Instead , he campaigns mostly on the force of his personality—as a grieving father , an avatar of American “ decency , ” the straight-shooting middle-class uncle from Scranton .
Many of the other moderates in the race did the same .
Though Bernie Sanders was often criticized for having a “ cult of personality , ” it was Pete Buttigieg who loved to tell voters how he would “ look you in the eye ” and give it to you straight—never mind what exactly he ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaigned on Midwestern niceness : disagreeing “ without being disagreeable , ” as she put it in her memoir , The Senator Next Door .
In endorsing her , the San Francisco Chronicle praised her “ wickedly quick sense of humor that can make her point effectively and with civility ” ; it said next to nothing about her policy goals .
These politicians avoid discussing politics for a reason .
As political scientist Lee Drutman has shown , some 40 percent of the electorate consider themselves moderates—though they have wildly divergent political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ platform that appeals to everyone in this motley group , so candidates instead rely on their amenable personalities to gin up something approaching enthusiasm .

In the summer of 2015, Josh Barro wrote a piece for The New York Times titled “Donald Trump, Moderate Republican.” The real estate magnate was “anything but ideologically rigid,” Barro wrote, “and he certainly does not equate deal making with surrender.” On such issues as taxation and immigration, Trump was “flexible,” vacillating between left and right. The premise seems laughable now, but Barro had a point. Trump is ideologically flexible—he has slashed taxes on the wealthy, but he has also deported fewer people in his first three years than his rival Barack Obama did. So why does it seem so absurd to call Trump a moderate?
It’s not because his politics are so far out of the mainstream—if they were, he wouldn’t be president. Rather, his personality clashes with what moderates stand for—the emotional register they operate on. This is an unwritten yet fundamental rule of American politics: Moderation is not a political persuasion but a mood.


newrepublic--2020-04-24--Can Michael Jordan Fill the Huge Sports-Size Hole in Our Hearts?

The Last Dance , a new 10-part documentary about Michael Jordan ’ s sixth and final NBA championship season with the Chicago Bulls in 1998 , is being released at a very strange moment .
Live sports are dead .
The Olympics were canceled for the first time since World War II .
Wimbledon , too .
The English Premier League came to a shuddering halt , as did the NBA .
Originally slated for release in June , after the 2020 NBA Finals , The Last Dance was pushed up by ESPN to replenish the network ’ s lifeblood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one kind of debate , about Jordan versus LeBron James , about basketball then and now .
It has instead inadvertently sparked another , about why sports are important in the first place .
Sports networks have attempted to fashion a replacement .
These efforts have not been successful .
ESPN last week aired a three-part H-O-R-S-E tournament .
Shot on cell phones , it had all the clarity of the Zapruder film and all the tension of a game of croquet .
Still , it was a clear indication of the hunger @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
So the airing of the first two parts of The Last Dance on Sunday was something close to salvation .
It was not live sports , but it was the next best thing , a fire that invited sports fans to come out of the cold and gather around .
Featuring never-before-seen footage , The Last Dance is meant to give a new , intimate perspective on Jordan ’ s greatness .
It turns out to be a contemporary bit of myth-making , an attempt at resolving the increasingly disparate sides of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as the sport ’ s greatest player and its biggest jerk .
Without the suspense that live sports delivers , the film attempts to solve a mystery : What makes Jordan tick ?
Aired at another time , it might have read as yet another example of prestige sports journalism .
Airing now , it is , at times , unexpectedly poignant .
The Last Dance is a reminder not just of Jordan ’ s cultural gravity but also that there are things we can still share , a rare feeling in a @ @ @ @

Jordan, even then, was the greatest offensive player in league history. He could fly, hanging in the air just a split second longer than should be humanly possible. There are Jordan dunks where he seemed to rise three or four inches in the air at the precise moment he should have been falling, blocked shots where he literally hit his head on the backboard. Jordan’s competitiveness was also patently clear; he seemingly willed his team to victory. Here was a player who was not only the most talented in the world but also the most motivated. In Jordan, the God-given and the man-made were perfectly melded.
Jordan was the ideal pitchman for sneakers, hamburgers, and sports drinks: Put on some Air Jordans and take a swig of Gatorade and you, too, could be like Mike. The NBA, seeing that it had a once-in-a-lifetime talent, did everything it could to draw more attention to him. The league was reeling from a series of drug scandals (the 1984–’85 Bulls are referred to as a “traveling cocaine circus”), and here was a clean-cut workaholic superstar who could rehabilitate its image. Jordan didn’t flinch from the spotlight: His appetite for winning was matched only by his appetite for public affection.
The person behind the persona was a far cry from the smiling star of Space Jam. The public got its first glimpse of the real Jordan in 1992, when Sam Smith published The Jordan Rules, a behind-the-scenes account of the Bulls’ first NBA championship a year earlier. It turned out that Jordan was a bully and gambling addict who mercilessly terrorized (and occasionally assaulted) his own teammates. Over the subsequent years, Jordan’s ties to organized crime, disastrous baseball career, disastrous second NBA comeback, record-breaking divorce settlement, and ownership of the perennially mediocre (and, at times, historically bad) Charlotte Hornets have turned him into a shell of his godlike youth.


newrepublic--2020-04-24--My Life in Sero-Surveillance

My Life in Sero-Surveillance

In 2007 , in the spring , after living in New York City for six months , I rode my bike from my university on the Upper East Side to a public health clinic for my annual HIV test .
I ’ d had three sexual partners by that time , two women and a man ; the man lingered heavy in my mind .
If I tested positive , that was that , I thought .
My sex , ethnicity , age , and sexual behaviors would be added to a list and reported to the Centers for Disease @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ d moved to France the year before , I ’ d had to show proof of a negative HIV test to be allowed a visa .
The United States wasn ’ t any better in that respect : Testing HIV-positive also would have barred foreigners from entry into the U.S. back then .
I knew that from my best gay friend , an immigrant from Poland studying in my Ph.D. program in molecular biology .
If he tested positive and gave his name , he could be removed from the country @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He studied how the ear tunes itself to recognize different pitches .
My work was on bacteria and the viruses that kill them .
HIV is a virus that copies its viral code into our DNA , sticking itself in us forever .
Other viruses—like influenza , and like coronaviruses—come and go , eventually leaving nothing of their genetic material behind .

