Tuesday, January 10, 2023

10: Hakeem



Election Deniers Are Also Economy Deniers The people who will be running the House of Representatives for the next two years — a group that does not, as far as anyone can tell, include Kevin McCarthy ........ Quite a few either subscribe to or are at least friendly to beliefs of the QAnon cult, which claims that the world is run by a vast conspiracy of pedophiles. ......... There wasn’t a recession in 2022. Indeed, the U.S. economy ended the year with continuing strong job growth and the unemployment rate all the way back down to what it was before Covid. ....... financial markets have basically declared the inflation threat over: They’re implicitly predicting roughly 2 percent inflation as far as the eye can see. ...... the federal government is, as an old line puts it, basically an insurance company with an army. ........ — federal dollars mainly go to retirement and health care programs on which scores of millions of Americans, including many Republicans, depend.

What Ukraine Teaches Us About Power modern wars don’t involve much hand-to-hand combat among guys with bulging muscles ........ strategic duels using long-range weapons, aided by a lot of technology. ......... “There were no decisive battles in World War II.” ........ Russia-Ukraine would turn into a war of attrition — and that Ukraine stood a good chance of winning such a war. ........ It’s true that on the Ukrainian side, Ukrainians are doing all the fighting and dying. But they haven’t had to rely on their own military-industrial base. ........ a form of soft power — Ukraine’s ability to portray itself as the defender of democracy against a brutal tyrant — the country has been getting lots of weapons from the West. ........ NATO’s military technology — notably the ability to make precision strikes on targets from incredible distances — appears to be even further ahead than most people realized ......... Russia began this war with a huge number of tanks and an immense amount of artillery. But many of the tanks were destroyed in the disastrous early attempt to seize Kyiv .......... productive capacity — ultimately, economic power — tends to be decisive in a war of attrition. And Russia is just hugely outclassed by that measure .......... the arithmetic, incredibly, seems to favor Ukraine.

Lula Has No Easy Choices Brazil is a major producer of steel as well as agricultural products such as citrus and soybeans. ......... Bolsonaro, although far right in his politics, governed as a free-spending populist. ....... There’s no second honeymoon for Lula. ......... Rising interest rates have increased the burden of debt. It isn’t just a problem for emerging markets, he wrote. “The over-indebtedness of the United States, Europe, Japan and China could create a much more severe debt crisis, both at sovereign and at corporate levels.” He predicted that 2023 will be “the year where we will start paying the cost of our inconsiderate addiction to debt.”

2023: the year when the cost of the global indebtedness will explode This year will be a tougher year for the global economy than 2022. For most of the world economy, this is going to be a tough year, tougher than the year we leave behind because the three big economies — US, EU, China — are all slowing down simultaneously. We expect one third of the world economy to be in recession Even countries that are not in recession, it would feel like recession for hundreds of millions of people. ......... inflation that spread around the world ......... Central banks, Governments and large corporations have a vested interest to hide the facts. Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank is blaming the war in Ukraine for the inflation. Having warned in these columns and others about the risks of explosion of the world debt for the past five years, I remain flabbergasted to see that the narrative remains centered on recession and inflation. The impact of high interest rates increases of spreads and high value of the US dollar will start being felt where the over indebtedness has been exploding. .......... The continued increase of the US debt will have a budgetary impact in the years to come through the increase of the net interest costs that is fairly dramatic. In four years, the share of net interests to the budget deficit will move from 25 to 44%. It is basically unsustainable ...

The death of the Republican religion of fiscal conservatism started with the war in Irak.

........... those countries who are closest to a possible failure cannot be rescued any longer. ........ The dramatic stagnation of the Japanese economy will undoubtedly make the cost increase of its gigantic sovereign debt unbearable. ......... While China’s sovereign debt to GDP remains under control, at 80%, the effective leverage of the Chinese public sector reached proportions that represent 200% of the Chinese GDP. It is the speed at which the sovereign debt increased from 30% in ten years that makes China increasingly overleveraged. ........ 2023 is the year where we will start paying the cost of our inconsiderate addiction to debt. ........ We all make mistakes, and we all pay a price. But it will be deeply inequal making the coming years a huge social challenge.



