David Ciepley in The Hedgehog Review:

On its glittering surface, America’s corporate economy appears to be in fantastic shape. The stock markets recently reached record highs, even if they dipped and bobbed after reaching those heights. Profits are soaring. Financing is cheap. The corporate tax rate has been cut. The unemployment rate is near a fifty-year low, with little inflation.

But look under the hood, and you will find that all is not well. Those stock prices have little, if anything, to do with underlying value creation; those profits owe little to increased productivity; that cheap financing seldom goes to investment. Despite the record profits and unusually favorable terms for borrowers, the rate of corporate investment is down—by historical standards for such conditions, way down. Productivity growth is down. Wages, adjusted for inflation, have remained largely flat since the 1970s, despite all of labor’s subsequent productivity gains. As a proportion of corporate income, wage expenditure today is at a historic low, even with profits at or near historic highs. Profits that used to be allocated to wage increases, training, research, and expansion are instead being disgorged to stockholders in the form of increased dividends and stock buybacks (which helps explain those rising stock prices). The windfall from the 2017 corporate tax cut went almost entirely to such buybacks, not wages or investment. The number of listed companies is actually declining, in part because entrepreneurs who wish to grow their companies dare not place them under Wall Street’s care, to be bled out for the pleasure of today’s short-term–focused stockholders.

Today’s stockholder is fat and happy from cannibalizing the corporate body. Yet the feast is unlikely to last.

More here.

Jan Ellen Spiegel in Undark:

Bob Marra navigated his way to the back of a dusty barn in Hamden, Connecticut, belonging to the state’s Agricultural Experiment Station. There, past piles of empty beehives, on a wall of metal shelves, were stacks of wooden disks — all that remains of 39 trees taken down in 2014 from Great Mountain Forest in the northwest corner of the state.

These cross-sections of tree trunks, known as stem disks — or more informally as cookies — are telling a potentially worrisome tale about the ability of forests to be critical hedges against accelerating climate change. As anyone following the fires burning in the Amazon rainforest knows by now, trees play an important role in helping to offset global warming by storing carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide — a major contributor to rising temperatures — in their wood, leaves, and roots. The worldwide level of CO2 is currently averaging more than 400 parts per million — the highest amount by far in the last 800,000 years.

But Marra, a forest pathologist at the Experiment Station with a Ph.D. in plant pathology from Cornell University, has documented from studying his fallen trees that internal decay has the capacity to significantly reduce the amount of carbon stored within.

More here.

Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books:

“Gun rights,” as used by devotees of an absolutist Second Amendment, means their right to own guns. But as used in real American life these days (or real American deaths), it means the rights of guns. Guns themselves possess even more rights than persons do.

If a person were found to have shown up regularly in so many places where so many crimes had been committed by so many people, how could that person not be called to account for such suspicious behavior? He would clearly be investigated for being present with such persistence at crime scenes. Did he facilitate them, making them easier by his mere presence? What could induce any innocent person to be so energetically omnipresent at so many varied crime scenes? What excuse could relieve him from the charge of being an accessory? A person with such skill and dogged effort would be considered a national menace, no matter how many excuses he could concoct for such weird conduct.

But guns can do all of those things and profess an entire non-involvement.

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Sean Carroll in the New York Times:

“I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics,” observed the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. That’s not surprising, as far as it goes. Science makes progress by confronting our lack of understanding, and quantum mechanics has a reputation for being especially mysterious.

What’s surprising is that physicists seem to be O.K. with not understanding the most important theory they have.

Quantum mechanics, assembled gradually by a group of brilliant minds over the first decades of the 20th century, is an incredibly successful theory. We need it to account for how atoms decay, why stars shine, how transistors and lasers work and, for that matter, why tables and chairs are solid rather than immediately collapsing onto the floor.

Scientists can use quantum mechanics with perfect confidence. But it’s a black box. We can set up a physical situation, and make predictions about what will happen next that are verified to spectacular accuracy. What we don’t do is claim to understand quantum mechanics. Physicists don’t understand their own theory any better than a typical smartphone user understands what’s going on inside the device.