One tool that could help us all stay healthy would be to rapidly staff doctors’ offices, hospitals, stores, and restaurants with the immune—if they’re truly immune. Someday, we hope, that immunity can come from a vaccine that’s free and available to all. But until then, serosorting (but not sero-surveillance) may save lives. The Covid-19 seropositive may soon stand up to this virus, safely. I put my faith in them and promise, for my part, to ensure they’re safe from stigma, persecution, and being named on a list at the CDC.
I’ve spent years trying to de-serosort my own mind—to not value a human, me or anyone else, by the presence or absence of an IgA, IgM, IgG in their body. HIV that’s still in us, a coronavirus come and gone. A virus wants nothing. The presence or absence of a virus in a person doesn’t make them good or bad.
We must protect the most vulnerable among us from this virus, yes, but also from each other; from our government; from all the harm we can do with our fears. Will we let fear lead, track the Covid-19 positive with phones, and send the cops if they move? Or will we encourage people to do the right thing and support them with all they need to survive until they emerge from their apartments, healthy again and seroconverted? We must watch ourselves to avoid being watched; we must care for each other to avoid being policed.


newrepublic--2020-04-24--The Media Is Blowing the Coverage of the Coronavirus Protests

Politico co-founder John F. Harris last week delivered a dire warning about the right-wing anti-lockdown protests that were then just beginning to spread across the country .
“ The wake of the coronavirus will be a powerful boost to the animating spirit of libertarianism : leave me alone , ” he wrote .
“ Ideology hasn ’ t been suspended .
It has been forcibly suppressed—in ways that inevitably will come roaring back , sometimes in highly toxic ways.
” In Michigan , a few thousand people protested outside the state ’ s capitol building .
In other states—including Kentucky @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were significantly smaller .
The coverage , however , was outsize , with mainstream media outlets heralding the arrival of a new Tea Party .
Writing in The Guardian , Cas Mudde wrote that the protests have provided President Trump “ with visible popular support for his Covid-19 strategy.
” Fox News egged the protesters on .
The New York Times , Politico , and The Washington Post identified shadowy conservative groups as the puppet-masters behind the rallies , pulling the strings of protesters for their own ends .
In the anti-lockdown protests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not so ) hidden hand of Fox News and right-wing influencers , the president ’ s political future , and the arrival of a seemingly frightening backlash to the quarantine regime .
The visuals—masks , guns , nutty signs—made the protests irresistible .
But there is good reason to believe that these protests have been significantly overhyped—and that credulous media reporting has boosted the profile of right-wing organizations that have done very little of note .
Far from a new Tea Party , this movement is tiny , disconnected , and not reflective @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .

The New York Times noted that the protests were tapping into widespread dissatisfaction with quarantine rules. “In a deeply divided nation, the size of the protest in Michigan, and the appetite in other states for more rallies, suggested that anger over the no-end-in-sight nature of the lockdowns was not limited to the far right, and that for many not directly touched by the virus, patience has a limit,” wrote Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Jeremy W. Peters.
At the same time, reporters raced to identify conservative groups that were taking credit for the “success” of the protests. The Associated Press reported that FreedomWorks, a big booster of the Tea Party, was back in action and “holding weekly virtual town halls with members of Congress, igniting an activist base of thousands of supporters across the nation to back up the effort.” The Washington Post pointed the finger at a family of right-wing Second Amendment agitators, suggesting the protests were being coordinated out of a couple of living rooms. Both Politico and the Post identified Convention of States, a little-known but deep-pocketed group with ties to Ben Carson, Ken Cuccinelli, and other Trump administration officials, as a primary driver of the protests.
The organizations, unsurprisingly, were quick to take credit. “Groups are united in purpose on this,” Noah Wall, advocacy director for FreedomWorks, told the Times. “This is about people who want to get back to work and leave their homes.” For many on the left, the conclusion was clear: This was an astroturfing campaign, plain and simple.


newrepublic--2020-04-24--The Beastie Boys Keep It On and On

The Beastie Boys Keep It On and On

In 1987 , the Beastie Boys opened for Run DMC on tour .
The headliners ’ song “ Walk This Way ” with Aerosmith was a monster hit , and the Beastie Boys ’ debut album Licensed to Ill had made them frat-house stars the year before .
The night they played Miami , Aerosmith came onstage to co-perform “ Walk This Way.
” Unnoticed , the Beastie Boys ’ MCA snuck onstage with bass in hand and just started playing along .
He sidled up to Joe Perry and tried to do that back-to-back hair-metal thing .
Perry inched @ @ @ @ @ @ @ across the stage ; and in the wings his bandmates Ad-Rock and Mike D looked on , helpless with laughter , as MCA nonconsensually jammed along .
This anecdote encapsulates all that ’ s sweet about the new movie Beastie Boys Story .
Directed by the band ’ s longtime collaborator Spike Jonze , this “ live documentary ” is actually a stage show performed by the band ’ s two surviving members , Michael “ Mike D ” Diamond and Adam “ Ad-Rock ” Horovitz , at Brooklyn ’ s Kings Theatre @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be an immersive IMAX experience , but the coronavirus did its thing , and now the substitute premiere is tonight on Apple TV ( the movie is billed as “ an Apple Original ” ) .
The set is two hours of storytelling : funny , intimate , and mercilessly nostalgic for the days of fish-eye lenses , wearing a regular T-shirt over a long-sleeved T-shirt , and the far-off youth those artifacts now represent .
Diamond and Horovitz stand onstage , holding microphones , and talk to each other and the audience @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
That ’ s it .
It ’ s still a shock at first to see just the two of them up there , missing their third .
It ’ s been eight years since Adam “ MCA ” Yauch died of cancer and brought an end to the band that could not go on without him .
As a twosome , they just look wrong—like Destiny ’ s Child without Beyoncé or the Golden Girls with no Blanche .
But for all its modesty , Beastie Boys Story , which follows the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Boys Book , is nevertheless part of a big retrospective , inviting a big reckoning .