I had a 37K YouTube audience, and here’s what I earned and learned Last week, I released a goodbye video on my YouTube channel. ....... I started the channel in 2019. Since then, I had published videos regularly once a week ....... It took me nine months to reach 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watched hours (subscribers came faster than watched hours.) ........ Reaching these milestones is required to monetize a channel. ........ When I became eligible for YouTube Partner Program, I enabled it which allowed me to earn a percentage from ads shown in my videos. ........ In my first nine months of video publishing, I made $0. Over the next five months, my earnings ranged from $30 to $35 a month. ........... I kept releasing videos. Once a week, sometimes twice. They were 10–15 minutes long (it was all before Shorts) ....... In the next nine months, the channel grew rapidly (sort of) and by 2020 had 10K subscribers and a gross income of $900 (for 2019–2020). ....... On average, I would spend six hours making a video ........ my income from the channel wasn’t enough to cover the cost of a DSLR camera. ....... most of my viewers watched my videos on mobile devices. For that kind of video viewing, iPhone’s filming quality was fine ........ Whether I released one video a week or two, or uploaded Shorts or not (when those were introduced on the platform), it had no impact on the channel’s growth. ............. My videos have gone viral only twice. Once by accident (I recorded a spontaneous video about Canada, low quality, but Youtube picked it up and now it has over 283.4K views), another time by calculation (I made a video about the pros and cons of living in Canada after researching trends and demands, and YouTube algorithms "endorsed" it, so now the video has over 389.4K views.) ....... I switched to prioritizing content that could potentially gain more views — Canada, travel, and lifestyle. ........ Over 2021, the channel grew by another 15K, and now it has 37,000 subscribers and 2.5 million views (September 2022.) ........ when I sat down and soberly calculated the losses vs income, it became evident that I should stop dedicating myself to the channel. ......... Publishing a video usually took me about six hours, and sometimes more. In total, I produced 240 videos (excluding shorts). That is, in the most conservative calculations, the channel took 1440 of my productive hours. ....... The time spent on shorts, live streams, and replies to comments brings the figure to at least 2000 hours. All that effort and time to get hundreds of “thank you” (which is nice) and this amount of $ (which is sad): ........ Bloggers receive 45% of YouTube’s ad revenue, while Youtube takes 55%. ........ My advertising revenue from Youtube over the past three years has been $5K. ........ Youtube bloggers often say that their main income comes from paid integrations, brand partnerships, and product sales, not YouTube ads. And it’s true. ............ I enabled the Membership feature and had one $5 sponsor. Due to some reason, Youtube was taking 80% of the sponsor’s paid membership, and I was getting $1/month: ......... A simple math calculation revealed that an hour of my work was only worth $1.5. I let my work and time get devalued drastically. In terms of profitability, freelancing was 48x more lucrative for me. ......... You will need to release videos regularly if you don’t want to go into YT oblivion. .......... The more subscribers you have, the more hatred you get. I had a Russian-speaking audience, I hate to admit it, but they can be extremely spiteful. The profanity and animosity of their attacks are enough to break the spirit of any highly motivated individual. While English-speaking audiences are generally kinder, still be prepared for some harsh remarks.



This Year, Try Organizing Your Life Like a Monk The lives of monks and nuns have taught me, a non-Catholic mother who sleeps late whenever possible and binges Netflix, how to better live. Because of their example, I’ve adopted a rule of life. A rule of life is an overarching plan governing your daily practices, habits and routines. It is not a resolution, but rather a comprehensive way to take stock of how you spend your time so that you can be the person you want to be. ........... The most famous rule of life is the Rule of St. Benedict, written in the sixth century, which organizes the life of Benedictine monks, specifying everything from what they should wear to when they should pray. My copy of the Rule of St. Benedict clocks in at just under 100 pages. My personal rule of life, by contrast, is three pages long (and ever evolving). .......... His rule prohibits monks from having private ownership and wealth. ...... His rule recommends times of fasting. ........ in one of Jesus’ most famous teachings, in John 15, he says, “Abide in the vine and you will bear much fruit.” His disciples are like the branches, and God is like the vine. By living in God, we bear what he called fruit, which is this metaphor for what is later qualified in the New Testament as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. ..........

