Antitrust Revolution & Swing Set

Today is a travel day for me, so I had to write the newsletter earlier than usual. Expect a more packed list tomorrow!

Featured Articles

The Antitrust Revolution

Harper's Magazine • 16 Sep 2024 • ~8000 words • Archive Link

Barry C. Lynn discusses the rise of big tech monopolies and their impact on democracy, individual liberty, and the American economic system. It traces the historical roots of anti-monopoly policies in the United States and argues that the neoliberal policies of the Reagan and Clinton eras have led to a dangerous concentration of power that threatens the core principles of American liberalism. The article poses critical questions about how this counterrevolution occurred and how it has reshaped our society, economy, and intellectual landscape.

It is Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple that today enjoy the power to create and destroy, to censor and punish, to “make and unmake” who they will. It is these corporations that—even as we fear consolidation of power in the public state—have erected a private state over us. They who have disrupted almost every economic and political balance in the Republic. They who have amassed the power to shape and determine how we speak to one another and share news and information. Even how we think, dream, and perceive our place in the world.

Swing Set: The Giant’s Footsteps

Belt Magazine • 16 Sep 2024 • ~4150 words

This reflective piece explores the author's childhood memories of growing up in a working-class suburb of Detroit in the 1960s. It delves into the significance of the family's backyard swing set, using it as a lens to examine themes of community, identity, and the changing industrial landscape of the Rust Belt region.

Working in the factory provided a decent middle-class income. You could afford to buy a house, raise kids, and get a new car every so often—a big car, so all the kids fit. Yet an assembly-line worker had no upward mobility—like the glide ride, there was a very limited range of motion, no escape route that wasn’t risking a financial plunge into a minimum-wage job. The glide ride lifted us up a little in each direction, but never got us anywhere. It mimicked the repetitive, mechanical work of the assembly line where you couldn’t stray far.

Recommended Articles

Why Are Museums So Afraid of This Artist?

New York Times • 16 Sep 2024 • ~3650 words • Archive Link

The article discusses the controversial career of the 88-year-old artist Hans Haacke. His politically charged artworks have often faced resistance and censorship from museums and cultural institutions. It explores Haacke's bold confrontations with the art establishment, highlighting how his art challenges both cultural institutions and the wealthy patrons behind them.

Before Haacke, museums were considered, in the words of the New York Times critic Holland Cotter, “genteel and politically marginal.” Robber barons might have donated to them to enhance their social clout, but such cultural largess was seldom questioned. Today, though, when phrases like “artwashing” and “toxic philanthropy” have entered the lexicon to describe the role that museums and other cultural organizations play in boosting the images of corporations and billionaires, Haacke’s work is more than just relevant — it’s prophetic. With persistent clarity, he seemed to understand, half a century before anyone else, the stakes of the uncomfortable relationship between art and politics.

The Fever Called Living, by Evan Malmgren

Harper's Magazine • 16 Sep 2024 • ~6100 words • Archive Link

Evan Malmgren explores the experiences of people suffering from environmental illnesses, such as multiple chemical sensitivity and electromagnetic hypersensitivity. It delves into the lives of individuals like Gary Duncan, who have retreated to remote areas to escape perceived environmental triggers and examines the broader societal and medical debates surrounding these contested conditions.

Duncan is a refugee from what some would call “environmental illness,” or EI: a person who feels as though they have been pressed to the physical margins of society by the proliferation of artificial irritants associated with controversial, broadly unrecognized conditions like multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) and electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) . . . They are widely seen as overly anxious hypochondriacs. Because they find scant support from mainstream medical practitioners, EI refugees often consider self-directed avoidance their only viable option.

China’s Hinterland Becomes A Critical Datascape

NOEMA • 16 Sep 2024 • ~2800 words

With this piece we explore how the southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou is being transformed into a major data hub and computing center for the country. It examines how the region, historically seen as a remote hinterland, is now the site of massive state-led infrastructure development aimed at establishing Guizhou as the "Data Valley" of China, with implications for the region's economy, environment, and relationship to the country's coastal centers of power.

. . . look more closely at the buildings in the new Czech town and you’ll notice that their windows are in fact air vents, thrumming and heaving with the high-pitched rush of server racks and cooling fans. The water tumbling down the artificial cliffside and circulating in the moat is part of a cooling system for transferring heat away from the machinery. This is Huawei’s new Cloud Data Center, which follows the company’s tradition of building its Chinese campuses in a range of historic European styles, from medieval to neoclassical, replete with spires and cornices.