Mike, Adam, and Adam were three middle-class kids from New York City—two from Manhattan, one from Brooklyn Heights. Their band had a fourth member at first, Kate Schellenbach, and together the gang tore through the city’s music scene. First they fell for hardcore, then for rap, then for the idea of both at once (Bad Brains helped). Their band was named for “Boys Entering Anarchistic States Towards Internal Excellence,” which, as Ad-Rock points out, does not make sense, as their name has the word “Boys” already in it. Some adorable archival footage projected on a screen shows the boys and Kate attempting to rap onstage while reading from lyric sheets, looking like the dorkiest white teenagers of all time.
Success and then embarrassment came in rapid succession. Record store owner Dave Parsons put their absurd prank phone call track Cooky Puss out on 12-inch. The gang met the young Def Jam founders, Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons, both evil geniuses on the brink of reinventing the music industry, who advised them to kick Kate out of the band. In 1986 they released “Hold It Now, Hit It,” propelled by a homemade “hot go-go-swing-type beat,” as Mike D describes it, layered over an 808 loop. The Beastie Boys’ sound was born.
Their beats were strong, and while their early rhymes at times flashed with genius (“Rock ’n roll rhythms are raunchy and raucous / We’re from Manhattan, you’re from Secaucus”), they often did not. Whatever they sounded like, the Beastie Boys of the mid-’80s acted like boorish assholes. According to Diamond and Horovitz, all their early idiotic antics—shitty lyrics, spitting beer all over the stage, wearing Volkswagen hood ornaments on chains—were done on instruction from Rubin and Simmons, who were squeezing gold out of the band’s image as white hooligans. They even attracted the ire of the British tabloid press, like the Sex Pistols before them.


newrepublic--2020-04-27--The Coronavirus and the Limits of Individual Climate Action

In the United States , the fight against climate change is often framed as a matter of individual action toward a collective goal .
If only Americans would drive and fly less , and consume more sustainable energy and food , then maybe our country could do its part to help reduce carbon emissions worldwide .
The effects of the coronavirus pandemic are a sobering rejoinder to such hopes .
With much of the world in lockdown , road traffic and air travel have decreased significantly .
The air in major cities like Los Angeles and New York is clearer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , revealing skylines and mountain ranges previously obscured .
We have never had a clearer example of how changes to individual behavior , on a mass scale , can make a real difference .
And yet , as drastically as our lives have been circumscribed in recent weeks , new data shows that this would not be enough to save the planet—even if it were somehow sustainable .
Carbon Brief , a website in the United Kingdom , has estimated that the pandemic could wind up cutting global carbon dioxide emissions in 2020 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fall in CO2 emissions ever recorded , in records going back to the 18th century.
” Another report predicts a similar 5 percent reduction this year , based on anticipated economic stagnation in the months ahead .
Any drop in emissions , which currently aren ’ t being reduced fast enough to curb global warming , would normally be good news .
But with such dramatic changes to the ways we conduct our lives , a 5 percent reduction feels like poor payoff .
Climate experts aren ’ t celebrating .
If anything @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and temporary reduction shows how desperately we need comprehensive climate policy—to reduce emissions in a truly systematic , sustainable way .
In order to hit the aspirational 1.5-degree target outlined in the Paris agreement , emissions would need to fall by about 7.6 percent every year for the next decade .
Even the 5 percent reduction estimated for this year wouldn ’ t be enough—and the way we ’ ve gotten to that reduction is not sustainable in the long term .
Although they are necessary to halt the spread of the coronavirus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ emotional , physical , and financial well-being of millions of people .
And , experts say , as soon as businesses being to reopen , we ’ ll likely see a push to ramp up production and erase most or all of these environmental gains .

Reducing emissions from transportation doesn’t have to mean not traveling, in the fashion of the current stay-at-home measures. Switching to more sustainable fuels and efficient vehicles, as well as changing travel and the transportation of goods, is also important. There are several possible ways to bring that about, including carbon pricing—whether a cap-and-trade or carbon tax program.
Transportation made up the biggest slice of the emissions pie in 2018, with 28 percent of emissions coming from personal and commercial transportation, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Within that slice, about one-fifth of transportation emissions come from commercial freight trucks. While more people are staying home, both from work and from travel, deliveries have skyrocketed. From March 22 to April 4, online shopping in North America soared by more than 50 percent, and online grocery shopping in particular saw a massive increase—more than 200 percent higher in March than it was last August. And as people stay home and rely on electronic communication more than ever, they could put more pressure on electricity consumption—the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the U.S. Changes in personal consumption habits have their limits if the energy sources remain the same.
Individual actions do matter. Some personal sacrifices will need to be made to address climate change, and how we live our lives will inevitably be affected by those changes—whether that’s in response to greener policies or to the rapid environmental shifts, like floods and wildfires, themselves. But it’s hard to make a lot of planet-friendly individual choices—for example, switching to renewable energy sources—when the system to do so has not been put in place. The two aren’t mutually exclusive: Individual consumption choices can lead to systemic changes, and sustainable changes can lead to better consumption habits. But a 2019 study in the journal Nature Climate Change found that when people are asked to make small personal sacrifices, they’re less likely to push for wider systemic changes like a carbon tax.


