Weekend Reading
Keep passing the open windows ...
“Sometimes a photo can captivate so powerfully that you are transported to another place and time. When photographer Josh Dury traveled to Easter Island for last month's annular solar eclipse, he wasn't going to let a single moment go to waste. Although primarily there for the celestial day-time alignment, with support from the islanders, Dury also managed to capture some overnight images alongside some of the island's famous statues, known as Moai. Due to its remote location, Easter Island has one of the darkest skies on Earth. Capitalizing on the novel setting, Dury set up one of his cameras next to a row of Moai statues to capture the vibrant arm of the Milky Way painted across space and time. Dury posted the photo to social media, with the title ‘Aringa Ora O Te Tupuna’ (The Living Face of the Ancestors). The shot was impressive enough to be selected as a NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day (APOD).” (Josh Dinner/Space.com)
“Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. He has inflation to thank. In poll after poll, focus group after focus group, Americans said the economy was bad—and the economy was bad because prices were too high. This was always going to be a problem for Kamala Harris. ‘Excess’ inflation—defined as the cumulative growth of prices in one presidential term compared with the term preceding it—is highly predictive of electoral outcomes, according to the Northwestern economist Robert Gordon. It is a crucial part of how voters decide whether they are better off and want to stick with the incumbent. The measure strongly pointed to a Trump victory. Indeed, since the global post-pandemic inflation spike began, ruling parties around the world, on the left and the right, have been toppled. Still, before this week, Democrats had good reasons to believe that they might be spared the inflation backlash. Households’ spending power improved more and faster in the United States than in other countries. On paper, families were doing better than they were before the pandemic, particularly at the low end of the income spectrum. Real wages—meaning wages adjusted for prices—jumped 13.2 percent for the lowest-income workers from 2019 to 2023; real wages for the highest-income workers climbed 4.4 percent. But voters do not make their decisions at the polls on the basis of price-adjusted time series. Nor do they seem to appreciate pundits and politicians telling them that their lived experience is somehow incorrect—that they are truly doing great; they just don’t know it. Prices spiked more during the Biden administration than at any point since the early 1980s. In some categories, they remain unsustainably high. Home prices have jumped an astonishing 47 percent since early 2020. This has made homeowners wealthier on paper, but has priced millions of people out of the housing market. The situation with rented homes is no better. Costs are up more than 20 percent since COVID hit, and have doubled in some places. The number of cost-burdened renters is at an all-time high. In response to inflation, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates. Inflation statistics do not include the cost of borrowing, but many Americans experienced higher rates—the supposed cure for higher prices—as making costs worse. Mortgage rates more than doubled from their pandemic-era level, adding insult to home-buying injury. The interest payment on a new-car loan has grown nearly as much. Credit-card APRs climbed to all-time highs, making many families’ buffer against month-to-month earnings and spending changes a costly one. If you include the cost of borrowing, inflation peaked at 18 percent, not 9 percent.” (Annie Lowry/The Atlantic)
“I was broke. I got to Paris with forty dollars in my pocket, but I had to get out of New York. My reflexes were tormented by the plight of other people. Reading had taken me away for long periods at a time, yet I still had to deal with the streets and the authorities and the cold. I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed. My best friend had committed suicide two years earlier, jumping off the George Washington Bridge. When I arrived in Paris in 1948 I didn’t know a word of French. I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t want to know anyone. Later, when I’d encountered other Americans, I began to avoid them because they had more money than I did and I didn’t want to feel like a freeloader. The forty dollars I came with, I recall, lasted me two or three days. Borrowing money whenever I could—often at the last minute—I moved from one hotel to another, not knowing what was going to happen to me. Then I got sick. To my surprise I wasn’t thrown out of the hotel. This Corsican family, for reasons I’ll never understand, took care of me. An old, old lady, a great old matriarch, nursed me back to health after three months; she used old folk remedies. And she had to climb five flights of stairs every morning to make sure I was kept alive. I went through this period where I was very much alone, and wanted to be. I wasn’t part of any community until I later became the Angry Young Man in New York.” (James Baldwin/The Paris Review)
“Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often. If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action. I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.” (Micael Tomasky/ TNR)
“Following Tuesday’s vote, it now seems that it was the Biden presidency that was the anomaly, and that Trump is inaugurating a new era in US politics and perhaps for the world as a whole. Americans were voting with full knowledge of who Trump was and what he represented. Not only did he win a majority of votes and is projected to take every single swing state, but the Republicans retook the Senate and look like holding on to the House of Representatives. Given their existing dominance of the Supreme Court, they are now set to hold all the major branches of government. But what is the underlying nature of this new phase of American history? Classical liberalism is a doctrine built around respect for the equal dignity of individuals through a rule of law that protects their rights, and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to interfere with those rights. But over the past half century that basic impulse underwent two great distortions. The first was the rise of ‘neoliberalism,’ an economic doctrine that sanctified markets and reduced the ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change. The world got a lot richer in the aggregate, while the working class lost jobs and opportunity. Power shifted away from the places that hosted the original industrial revolution to Asia and other parts of the developing world.” (Francis Fukuyama/FT)