Western culture is fracturing at the seams with spikes in anxiety, depression and mental illness, loneliness and alienation, the breakdown of the family and systemic racism.

.......... every morning, I get up at such a time that I can spend an hour in prayer, followed by an hour of reading before I let myself look at my phone. ........ At a more family level, we practice Sabbath together. The whole 24-hour period, we put all of our phones away. We gather around the table with close friends. We celebrate a huge meal. We practice gratitude, rest. We sleep. We play. .......... The monastic tradition has preserved something down through the centuries that was originally for all Christians. .......... Communities have to form around something. In the American context, many communities attempt to form around preferences and pleasure. That’s not bad, but that tends not to create a deep, vulnerable level of relationship. In most American contexts, the moment that the relationship is no longer pleasing, we slip away. ......... But ancient Christian communities were really trying to go the distance with each other. Part of the goal of a disciple of Jesus is to be formed into a person of love, and formation tends to happen in these interpersonal relationships over a long period of time. You have to stay in difficult relationships to actually be forged into that kind of person. ........... all people have a rule of life. You likely have a morning routine. You have a way that you spend your free time. You probably have a job. Hopefully you have a budget. ........ it is working, but it’s poorly designed. It’s giving them outcomes — emotional outcomes, relational outcomes, vocational outcomes — different than the ones they actually desire ............. the way that we’re all addicted to our phones and waste copious amounts of time scrolling on Instagram or reading click bait-y news to scare us .......... But that micro habit is forming us into a kind of person that is not likely the kind of person we want to be. ........ Start really, really, really small. Don’t start with massive steps. ........ If it’s “I’m going to work out an hour a day,” start with “I’m going to do 10 push-ups a day.” ........ Do it with other people. A rule of life — from a Christian perspective — is always done with other people. You can personalize a rule, but it’s an attempt to live with other people into a shared vision of human flourishing. Without that, it’s not really a rule of life. ..........

you can’t live by a rule of life and live at the hurried pace of a modern American person, most of whom are radically overbusy, distracted, overcommitted, underslept and exhausted all the time.

........ A rule of life will force you to face your mortality, your limitations, your emotional limitations, and it will force you to say no. The joy is that on the other side of it is a life where you are integrated. You are living at a pace that you can walk until you die and still be deeply joyful and year over year become more loving and kind and peaceful. But there is no way to do that without a willingness to live unlike how most people around you are living.



Pope Benedict Wasn’t Conservative. He Was Something Much More Surprising. Whereas John Paul’s sunny disposition and glad-handing stadium tours eventually won him the affection of nearly everyone not named Sinead O’Connor, Cardinal Ratzinger was seen by critics (and even some admirers) as a holdover from the period before the Second Vatican Council. His was an older, more aloof style of churchmanship that seemed ultraconservative, detached, forbidding, skeptical of emotion, indifferent to the experience of the laity and the lower clergy alike, much less to those of non-Catholics. His enemies called him “God’s Rottweiler.” .......... Benedict the theologian bears almost no resemblance to popular caricatures. ....... has more in common with that of Soren Kierkegaard or John Henry Newman or G.K. Chesterton — those idiosyncratic but somehow essential figures in the modern history of Western Christianity who, in translating fundamental questions about the nature of the universe into the language of their own era, spoke for all time. ............. one of the 100,000 or so Catholics in this country who attend the old Mass each week ......... In the past, church councils had issued long series of condemned propositions that the Catholic faithful must abjure under penalty of excommunication; the style of these announcements was technical and precise, leaving no room for ambiguity about what must be believed. By contrast the documents of Vatican II contain little — indeed, arguably no — dogmatic material, and in place of the precise terminology derived from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas they substitute phenomenological jargon typical of midcentury continental philosophy. ............ his claim that “the real heart of faith in resurrection does not consist at all in the idea of the restoration of bodies, to which we have reduced it in our thinking,” which seems to cast doubt on the idea that the resurrection of the dead at the end of time will be a literal, corporeal phenomenon. ......... For conservative Catholics of my generation, the existence of hell as a place of eternal torment is about as controversial as the existence of gravity. ............ the future pope describes hell as “real, total loneliness and dreadfulness,” a willed state beyond the reach of love, a definition he arrives at by way of Hermann Hesse. In “Eschatology,” he writes, “No quibbling helps here,” before admitting that hell “has a firm place in the teachings of Jesus.” Not exactly fire and brimstone. ........... For Father Ratzinger, writing in 1958, the church on the eve of the Second Vatican Council was a “church of pagans, who still call themselves Christians,” a church exhausted by empty formalism. ......... fundamental questions faced by our species — not only whether God exists but why matter does; the possibility of a coherent account of the good in ethics and politics; the role of reason in public life .......... “the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the religions because of the ways in which they are often practiced.” For Benedict the “struggling and questioning” of agnostics was an admirable posture, a radical openness that ought to motivate believers “to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible.” ........... a slim volume of talks given by Cardinal Ratzinger on the Book of Genesis in the 1980s. ........ a being who does not merely love but who is love itself.