newrepublic--2020-04-27--“Believe Science” Is a Bad Response to Denialism

Scientists saw it coming well in advance : a crisis that , left unaddressed , could kill hundreds of thousands of people .
The White House ignored it , telling the public the problem was already contained .
Maybe , senior officials speculated , it wasn ’ t a problem at all but another hoax cooked up by the president ’ s enemies in Congress , or by the Chinese government .
Once the crisis grew and could no longer be ignored , the right changed its tune , insisting that a full-throated response to the problem could be worse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country unnecessarily into economic ruin ; if tens of thousands of lives had to be sacrificed at the altar of the S & P 500 , so be it .
Quacks boasting about their shaky subject expertise claimed to know what the bona fide experts didn ’ t , questioning official models with their own contrived ones .
Contrarians called the people implementing established authorities ’ recommendations hysterical alarmists trying to press their socialist agenda onto an unwitting public .
Then came the protests : overwhelmingly white , seemingly homegrown expressions of outrage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hand from a Koch brother and the Mercer family , as well as fawning coverage from Fox News .
For those who follow climate politics , the past few months of coronavirus news have felt eerily familiar .
For years , well-meaning people calling for climate action have pleaded with American voters and policymakers to trust the experts .
The hope was that if enough people simply learned about global warming they would come around to the right side of things .
If they didn ’ t , there must be something pathologically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were just stupid .
Al Gore ’ s An Inconvenient Truth embodied that logic : a calm , authoritative voice presenting slide after slide of dispiriting facts about what concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would do to our planet .
Climate deniers—or “ skeptics , ” as they like to call themselves—would be fact-checked into oblivion by experts cooly dismantling deniers ’ favorite fringe theories .
After Trump ’ s election , calls to “ believe science ” became a rallying cry .
Of course , the experts were right .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to expertise any more potent a political strategy , as America ’ s current lack of comprehensive climate policy can attest .
The Covid-19 parallels are numerous .
The Trump administration ’ s bungled pandemic response has almost certainly been responsible for tens of thousands of preventable deaths , just as the administration has likely irreparably damaged the climate in its nearly four years of regulatory rollbacks and fossil-fuel boosterism .
Upward of 50,000 U.S. casualties from the coronavirus made the issue too big to deny—unlike the threats from environmental degradation and severe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americans are more indirect .
GOP denial of Covid-19 , instead , has morphed into disputing what ’ s needed to deal with the virus and its fallout .
So far , it has offered generous handouts to corporations , while expecting struggling families to get by on a $ 1,200 check for 10 weeks .
Cash-strapped state and local governments , Senator Mitch McConnell has argued , should tighten their belts instead of asking Uncle Sam for help .
The president seemed , last Thursday , to be suggesting people ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( Please do not do this . )
Republican governors in Georgia and South Carolina have begun reopening their economies without adequate testing protocols in place , giving at-risk constituents the freedom to die .
And protests against shutdown orders have cropped up in Ohio , Wisconsin , Texas , Pennsylvania and elsewhere , with some attendees creatively likening self-isolation measures to communism .
In recent weeks , as casualties and increasingly shrill GOP backlash have mounted , White House Coronavirus Task Force head Anthony Fauci has become an unlikely # Resistance hero @ @ @ @ @ @ @ James Comey and spawned an exceedingly thirsty genre of homemade Etsy kitsch .
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—overseeing the country ’ s worst crisis—has won similar praise with his stern nightly briefings , despite the governors of California and Washington having responded more ably .
“ Cuomosexual , ” God help us , was trending a few weeks back .
Abroad , German Chancellor Angela Merkel ’ s background in the sciences has become the subject of # girlboss adoration , even as the tight-fisted status quo she ’ s crafted for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ response and putting its future in jeopardy .
Cringe aside , these upstart fandoms may be a window into the kinds of leadership at least some segment of the population craves in chaos .
What if all people want , in a time of crisis , is a strong , expert manager-type telling them what to do ?
Call it the tyranny of low expectations .

Scientists saw it coming well in advance: a crisis that, left unaddressed, could kill hundreds of thousands of people. The White House ignored it, telling the public the problem was already contained. Maybe, senior officials speculated, it wasn’t a problem at all but another hoax cooked up by the president’s enemies in Congress, or by the Chinese government. Once the crisis grew and could no longer be ignored, the right changed its tune, insisting that a full-throated response to the problem could be worse than the problem itself and send the country unnecessarily into economic ruin; if tens of thousands of lives had to be sacrificed at the altar of the S&P 500, so be it. Quacks boasting about their shaky subject expertise claimed to know what the bona fide experts didn’t, questioning official models with their own contrived ones. Contrarians called the people implementing established authorities’ recommendations hysterical alarmists trying to press their socialist agenda onto an unwitting public. Then came the protests: overwhelmingly white, seemingly homegrown expressions of outrage, which—it turns out—had gotten a helping hand from a Koch brother and the Mercer family, as well as fawning coverage from Fox News.
For those who follow climate politics, the past few months of coronavirus news have felt eerily familiar. For years, well-meaning people calling for climate action have pleaded with American voters and policymakers to trust the experts. The hope was that if enough people simply learned about global warming they would come around to the right side of things. If they didn’t, there must be something pathologically wrong with them. Or maybe they were just stupid. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth embodied that logic: a calm, authoritative voice presenting slide after slide of dispiriting facts about what concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would do to our planet. Climate deniers—or “skeptics,” as they like to call themselves—would be fact-checked into oblivion by experts cooly dismantling deniers’ favorite fringe theories. After Trump’s election, calls to “believe science” became a rallying cry. Of course, the experts were right. But that didn’t make appealing to expertise any more potent a political strategy, as America’s current lack of comprehensive climate policy can attest.


newrepublic--2020-04-27--The “Shadow Banks” Are Back, and Still Too Big to Fail

On April 14 , University of California-Berkeley real estate professor Nancy Wallace gave an interview to the university ’ s business school , during which she warned of “ a looming nightmare ” in the economy .
Her dire prediction , in this instance , was centered on nonbank mortgage servicers : lightly regulated financial intermediaries ( Quicken Loans being one of the more familiar examples ) who own the right to collect mortgage payments and repackage them into other financial products such as the infamous mortgage-backed securities which you might remember as the inglorious stars of the last financial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wasn ’ t certain that some of the more prominent players in the nonbank mortgage game had the necessary funds on hand “ to last even 30 days , ” let alone those that wouldn ’ t “ be able to do it for three months , much less a year.
” The proximate cause of these firms ’ miseries is familiar to anyone who ’ s not been comatose for the past two months : the coronavirus pandemic and its concomitant impact on the economy .
In this instance , the CARES @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attempt to stabilize the economy , allowed mortgage holders to defer payments for up to a year .
Mortgage servicers were still , during this period of time , required to pay their investors , meaning that they could quickly run out of money .
“ We are going to see bankruptcies , ” Wallace said .
It ’ s hardly surprising , then , that nonbank mortgage servicers and their powerful lobby , the Mortgage Bankers Association , have been begging the federal government for a bailout .
The fact that these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ initial round of Federal Reserve actions to combat the economic impact of the pandemic was due to a history of malfeasance : During the decade they ’ d spent taking over the market for mortgage origination from the big banks , Wallace noted , they had “ pushed every boundary ” while refusing “ every form of oversight.
” Even a group of sympathetic senators , who beseeched the Treasury to lend a hand to mortgage servicers in early April , were forced to concede that while these businesses need help , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have adopted practices that made them particularly susceptible ” to a crisis .
And so , amid the storm of the Covid-19 pandemic , we have an additional dilemma .
If nothing gets done to backstop these financial firms , the businesses who originate over 60 percent of all mortgages in the country would speed over a cliff , possibly dragging substantial portions of the financial system down with them .
But if you bail them out , you risk affirming their oversight-free existence , or at the very least release them from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ They ’ ve revealed themselves to be a new vampiric subspecies of institution we learned to classify in the last crash as “ too big to fail .
”