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Howard LaFranchi in The Christian Science Monitor:

The sleek blue-glass building of the Infosys corporation sits like an intruding spaceship amid the unpaved side streets and half-completed residential structures that surround it. Its giant porthole windows offer a peek into a Jetsons-esque world of workers gliding between floors on elevated moving sidewalks. For now, 19-year-old Nishank Nachappaa toils in the shadows of Infosys and the other high-tech companies that, like him, call the Electronic City section of Bangalore home. The high school graduate helps out at two dormitories for tech workers – one for young men, the other for young women – that his parents manage. His father maintains the buildings and his mother prepares meals for the 120 male and 30 female residents. Walk a block or two from the dorms and other corporate structures loom with multinational names such as Emerson and Yokogawa, Altametrics and Hewlett Packard.

…The country has addressed much of the abject destitution that vast numbers of Indians lived in 25 years ago. As a result, it appears ready to join not just China but also South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and other Asian neighbors that have either made the leap to middle-income prosperity or are well on their way. Along with its world-class space program, assertive foreign policy, and global cultural presence, India is trying to leverage its economic clout and privileged relationship with the United States into a more prominent role among world powers.

And yet, the country that will soon be the planet’s most populous – India is on track to surpass China in 2027– and is perhaps the world’s most culturally and linguistically diverse, also faces a number of key challenges that could yet stifle its rise. Among them: a huge, underproductive rural population and economically inactive female population; a heavy state footprint in the economy that discourages private enterprise and foreign investment; rising political divides and religious tensions; and a lingering post-independence mindset of reliance on the state. It’s a daunting list – one that echoes the period, more than a decade ago, when a first wave of “India’s time has come” declarations coursed through the country.

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Adam Kosan in Nautilus:

Emily Dickinson spent most of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Despite the geographic limits of her experience, she perceived an abundant, entrancing and confounding natural world of life and death all around her. Among her many aspects as a poet, she comes down to us as a fascinating observer of birds.

Scott Edwards is an ornithologist who studies the evolutionary biology of birds. Poetry in America director Elisa New recently invited Edwards to join her at Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum in Boston to listen to birdsong and read some of Emily Dickinson’s bird poems. As their conversation makes clear in the video below, you can approach these poems on different levels. There is, on the one hand, Dickinson’s perspective as a naturalist, keen to record patterns of nature, and on the other, her perspective as a poet, finding the raw materials of metaphor in those natural patterns. How do these modes complement or diverge from each other? New and Edwards begin by looking at the nature of robin song, memorably conjured in the poem “You’ll know her by her foot.” Their conversation then proceeds to cover a range of questions about poetic vocabulary and scientific knowledge.

More here.

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal—a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.

by Mary Oliver
from House of Light
Beacon Press, Boston

Mitch Anderson in Reasons to be Cheerful:

Like many other nations, Canada is blessed with enormous resource wealth. We are the 7th largest oil-producing nation in the world (Norway is the 15th), with vast forests, mineral deposits and prime farming land. The Canadian province of Alberta legally controls almost 80 percent of the country’s fossil fuel production, has a similar population to Norway yet somehow managed to end up with a $62 billion debt and another $260 billion in unsecured environmental liabilities. Other nations like Nigeria, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia have become even more wretched examples of resource mismanagement, with deplorable human rights records, dysfunctional economies and rampant graft.

Norway is different. Unlike many countries endowed with natural abundance, Norway has somehow avoided the so-called resource curse—where outside interests make off with most of the money and leave behind corrupt and enfeebled institutions.

I had journeyed to Norway to learn how this small country had managed to capture and save over $1 trillion of resource revenue in the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. Norway regularly tops global rankings on happiness, human rights and the best country to be a mother. They also outright own over half of their oil production, they tax oil profits at close to 80 percent and are still rated as one of the most desirable jurisdictions for international investment.

More here.

Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker:

The M.I.T. Media Lab, which has been embroiled in a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than it has previously acknowledged, and it attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him. Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as “disqualified” in M.I.T.’s official donor database, the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds, and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university. Perhaps most notably, Epstein appeared to serve as an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors, soliciting millions of dollars in donations from individuals and organizations, including the technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black. According to the records obtained by The New Yorker and accounts from current and former faculty and staff of the media lab, Epstein was credited with securing at least $7.5 million in donations for the lab, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, gifts the e-mails describe as “directed” by Epstein or made at his behest. The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or “he who must not be named.”

More here.