At Columbia’s $600 Million Business School, Time to Rethink Capitalism On the developing Manhattanville campus, the architecture of Diller Scofidio + Renfro reinforces a social movement in business education to do good as well as make money. ........ Their design reflects the close fit of the architecture to person-to-person connection and intensified interaction — what the school’s leadership sees as essential to the sprawling aspirations it has for its graduates to do good as they make money. .......... The design of the complex just blocks north of Columbia’s main Morningside Heights campus coincided with business schools around the country coming to terms with a rising chorus of criticism that companies are too predatory, exploitative and monopolistic, and that business education had to change. ......... “it is hard to teach narrow, applied skills and also encourage students to wrestle with giant, ambiguous questions about ultimate values and hierarchies of power.” ........... the twisty stairways come in. They open onto informal lounges and numerous six-person study rooms at the landings, all walled in glass, that are popular even when the adjacent classrooms are empty. (All spaces are completely accessible to people with mobility impairments.) ........... “They are about problem-solving and being in the world.” ......... They also constantly encounter the city thanks to the stairs, which kaleidoscopically unveil views of the campus, a tangle of nearby viaducts, as well as brick tenements and public housing towers — in the process reminding people of the messy world beyond. .......... The centers run programs on managing nonprofits, addressing climate change, and improving employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated people. .......... an “urban layer,” the idea that all the new buildings would float above tall glass-clad street frontages that were largely committed to facilities open to the public. ......... Skeptics will be watching the pivot of Columbia and other top business schools, like the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, to more high-minded teaching methods. It may be all too easy to default to the comfort of traditional quantitative modeling and case-study what-ifs. After all, schools are also buffeted by those who continue to worship the ideology of unfettered markets, and loudly proclaim social and environmentally focused teachings to be excessively “woke.” ........... “How do I find personal and professional financial stability and not sell my soul?” ........ wonders if climate change and “authoritarianism 2.0,” are among challenges that businesses can no longer ignore