Fannie Mae was, in some ways, a proto–shadow bank, and it issued some of the first mortgage-backed securities. These financial products were an innovative way to privately fund home loans without deposits, and they inspired the emergence of similar tools. One such product was the money market account, introduced in 1971, which was similar to a bank account but classified as an investment. These allowed financial businesses an alternative way to raise money for lending, without the traditional regulation associated with banking. To many customers, money market accounts seemed to function a lot like normal bank accounts. But whether they knew it or not, their money-market deposits, unlike their standard bank deposits, weren’t insured by the government.
As alternative schemes of funding proliferated, so did shadow banking in general. Hedge funds and other types of investment banks started to dominate the landscape. One of the first warnings that the shadow banking industry might one day become the epicenter of economic calamity came in 1998, when Long Term Capital Management—a hedge fund—went belly up. LTCM had rapidly raised vast sums to make enormous bets on the debt of foreign governments, but when Russia unexpectedly defaulted on its sovereign debt, they imploded. By this time, however, the hedge fund had grown so big that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan fretted that the firm could bring down the entire economy. Greenspan’s solution at the time was to organize a private bailout, thus sparing taxpayers from bearing the Too Big to Fail costs. But Greenspan failed (or refused) to scrutinize the possible wider societal impacts of the ever-growing numbers of private and unregulated banks.
A decade later, those full impacts became clear. AIG, which had grown to become a gigantic shadow bank, had—unbeknownst to many—recklessly agreed to be the counterparty to a bevy of credit default swaps, against which it held little capital. When things went south, the government had to stabilize the financial world by accepting the responsibility for all of AIG’s reckless lending—essentially assuming the role of the FDIC for a financial entity that taxpayers were never meant to backstop. In the aftermath of the financial crash, it was revealed that there were a number of grotesquely large shadow banks just like AIG, such as Metlife, Prudential, and GE Capital. These were so large that they could be considered, under the terms of the Dodd-Frank bank reform bill, to be “systemically important financial institutions,” or SIFIs. Yes, that’s another euphemism for “Too Big to Fail.”


newrepublic--2020-04-27--Turn On, Tune In, Cash In

Turn On, Tune In, Cash In

In 2009 , when she was 56 years old , Judith Goedeke , a retired acupuncturist living in the middle of Maryland who was suffering from severe depression , took psilocybin , the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms , for the first time .
Goedeke was a volunteer subject for a government-approved research study on the effects of psychedelic compounds .
Judith followed the advice of the project ’ s leaders , and brought a keepsake to her sessions , which could last more than eight hours each .
The idea was to use a familiar object with sentimental associations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . )
to serve as a kind of psychic security blanket .
The idea was to direct Goedeke ’ s focus as she explored the shifting geography of her own consciousness .
She brought a statue of Guanyin , a Buddhist bodhisattva , a souvenir that her husband had taken home from a trip to Taiwan .
“ That ’ s the goddess of mercy , ” Goedeke recalled some 11 years later .
“ It means a great deal to me.
” Her Guanyin statuette was carved , with great delicacy , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a tree that typically emerges out of some area of trauma , like an injury or an infection .
From the outside , burl wood appears deformed , all grayish scabs of nasty bark .
Inside , it reveals colorful lumps and concentric swirls , cresting and falling , burrowed inside one another in seemingly infinite regress .
As you ponder a burl ’ s interior design , you get the distinct impression that nature went nutty with a spirograph .
A burl evinces both illness and the response to that illness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s a suitable material , both as homage to a Buddhist goddess of compassion who heeds the anguished cries of the living—and as an allegory for the therapeutic power of psychedelics .
Goedeke ’ s trip would , not unlike the burl itself , traverse beneath the hard carapace of her isolated suffering and evoke something much bigger , even transformative .
The psilocybin sessions would find her fearlessly confronting much of the deeper anguish roiling just beneath the surface of her conscious mind : the sources of her depression @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cancer diagnosis , the trauma of her childhood abuse .
As this trip wore on , she ’ d find herself bartering with a voice deep inside her , leaving her own body , and seeing herself as a golden thread woven together in a tapestry with a trillion others .
Finally , deep in a hallucinatory revel , she saw herself scooping up the sins and miseries of all of human history and laying them , as she relates it , through fitful sobs , “ at the feet of the divine @ @

“I came in as an interested skeptic,” Griffiths explains. “And frankly I was a bit suspicious that the psychedelic enthusiasts were promoting a potentially false narrative about what the effects of these compounds could be.” He was well aware of the reputational risks involved in taking up this line of inquiry. He knew that psychedelic research was a “third rail issue”: the sort of research that carries a high chance of professional marginalization. (That was certainly the case for Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who both were fired from Harvard for their extramural efforts to introduce LSD into the drug culture of the 1960s.)
Still, with the support of Johns Hopkins, federal approvals, and careful monitoring, the initial psilocybin trials began in 2000. That psychedelics can produce “mystical-type experiences” is fascinating enough. But even that testable hypothesis raises at least two questions: What are “mystical-type experiences,” and what practical value do they confer on people having them? Of course, the literature on mystical experience is vast, and accounts vary widely across history and context. But common traits recur: an initial anxiety followed by a giddiness, the feeling of leaving one’s body, of the ego “dissolving,” the recognition of a deep and meaningful interconnectedness to all things, the intuiting of a grander metaphysical structure to the universe, and a common revelation about the benign alignment of cosmic forces. During her trip, Judith Goedeke came to understand, in a flash, as a self-evident matter of fact, that “love is the defining principle in the world.”
It can all sound very woo-woo. Even typing it out feels vaguely embarrassing. Indeed, the simple act of describing the psychedelic experience has long bedeviled even its most fervent advocates. Author Aldous Huxley, a celebrated champion of psychedelia’s first wave, noted that descriptions of these experiences often dissolve into “twaddle.” William James sought, in his own empirically minded way, to attribute the ineffable character of mystical transport to what he called its “Noetic Quality”: the sense that, even if the subjects of such experiences awaken, as they usually do, to mundane life as they had wearily come to know it, the remembered moment of transport still lingers, and feels meaningfully real. They are, as James wrote, “illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain.” And that, he theorized, is why such revelations produce dramatic, enduring changes in behavior, emotion, and cognition.


newrepublic--2020-04-27--Who Will Be Joe Biden’s Pick for Vice President?