Bennett McIntosh in Harvard Magazine:

AS A MEDICAL STUDENT in the 1980s, Isaac “Zak” Kohane heard stories—from patients, mentors, and colleagues—of nearly miraculous recoveries from cancer. A patient given weeks to live instead survives for years. An experimental drug works exceptionally well—in only one patient. Or, most controversially, a patient rejects chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, and somehow lives. As a trainee, Kohane found many such stories quite literally unbelievable. “Frankly,” he says, “I assumed that they didn’t really have a cancer.” Now Nelson professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School (see “Toward Precision Medicine,” May-June 2015, page 17), Kohane not only believes these stories, he’s seeking them out. A year ago, he began a project to find “exceptional responders” to cancer treatment—those who have beaten the cancer odds many times over—in order to figure out what makes them special.

He was inspired initially by a very different group of patients. Since 2014, Kohane has coordinated a nationwide program to study and aid patients whose affliction with rare, undiagnosed diseases mark them as statistical outliers. “Outliers, by definition, are interesting,” he explains, because they are different from everybody else, “so there are things to be learned. By finding these outliers, we have been able to make breakthroughs both for the patient but also scientifically,” diagnosing more than 300 patients suffering from newly discovered genetic diseases in five years.

More here.

George Packer in The Atlantic:

The Wise Men were high-born WASPs of the past century who went to the best schools and joined the most exclusive clubs and assumed top positions in law, banking, and government as naturally as if power were their birthright. They assisted in the creation of NATO, the international monetary system, the Cold War, and the war in Vietnam. Even out of government, they had the ear of presidents of both parties. They achieved great things and made colossal mistakes. Among them were a compulsive philanderer, an anti-Semite, and a crook. In other words, though they cultivated an air of nonpartisan and disinterested wisdom as Ciceros of the American century, they were human.

Leslie Gelb, who died last Saturday at the age of 82, was a wise man for a different era. He was a poor Jewish kid with bad eyesight from New Rochelle, New York, who studied international relations at Harvard so that he wouldn’t have to spend his life working seven days a week in his parents’ deli, a claustrophobic fate out of Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant. Gelb’s spectacularly unpromising origins gave him a lifelong aversion to pretense and fakery. One of his essential words was bullshit, which he dispensed to anyone guilty of peddling the stuff, no matter the person’s station. He never made a pile of money; he was a fixture of no social scene. If he cultivated any air, it was that of a no-nonsense joker. He was the wise man as wise guy.

More here.

Ted Mann in Tablet:

Kraus loved paradoxes and published a magazine, Die Fackel, full of them. “An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half truth or a truth-and-a-half,” he wrote. Kraus also gave popular stage performances, in which he played piano, read Shakespeare’s sonnets, and acted out parts from his monumental masterpiece, the 800-page play, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, usually translated as The Last Days of Mankind.

The Last Days was conceived as a play in the early weeks of World War I, from the perspective of Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The play begins with Vienna newsagents crying the headlines, “Archduke Ferdinand assassinated in Sarajevo! Murd-ra’s a Serb!” (“Thank God, not a Jew,” remarks a passerby to his wife, who immediately drags him offstage.) The play ends with the voice of God intoning, as Kaiser Wilhelm did in the aftermath of the war, “This is not what I intended.”

Kraus wrote his play “live” throughout the war in response to events reported or observed. As he says in his introduction, “The most improbable actions reported here really occurred … the most implausible conversations are reported verbatim, as spoken, word for word; the shrillest fantasies direct quotations. Sentences whose insanity is indelibly imprinted on the ear are grown into the music of time.”

Patriot: For example, the civilized language we use, even when speaking of the enemy, who are, after all, the greatest scum on God’s earth.

Subscriber: And above all, unlike them, we are always humane. For example, the editorial in the Presse even talked about the good times ahead for the fish and crustacea in the Adriatic, with so many Italian corpses to feed on …

In part, Kraus seems to have invented the form of a living play in response to the collapse of the Austrian press during wartime. “The truth is that the newspaper is not a statement of contents but the contents themselves; more than that, it is an instigator,” said Kraus in a remarkable speech, “In These Great Times,” made in 1914 as WWI commenced. “It would be far less shameful to be paid for committing atrocities than for fabricating them.”

More here.