This Is Not Your Grandfather’s M.B.A. more than the generic American vocation to make money and live your best life now ....... tentative questions about the means and ends of capitalism itself. ........ Even before the pandemic, business schools were offering initiatives and program concentrations with names like “Conscientious Capitalism” and “Sustainable Business,” in line with investors’ growing interest in “environmental, social and governance” considerations, better known as E.S.G. ......... Are they a kind of divinity school for secular capitalists, where students discern their true vocation? Today’s business schools try to fulfill all these aims at once — but it is hard to teach narrow, applied skills and also encourage students to wrestle with giant, ambiguous questions about ultimate values and hierarchies of power. ......... The goal of the Tuck School of Business, founded in 1900 at Dartmouth College, was to educate “the man first and the businessman afterwards.” At the dedication of Harvard Business School’s new campus in 1927, one speaker declared “that the ministers of our business, like the ministers of our churches, should appreciate their responsibility.” He stressed the need for businessmen to have a wide-ranging education, to become “men who have not only a broad outlook in history, politics, and economics — but men who have also that moral and religious training which tends to develop character.” ........... this ideal of “the C.E.O. as enlightened corporate statesman” ......... schools are adept at defanging detractors, cordoning them off in their own professional journals and conferences and keeping them on payroll. ........ It’s liberal fairy dust. Others don’t see it that way. They think capitalism just needs to become quite a bit nicer, that we need to orient corporations toward more benign investment strategies and less toxic relations with workers. That would be good — I’m not against small steps — but that diagnosis doesn’t reflect the nature of the problem we have.” .......... The Ford report — and a similar one sponsored the same year by the Carnegie Corporation — warned against ignoring the humanities or allowing faculty members and students to specialize too narrowly. Yet the funding that followed pushed schools in the opposite direction, consistent with the 1960s vogue for number-crunching wonkishness. Business schools embraced the hyper-specialization that pervades the rest of academia, falling especially under the thrall of economics and other heavily quantitative disciplines. ......... Business schools now pump “out over half a million narrow specialists per year” into an economic culture that prizes quick returns and efficiency .......... He lamented the absence of the humanities, qualitative disciplines that “teach someone how to think in a complex adaptive system. We treat that system like something else — we silo-ize it, break it into chunks, put it back together and think it will be fine. The humanities are the only hope for thinking about things in holistic, non-quantifiable ways.” .......... At a time when society needs managers who can grapple with uncertainty and operate in a culture divided over basic questions of justice and human flourishing, most business schools still emphasize specialized skills and quantitative methods, the seductive simplicity of economic and social scientific models. They often reduce the weirdness of human organizations to the tidy pedagogy of the case method, in which students discuss 15- to 20-page accounts of how an individual or a corporation handled some task or crisis. ............

“The case method is theater”

......... The case method does not dominate every business school, but Harvard Business School, where the method originated, sold more than 15 million cases to other schools and organizations in 2020. Mr. Martin estimated that 30 percent of North American business education is “aided and abetted by an H.B.S. case.” ......... sees “environmental, social and governance” not as politically fashionable hand-waving, but a call to center the M.B.A. on big, hard questions.

Think Screens Stole Our Attention? Medieval Monks Were Distracted Too. In “The Wandering Mind,” the historian Jamie Kreiner shows that the struggle to focus is not just a digital-age blight but afflicted even those who spent their lives in seclusion and prayer. .......... the ruins of our attention have commanded a lot of attention. We can’t focus anymore. ....... Getting any “deep work” done requires formidable willpower or a broken modem. Reading has degenerated into skimming and scrolling. The only real way out is to adopt a meditation practice and cultivate a monkish existence. .......... the monks of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (around A.D. 300 to 900) struggled mightily with attention. Connecting one’s mind to God was no easy task. ......... For the monk seeking oneness with God, the body was an encumbrance. After all, Kreiner notes, “angels were pure consciousness.” As the sixth-century desert father Dorotheos said of his body, “It is killing me, I am killing it.” ......... Elites who converted to monasticism had to be reminded of the need to dress shabbily and forgo the cologne, but “unkemptness could become its own distraction,” Kreiner says, with a monk “feeling vain about his griminess.” Virtually the only point of agreement among the monks in Kreiner’s book was a profound suspicion (at least officially) of sex and sleep. ......... Monks were encouraged to read slowly and methodically, and they engaged with the text by writing notes in the margin. Kreiner says this marginalia helped them “to stay alert” — though she also concedes that sometimes what they scribbled down had nothing to do with the text at hand. An image from a copy of Priscian’s Latin grammar includes a note in Old Irish that reads lathaerit, or “massive hangover.” ........... Even prayer, which was supposed to be “the ideal state of attentiveness,” wasn’t enough to crowd out other thoughts. A monk might achieve the sublime stillness of revelation, but this was only temporary, and in the next moment the mind would revert to its old distractible ways. .......... Monks were determined not only to discipline the mind but also to work with it, accommodating some of its foibles and idiosyncrasies, because they saw concentration “as a matter of eternal life and death.”