The search for a vice president follows a series of rituals as stylized as those of the Japanese tea ceremony .
There are leaks , carefully orchestrated by the campaign to appease various constituencies , expressions of humility by potential veeps , and pious promises from the candidate that political considerations would never enter into a decision this momentous .
Meanwhile , campaign reporters , desperate for storylines now that the primaries have ended , pursue every thinly sourced rumor as if it came with a Pulitzer Prize attached .
Following that familiar script , Joe Biden is slated to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ teams to do the background research on possible vice presidents , with the goal of narrowing the list of contenders by July .
Ever since he flatly stated in his final debate with Bernie Sanders that his running mate would be a woman , the press and the pundits have been circling around the five seemingly most obvious choices : his former presidential campaign rivals , Senators Elizabeth Warren , Kamala Harris , and Amy Klobuchar , along with Governor Gretchen Whitmer ( denounced by Donald Trump as “ that woman in Michigan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Stacey Abrams , who has become a TV regular as she stumps for the job .
Other candidates , particularly a handful of strong Latina contenders , will undoubtedly get their moment in the limelight .
But barring a surprising turnabout , attention will keep returning to the frontline five .
The endless spins of the wheel as the media play Veepstakes Roulette obscure certain lasting truths surrounding the search for a second banana .
As Richard Nixon shrewdly observed in 1968 , “ The vice president can ’ t help you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A half-century later , with partisan sentiments hardening on both sides , this dictum is even more on target than it was in the days when Nixon tapped Spiro Agnew .

Biden will have to deal with a weird affliction that hits former vice presidents when they are nominated for the Oval Office job of their dreams. The track record of former VPs in picking their own number twos is impressively dismal. Agnew, of course, became the first vice president since John Calhoun in 1832 to resign the office to avoid being prosecuted for taking bribes. In 1988, George H.W. Bush tapped the hapless Dan Quayle, who in his autobiography admitted that he came across as “the guy on the game show who’d just won the Oldsmobile.” Al Gore’s 2000 selection of Joe Lieberman (a leading critic of Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct) made some political sense at the time. But by 2006, the hawkish Lieberman was forced to run for reelection as an independent after he lost the Democratic primary for his own Senate seat. Two years later, John McCain nearly put him on the Republican ticket.
But Biden has an advantage that these former vice presidents lacked: His closeness to Barack Obama seems genuine rather than a convenient media creation. In contrast, Dwight Eisenhower said he needed a week to recall a pivotal decision that Nixon made as vice president. Barbara Bush always resented that the Reagans never invited her or her husband to the family quarters in the White House during their eight years in office. And in 2000, Gore pointedly avoided asking Clinton to campaign for him even in a state like Arkansas.
That’s why Biden knows that the choice of a running mate, ultimately, is an intensely personal one. Unlike an errant Cabinet pick, a vice president can’t be discarded at will. Nor, these days, can a VP be forgotten (as Lyndon Johnson was during the Kennedy years) until the president needs him to attend a second-tier foreign funeral. A president and a vice president are as closely entangled as a family, sometimes dysfunctional and sometimes genuinely close.


America’s Post-Pandemic Monoculture

Before the economy officially collapsed , it was easy enough to imagine that the world would resume without much of a hitch after the pandemic had dissipated : Restaurants and bars would open in time for the start of the summer , shoppers would wander into stores once more , movie theaters would start screening again .
Now it ’ s clear that little in the post-pandemic economy will be the same as it was , except , perhaps , for the ultrarich , who tend to be exempt from most upheaval .
( David Geffen will no doubt find @ @ @ @ @ @ @ standard of living when he disembarks the $ 400 million superyacht where he ’ s quarantining ; Martha Stewart ’ s life will probably be fine even after her staff , workers she ’ s come to call her “ detainees , ” are free to leave her compound once again . )
The rest of us will have to contend with a ruinous recession defined first and foremost by mass unemployment and the potential wide-scale disappearance of independent businesses .
In a March opinion piece for The New York Times , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that up to 75 percent of independent restaurants , which notoriously survive on very thin margins , could vanish for good after the economic blow of the coronavirus shutdown .
Last Thursday , Gabrielle Hamilton , chef and owner of the East Village restaurant Prune , described the uncertainty of keeping a restaurant , even a once successful one , in business after the coronavirus , in an age of ever-rising costs .
“ I , like hundreds of other chefs across the city and thousands around the country , [ am ] @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our restaurants , our careers , our lives , might look like if we can even get them back , ” she wrote .
Brick-and-mortar retail , too , has suffered a serious blow , and online behemoths like Amazon now stand ready to capitalize on the collapse of small retailers and chains alike .
( Amazon , in particular , appears to have been laying the groundwork for a takeover for some time by mining data on third-party sellers who used the site in order to gain a competitive edge . )
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Alex Shephard wrote last week , are the independent bookstores that briefly appeared to flourish after the last recession .
The economic devastation of the coronavirus could very well transform entire city neighborhoods—each one defined by its own eclectic mix of homes , shops , eateries , and more—into blocks of permanently shuttered storefronts or outposts for massive chains .
But there ’ s nothing inevitable about what might be the coming monoculture—or as Derek Thompson recently wrote in The Atlantic , an era in which “ big companies will get bigger , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and as always , it is easy to track how the choices made by this administration are driving us toward that future while countries around the world adopt different models to create economic stability and protect the vibrancy of their communities .
The financial distress unleashed upon small businesses in particular has been exacerbated by the inadequate funding and management of the federal relief program theoretically designed to keep them afloat .
The first iteration of the Small Business Administration ’ s Paycheck Protection Program , meant to provide loans to small @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the shutdown , was immediately overwhelmed with applications and ran dry after two weeks .
According to one estimate by the Center for Responsible Lending , up to 90 percent of small businesses owned by women and people of color were prevented from obtaining loans in the initial round of funding as a result of the program ’ s guidelines and the limited funding .
Applicants with past or pending criminal convictions were also shut out of the relief program .