A Gospel of Violence

Los Angeles Review of Books • 16 Sep 2024 • ~2650 words

In this book review of a new biography, The Abiy Project, Tom Gardner explores the complex and often troubling figure of Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, once celebrated as a peacemaker. Gardner paints a nuanced portrait of Abiy as a leader shaped by power struggles and brutal conflict, revealing the disturbing realities of a nation grappling with the aftermath of civil war and authoritarianism.

The Abiy Project is refreshingly free of the othering rhetoric and passive-aggressive attacks that have come to characterize so much discourse about the country today. Gardner has patiently listened to seemingly everyone who would talk to him—from orphaned street children to untouchable heads of state—and his journalistic rigor is what gives this book such extraordinary depth, comprehensiveness, and humanity.

Tender, yet creepy

Aeon • 16 Sep 2024 • ~3950 words

Dolls hold a unique place in our lives, straddling the line between comfort and eeriness. This piece explores how these childhood companions can evoke vivid memories while simultaneously stirring unsettling feelings about mortality and identity. The article also examines how dolls have been used across cultures and throughout history as ritual objects, playthings, and vessels for exploring human desires and fears.

In the land of dolls, puppets, mannequins, waxworks – all those inanimate objects enlivened with human qualities – there exists a tender-creepy boundary, a volatile and dynamic threshold that you may suddenly cross.

How Historical Fiction Redefined the Literary Canon

The Nation • 11 Sep 2024 • ~2300 words

Historical fiction has become increasingly prominent in contemporary American literature, with novels set in the past dominating major literary awards and prizes in recent decades. This piece examines how this shift has impacted the literary canon, particularly in terms of increasing representation of writers of color, while also raising questions about the limits of using historical fiction to address present-day issues and inequalities.

A historical novel has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 12 out of the last 15 years, and historical fiction has made up 70 percent of all novels short-listed for these three major American prizes since the turn of the 21st century. Today, writers like Colson Whitehead, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, and Hernan Diaz are less interested in the way we live now than the way we were.

The Machines Are Proving Ray Kurzweil Right—Sort Of

The New Republic • 11 Sep 2024 • ~3600 words

Ray Kurzweil has been a prominent voice in the conversation about artificial intelligence and the concept of the Singularity for decades. In this piece, the author explores how Kurzweil's optimistic vision for the future intersects with contemporary anxieties around AI, offering a look at both his predictions and the criticisms they face. It's a dive into the mind of a futurist who believes we are on the brink of a monumental shift in human evolution.

For Kurzweil, the Singularity still promises only deliverance—from our most intractable problems and the crooked timber that produced them. As the field he helped build rumbles with doubt, Kurzweil is the most prominent spokesman for AI messianism.

Andre Agassi, open to tennis again, returns to a sport that nearly destroyed him

New York Times • 7 Sep 2024 • ~2350 words • Archive Link

Andre Agassi is back in the world of tennis, but this time in a different role, with a fresh perspective shaped by years of introspection. In this piece, Agassi reflects on his tumultuous relationship with the sport, sharing insights on both the technical and emotional aspects of the game.

Agassi’s reentry came without warning. One minute he’s in the tennis wilderness, other than occasionally mentoring anyone who felt like making their way to the Nevada desert . . . The next, he’s at the Australian Open, all over screens in Uber commercials mocking his notorious mullet.

Almost everyone failed her. Then she vanished. The heartbreaking story of the girl in the Rosedale dumpster

Toronto Star • 24 Aug 2024 • ~4950 words

This tragic story of Baby Neveah highlights the failures of the child welfare system in Ontario. After a series of challenges and repeated interventions, she was returned to her mother’s care, only to vanish and be found in a Rosedale dumpster. This piece delves into the heartbreaking details of Neveah's life and the systemic issues that allowed something like this to happen.

Far from a mystery child — an undocumented immigrant, or a new arrival in Canada, as authorities first theorized — Neveah had, for most of her life, been in the care of the province’s child protection agencies. She was far from untraceable.

How heat in seas off West Africa is making the Atlantic’s hurricane season a nightmare

Post and Courier • 20 Aug 2024 • ~1950 words

The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season has been anything but predictable, and the key may lie along West Africa's coast. This article explores how warming ocean temperatures and unexpected weather patterns influence hurricane formation, revealing a complex interplay of climate factors that could redefine our understanding of storm behavior.

Meteorologists talked about their 2024 forecasts being a "bust." But a deeper look at the Atlantic’s main development region reveals a more nuanced story, one about migration of sea life and people and shifting currents in the ocean and the sky.