The Mediterranean Diet Really Is That Good for You. Here’s Why. It has become the bedrock of virtuous eating. Experts answer common questions about how it leads to better health....... Those who lived in and around the Mediterranean — in countries like Italy, Greece and Croatia — had lower rates of cardiovascular disease than participants who lived elsewhere. Their diets, rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, lean proteins and healthy fats, seemed to have a protective effect. ......... It’s something that was developed over time, by millions of people, because it actually tastes good. And it just happens to be healthy.” ....... People who follow the Mediterranean diet tend to “eat foods their grandparents would recognize,” Dr. Heffron added: whole, unprocessed foods with few or no additives. ......... The diet prioritizes whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, herbs, spices and olive oil. Fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids, like salmon, sardines and tuna, are the preferred animal protein source. Other lean animal proteins, like chicken or turkey, are eaten to a lesser extent. And foods high in saturated fats, like red meat and butter, are eaten rarely. Eggs and dairy products like yogurt and cheese can also be part of the Mediterranean diet, but in moderation. ............ those who followed the Mediterranean diet most closely for up to 12 years had about a 25 percent reduced risk of developing cardiovascular disease. This was mainly because of changes in blood sugar, inflammation and body mass index ........ It’s important that people also pay attention to other tenets of good heart health, like getting regular exercise and adequate sleep and not smoking. ............. olive oil and nuts, which are heart-healthy yet high in calories and can lead to weight gain if consumed in large portions. .......... Good sources of iron include nuts, tofu, legumes and dark leafy green vegetables like spinach and broccoli. Foods rich in vitamin C, like citrus, bell peppers, strawberries and tomatoes, can also help your body absorb iron.

100 Notable Books of 2022

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Monday, January 09, 2023

9: Storm

The Unexpected Gift of Dead Plants temperatures dropping tens of degrees in a matter of minutes ...... It was 52 degrees here the day the front was due, but the birds were already making their cold-weather plans. The dominant bluebird down at our end of the neighborhood spent much of it sitting on top of the sunny nest box in our front yard. He wasn’t laying claim to the box for nesting season, which is still months away, but for shelter. ....... And in winter, as it turns out, the plants that didn’t survive the storm were overwhelmingly nonnatives, at least from what I could tell in my admittedly unscientific survey of Nashville vegetation — another sign that these plants did not evolve for this ecosystem. Popular landscaping evergreens like Japanese cedar, skip laurel (which comes from the Mediterranean region), English boxwood and Japanese euonymus are now some dead shade of brown, while the undeterred Eastern red cedars and Southern white pines and American hollies remain a glorious green. ........ I confess I wasn’t thinking about the plants in my yard as I watched snow and ice pour from the sky the night the Christmas-week storm arrived. I was thinking about the bluebirds. How many of them had crowded into that little nest box?



Temple Grandin: Society Is Failing Visual Thinkers, and That Hurts Us All When I was younger, I believed that everybody thought in photo-realistic pictures the same way I did, with images clicking through my mind a little bit like PowerPoint slides or TikTok videos. ....... For many, words, not pictures, shape thought. That’s probably how our culture got to be so talky: Teachers lecture, religious leaders preach, politicians make speeches and we watch “talking heads” on TV. We call most of these people neurotypical — they develop along predictable lines and communicate, for the most part, verbally. ........ Schools force students into a one-size-fits-all curriculum. The workplace relies too much on résumés and G.P.A.s to assess candidates’ worth. This must change not only because neurodivergent people, and all visual thinkers, deserve better but also because without a major shift in how we think about how we learn, American innovation will be stifled. ...... When I was 7 or 8, I spent hours tinkering and experimenting to figure out how to make parachutes, fashioned from old scarves, open more quickly each time I tossed them into the air. This required careful observation to determine how small design changes affected performance. My single-mindedness, verging on obsession, was probably because I was autistic. At the time I loved a book about famous inventors and their inventions. It impressed me that Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers were so single-minded in figuring out how to make a light bulb or an airplane. They spent lots of time obsessively perfecting their inventions. It is likely that some of the inventors in that book also were autistic. ........ When I look back at all the projects I designed for large companies, I estimate that 20 percent of the skilled welders and drafting technicians were either autistic, dyslexic or had A.D.H.D. I remember two people who had autism and held numerous patents for mechanical devices they invented and sold equipment to many companies. Our visual thinking skills were key to our success. ......

hyper-focus is a classic sign of neurodivergent thinking and it’s critical for innovation and invention.