Before the economy officially collapsed, it was easy enough to imagine that the world would resume without much of a hitch after the pandemic had dissipated: Restaurants and bars would open in time for the start of the summer, shoppers would wander into stores once more, movie theaters would start screening again. Now it’s clear that little in the post-pandemic economy will be the same as it was, except, perhaps, for the ultrarich, who tend to be exempt from most upheaval. (David Geffen will no doubt find some way to resume his usual land-based standard of living when he disembarks the $400 million superyacht where he’s quarantining; Martha Stewart’s life will probably be fine even after her staff, workers she’s come to call her “detainees,” are free to leave her compound once again.)
The rest of us will have to contend with a ruinous recession defined first and foremost by mass unemployment and the potential wide-scale disappearance of independent businesses. In a March opinion piece for The New York Times, a group of chefs and restaurant owners speculated that up to 75 percent of independent restaurants, which notoriously survive on very thin margins, could vanish for good after the economic blow of the coronavirus shutdown. Last Thursday, Gabrielle Hamilton, chef and owner of the East Village restaurant Prune, described the uncertainty of keeping a restaurant, even a once successful one, in business after the coronavirus, in an age of ever-rising costs. “I, like hundreds of other chefs across the city and thousands around the country, [am] now staring down the question of what our restaurants, our careers, our lives, might look like if we can even get them back,” she wrote. Brick-and-mortar retail, too, has suffered a serious blow, and online behemoths like Amazon now stand ready to capitalize on the collapse of small retailers and chains alike. (Amazon, in particular, appears to have been laying the groundwork for a takeover for some time by mining data on third-party sellers who used the site in order to gain a competitive edge.) Among those casualties, as my colleague Alex Shephard wrote last week, are the independent bookstores that briefly appeared to flourish after the last recession.


newrepublic--2020-04-28--The Grim New Relevance of Workers Memorial Day

The United States loves a good holiday , and depending on how detailed a calendar one keeps , there are daily opportunities to celebrate everything from gumdrops to argyle .
( I finished writing this on National Spanish Paella Day . )
And given our political leaders ’ penchant for trumpeting America ’ s ( faltering ) manufacturing prowess and undying respect for ( some ) hard-working families , there are a number of holidays—both informal and federally recognized—dedicated to the struggles of the working class .
Labor Day is the best-known , though it is of course little more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to distract the toiling class from the true worker ’ s holiday , May Day ( an international celebration of workers that ’ s rather gruesomely marked on official U.S. calendars as “ Loyalty Day ” ) .
This year ’ s May Day celebrations will most likely be rather muted , given the need for social distancing and impossibility of gathering in the streets .
But the revolutionary flame that sparked the first American May Day parade in 1886 , when anarchist firebrands Lucy and Albert Parsons led a parade of unemployed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still burns ; this year , it has been transmuted into a growing call for a large-scale May rent strike .
But even ahead of this year ’ s May Day festivities there ’ s another , more somber workers ’ holiday worth observing in earnest : April 28 is Workers Memorial Day , an international day of remembrance for workers who have been injured or killed on the job , or after being exposed to hazards at work .
It ’ s a grim holiday in any year , but it has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many workers facing the cruel choice of either reporting for work amid a pandemic or struggling to make do as job prospects evaporate and a new recession sets in .
This day holds a personal meaning for me , as it must for many others .
Last month , my grandfather died .
He was 82 and had been fighting off lung cancer for a while ; I didn ’ t know how bad it had gotten until near the very end , because he did his best to hide the extent of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ man , an ornery son of a bitch who played his cards close to his chest , loved a gin and tonic , and never took painkillers , even after countless surgical procedures had ravaged his body and left his steel backbone bent .
I loved him more than anything , and I was always his favorite ; he was the kind of man who was still getting into bar fights in his seventies , but he always saved a wink for me .
He was an unschooled farm boy , then a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ factory jobs and a side gig as a motel janitor .
It was the decades he spent working as a millwright in an iron powder factory that broke his body , but I never expected him to die in his bed .
It was undignified—too soft for a man like him .

This day holds a personal meaning for me, as it must for many others. Last month, my grandfather died. He was 82 and had been fighting off lung cancer for a while; I didn’t know how bad it had gotten until near the very end, because he did his best to hide the extent of the damage. He was a hard man, an ornery son of a bitch who played his cards close to his chest, loved a gin and tonic, and never took painkillers, even after countless surgical procedures had ravaged his body and left his steel backbone bent. I loved him more than anything, and I was always his favorite; he was the kind of man who was still getting into bar fights in his seventies, but he always saved a wink for me. He was an unschooled farm boy, then a Marine, then split his time between factory jobs and a side gig as a motel janitor. It was the decades he spent working as a millwright in an iron powder factory that broke his body, but I never expected him to die in his bed. It was undignified—too soft for a man like him.
But in the end, he died of mesothelioma, a vicious form of lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos; it creeps in unannounced and eventually suffocates its victims. Industrial workers like him were four times more likely to contract the disease than members of the general population. Its long dormancy period—sometimes up to 40 years—means that when it rears its ugly head, it does so stealthily, when its prey is already weakened. Now I can’t stop thinking: Did his employer know about the risks of asbestos back then? Would they have cared? Would he? Knowing him, he would’ve waved it off. As a six-foot-four former Marine and avid big game hunter, he by all rights should have been taken down by more than a little prickly insulation. And yet down he went, to join his brethren on the great Workers Memorial in the sky.


Erasing the Dead

Tucked down near the end of a recent New York Times piece praising New Mexico ’ s response to the coronavirus was the fact that , “ While Native Americans account for about 11 percent of New Mexico ’ s population , new data on Thursday showed that they make up 44 percent of the state ’ s confirmed coronavirus cases.
” Virginia Public Media reported that Black residents made up all eight of Richmond ’ s coronavirus deaths , along with 62 percent of the city ’ s confirmed cases .
The Los Angeles Times found that Latinx people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were actually suffering higher infection and death rates than their older community members .
These are the statistics that bear out the material , life and death consequences of systemic racism .
They are also , tragically , not surprising .
But what has also become crystal clear in recent weeks is that the data we have , staggering as it is , represents just a slice of the fuller picture .
On Friday , Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle published a piece in The Guardian that examined the undercounting of Native Americans by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 80 percent of state health departments that have released racial and ethnic demographic data , half either excluded Native people entirely or listed them under “ other.
” ( This classification has a history : In the Jim Crow South , Native people were also segregated , with water fountains , bathrooms , movie theater sections , and hospital wings split by “ white , ” “ colored , ” and “ other.
” ) Even in New York City , where 111,749 New Yorkers identified as American Indian or Alaska Native in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ percent of the population , the city has not included them in its racial or ethnic statistics when tracking the virus .
Looking outside of Indian Country and back to the Los Angeles Times report , it noted that “ preliminary racial data released by health officials in California and L.A. County earlier this month suggested Latinos were not facing any higher rate of infection or death from the virus.
” Clearly , that wasn ’ t the case .
This crisis-within-the-crisis extends beyond marginalized communities to the general population .
Last week @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Carolina co-published a piece in the News & Observer to report that death certificates in the state—which determine a person ’ s official cause of death and are used for state reporting of statistics in the pandemic—have been regularly citing noncoronavirus ailments as the cause for death .
“ When state officials say 213 state residents have died of the virus as of Tuesday morning , they can only include those who tested positive , ” the journalists wrote .
“ Those with the same symptoms but no Covid-19 test results aren ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ virus .
”