“The simplest story is one that Michael Tesler and I wrote about back in March. A spike in inflation dragged down Joe Biden’s approval rating, which never improved very much even as inflation receded. Public views of the economy remained less positive than other indicators – economic growth, employment – would predict. Replacing Biden with Kamala Harris opened up the possibility that she could outperform his approval rating. Some research suggests that the incumbent president’s record matters less when the incumbent is not running. Of course, Harris was also part of the incumbent administration herself. As of March, Biden’s approval rating was consistent with a 3-point Democratic loss in the national popular vote. At the latest tally, early on Nov. 6, Trump has a 3.5-point lead. That may change as the remaining voters are counted, but it’s likely to be consistent with what Biden’s approval rating alone predicted. As we get more and better data – a process that will take months, to be sure – we can add important details. But the central plot lines of the story are already clear, and not that dissimilar from four years ago. In 2020, an unpopular incumbent lost reelection. In 2024, an unpopular incumbent’s party lost reelection. The circumstances and the reasons for their unpopularity differed. Nevertheless, their struggles provided the tailwind for the challenger. That has put Donald Trump back in the White House.” (John Sides/Good Authority)
“Ahram Online reports that a tomb dated to the Middle Kingdom period has been discovered in the Asasif necropolis at Thebes, which is located on the western bank of the Nile River in Upper Egypt. The 4,000-year-old tomb contained the remains of 11 individuals, who are thought to have been family members who lived during the 12th and early 13th Dynasties. Damage to the wooden coffins and linen wrappings in the tomb is thought to have occurred during ancient floods. Jewelry and pottery, however, were found to be well preserved and still in place among the skeletal remains. The jewelry items included a necklace made of 30 amethyst beads and two cylindrical agate beads framing a hippo-head amulet. Rings, bracelets, and chains made of red agate; blue and green faience; stone inlays; and additional animal-shaped amulets were also recovered. Copper mirrors, one with a lotus flower handle and the other with images of the goddess Hathor, were found in two burials. In addition, the tomb yielded copper ingots, a small fertility figurine with black-painted hair and jewelry, and a square offering table decorated with images of a bull’s head, bread, and other offering items. ‘This discovery will also deepen our understanding of burial practices and rituals in Thebes during this era,’ said Mohamed Ismail Khaled of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.” (Archaeology)
“Latina/o/x support for Biden in 2020 was 8 percentage points lower than support for Clinton in 2016, the largest drop of any racial/ethnic group.Footnote1 Given the increasing competitiveness of presidential elections, these shifts led pundits and academics to speculate about the causes and consequences of Latinos drifting from the Democratic Party. Though these electoral shifts re-ignited interest in Latino politics, the specter of GOP gains among Latinos has always been present (de la Garza and Cortina Reference de la Garza and Cortina2007). While many Latinos identify as conservative and vote Republican, a majority of Latinos identify as Democrats. To explain this, existing theory emphasizes a threat-mobilization process, where increasing polarization and extremism on the issue of immigration, owing to growing restrictionism among Republicans, has pushed Latinos toward the Democratic Party (Barreto and Collingwood Reference Barreto and Collingwood2015; Bowler, Nicholson, and Segura Reference Bowler, Nicholson and Segura2006; Gutierrez et al. Reference Gutierrez, Ocampo, Barreto and Segura2019). This process is consistent with social identity research, which posits that threat can activate anger and mobilize groups (Mackie, Devos, and Smith Reference Mackie, Devos and Smith2000). Given this, Trump support among Latinos ought to have reached a nadir after 4 years of immigration restrictionism. Yet, Trump made gains in majority Latino areas across the nation. (Footnote2) Are these rightward shifts durable? On the one hand, our evidence shows working-class and ideologically conservative Latinos supported Trump more in 2020, mirroring mass-level increases in educational and ideological polarization (Gethin, Martínez-Toledano, and Piketty Reference Gethin, Martínez-Toledano and Piketty2022). This points to lasting shifts in partisan loyalties. On the other hand, while the Latino vote continues to be majority Democratic, historical voting patterns reveal significant ebbs and flows in Republican support.Footnote3 Therefore, 2020 could be a ‘reversion to the mean,’ with 2016 serving as a high watermark for Democrats.” (Bernard L. Fraga, Yamil Perez, Emily A. West/American Political Science Review)
“There’s even a name for what investors have been doing since Donald Trump’s election victory on Tuesday: the Trump Trade. But most of the surge in the major indices took place at the opening bell on Wednesday; since then, gains have been modest. You have to dig into the numbers to see who really benefits from a Trump election. With an expected corporate tax cut that goes even deeper than the current 21 percent, everyone will be a winner at some level. There will be some relative losers too: clean-energy companies, for example, and maybe the auto industry if loosened mandates on electric vehicles domestically make them globally uncompetitive. Some industries come to mind that are poised to be above the curve. The oil and gas industry is going to get a boost from the next administration using some provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act to hand out more leases for public lands, and whatever else they want. Extricating corporate America from the shackles of Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter is going to lead to a pent-up merger boom, and the industries most likely to take advantage are entertainment companies and banks. Big Tech probably feels like they can return to the ‘catch and kill’ days of slaughtering nascent competition as well. Matt Stoller breaks some of this down here. But if you just look at this chart of the top stock gainers of the week, while throwing out the small-cap anomalies, some patterns emerge.” (David Dayen/TAP)