In New York City, a New York Times review of mortality data found that between mid-March and late April, the city saw a 300 percent surge in the average number of deaths. While 15,411 people were listed as having died from Covid-19, 3,800 were not. “At this stage, it’s a partial snapshot,” Patrick Gerland, a demographer at the United Nations, told the paper, adding that “in the next couple of months, a much clearer picture will be possible.”
It’s hard to get a full grip on the consequences of this kind of underreporting and misreporting, especially in real time, with the data shifting and updating every day. But a failure to take a full account of the ways in which the pandemic impacts communities of color and economically underserved neighborhoods means that the different needs of those communities will likely be erased as we try to prepare for the next crisis. It sets us on a course to repeat our deadly present. On an individual level, there is the pain of losing a loved one without a true understanding of what happened. On a community level, this experience is replicated until it becomes normalized—a recent poll from Siena College Research Institute found that 46 percent of New Yorkers know someone who’s died from the virus.
A day will come when the coronavirus pandemic is behind us. There will be an “other side,” distorted and strange as it almost certainly will be. Schools will reopen, parks will fill up, sports will be played, and people will establish a new sense of normalcy. The virus, or more specifically the extended time period in which the nation and the world ground to a halt, will be spoken of in the past tense. The memory of the pandemic will linger in everyone’s mind. But if this trend continues, the true toll will be unfairly shouldered by the same communities that have historically been ignored. And by the time the rest of the country realizes what’s happened, it will be too late.


newrepublic--2020-04-28--Don’t Let Larry Summers Block Climate Progress Again

There are many reasons the average news reader might not like Larry Summers .
A longtime friend of convicted predator Jeffrey Epstein , Summers deregulated the banking sector as Bill Clinton ’ s Treasury Secretary , helping to set the stage for the 2008 financial crisis .
While serving as chief economist of the World Bank , he put his name to a memo suggesting industries dump toxic waste in Africa because it was “ underpolluted , ” later claiming the memo was intended as “ sardonic counterpoint.
” In 2005 , while president of Harvard University , he posited @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t well-suited for math and science .
Less discussed , however , is how Summers worked during the Obama years to torpedo America ’ s last best shot to make itself a low-carbon society .
The issue has become newly relevant in the past few weeks : As reported last week by Bloomberg News , Summers is now serving as an adviser to Joe Biden ’ s campaign .
With Biden the presumptive Democratic nominee for the November presidential election , Summers could soon find himself in a position to repeat his mistakes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Obama administration featured a number of questionable choices .
As the incoming head of Obama ’ s National Economic Council in 2008 , Summers famously misled the president-elect about the size of the stimulus package that leading experts—including fellow transition team member Christina Romer—urged was necessary , and kept him from even seeing the trillion-plus dollar figures they recommended to avert skyrocketing unemployment .
The recession was more painful and prolonged as a result .
As reported by another transition team member , Reed Hundt , in A Crisis Wasted , he also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the inner circle about how the recovery should look .
As during the Clinton administration , Summers was leery of moving too quickly to curb carbon emissions , urging a lenient timetable for polluters ; any real reforms , he reasoned , would have to wait for legislation .
Hundt also writes that Summers rejected his proposal to have Obama ’ s stimulus create a green investment bank and build energy efficiency infrastructure and high-voltage transmission lines .
This Green Recovery and Investment Program ( GRIP ) , as it was known @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the roughly 10 percent of the stimulus eventually spent on clean energy .
Summers thought it would create too much debt .
He rejected the concept of creating new institutions , preferring a strategy of spending as quickly as possible , and saw the sole goal of the recovery as boosting demand and GDP with a quick injection of federal cash .
Staring down the barrel of double-digit unemployment in December 2008 , Summers said , “ Our economic problem is that the country has too much debt .
”

Hundt’s assessment is supported by evidence from the Clinton years. Summers has had a special fondness over the years for profit-making when in the power sector. When California’s electricity prices began skyrocketing in late 2000, then–California Governor Gray Davis called on the Clinton administration, correctly suspecting Enron was manipulating prices. Summers reportedly told him to accept the prices the free market had wisely decided and warned about the dangers of overregulating Enron chairman Kenneth Lay.
Hundt wasn’t the only one to criticize Summers’s time in the Obama administration. In an account largely sympathetic to the administration and its green stimulus efforts, and to Biden in particular, Mike Grunwald’s The New New Deal—focusing on the green aspects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—described Summers as a “born alienator” and “jealous turf warrior,” who resented not having been appointed to the Fed in 2010. At times, Grunwald added, he “seemed almost pathologically argumentative, and his meetings often devolved into academic cage fights that made consensus even less likely” than it already was, shutting out various members of the president’s inner circle. “The Summers style,” he writes, “was to debate new ideas to death—one of his mantras was the Hippocratic oath to do no harm—which created a bias toward inaction.”
Summers hasn’t been totally averse to new ideas, though. According to Bethany McLean’s book on the fracking revolution, Saudi America, Summers was specifically targeted by a group of domestic fossil fuel companies known as Producers for American Crude Oil Exports, who pushed to lift the crude oil export ban in 2015. As the group’s lead lobbyist, George Baker, told McLean, Summers was one of several then–former Obama-era officials he turned to to make the case to the White House. “We had a whole Congressional hearing that was all supportive testimony from former Obama Administration officials,” he said. Summers personally pitched the idea to the Brookings Institution, saying in 2014 that the “merits are as clear” for lifting the ban “as the merits with respect to any significant public policy issue that I have ever encountered,” calling it “an important test of the efficacy of the functioning of our democracy whether within the next nine months we will get to that correct solution.” As the Revolving Door Project has pointed out, the idea that emissions would be exported abroad had been Summers’s rationale nearly a decade earlier for calling the Kyoto Protocol and its binding emissions targets a failure.