.......... I often get asked what I would do to improve both elementary and high school. The first step would be to put more of an emphasis on hands-on classes such as art, music, sewing, woodworking, cooking, theater, auto mechanics and welding. I would have hated school if the hands-on classes had been removed, as so many have been today. These classes also expose students — especially neurodivergent students — to skills that could become a career. Exposure is key. Too many students are growing up who have never used a tool. They are completely removed from the world of the practical. ......... Despite my accomplishments, if I were a young person today, I would have difficulty graduating from high school because I could not pass algebra. It was too abstract, with no visual correlations. This is true for many of today’s students who get labeled as bad at math, students who might otherwise pass alternative math courses such as statistics that would also apply to real-life work situations. There is too much emphasis in school on testing and not enough on career outcomes. The fact that I failed the SAT in math prohibited me from getting into veterinary school, but today I am a university professor in animal sciences and I am invited to speak to groups of veterinarians to advise them on their work. The true measure of an education isn’t what grades a student gets today, but where they are 10 years later. ......... and the first thing I tell managers is that they need a neurodiverse work force. Complementary skills are the key to successful teams. We need the people who can build our trains and planes and internet, and the people who can make them run. Studies have shown that diverse teams will outperform homogeneous teams. If you’ve ever attended a meeting where nothing gets solved, it may be because there are too many people who think alike. ....... Today, Taiwan produces the majority of the world’s highest tech silicon chips. Much of the specialized mechanical equipment used for processing meat is made in Holland and Germany. When I visited the Steve Jobs Theater in California, pre-Covid, I discovered that the glass walls were created by an Italian company. The massive carbon fiber roof that looks like a spaceship was imported from Dubai. The reason this equipment is coming from outside the United States can be traced in part to differences in educational systems. In Italy and the Netherlands, for instance, a student at about age 14 decides whether to go the university route or the vocational route. The vocational route is not looked down on or regarded as a lesser form of intelligence. And that’s how it should be everywhere, because the skill sets of visual thinkers are essential to finding real-world solutions to society’s many problems.

Why Has America Fallen So Hard for Harry and Meghan? Whether out of Anglophilia, nostalgia, masochism, traditionalism or just a particular strain of fealty to the rich and famous, America’s quixotic devotion to the British monarchy remains strong. ....... Apparently, it’s better to be a celebrity in the United States than fifth in line for the throne in Britain. ........ Having initially decamped to Vancouver Island in a bid for privacy, they soon fled to Los Angeles in a bid for — what’s the opposite of privacy? As Harry says in the documentary, he’d “outgrown” his environment and “this was the most obvious place to come.” ........ The fact that the Sussexes ditched a country they characterize as anti-immigrant, overrun with racists and burdened by the legacy of colonialism makes Americans feel better about their own country, which also (whoops) might be described as anti-immigrant, overrun with racists and burdened by the legacy of colonialism. But Harry and Meghan see America as a haven. ........ In a run-up interview to promote her podcast last year, Meghan recalled a South African man who compared the joy at her royal wedding to the celebrations when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. But, according to the Sussexes’ narrative, they became too popular, threatening the monarchy. As Harry put it, they were “stealing the limelight” or “doing the job better than someone who was born to do this.” ........... Rather than staying mum, they insist on speaking up and speaking out — and speaking their own truth, as opposed to the more rigorous feat of speaking the truth. When they do speak, it’s in the manicured, massaged and meditative parlance of self-care and cause-driven commerce. Words like “conscious,” “consent” and “purpose” roll off their tongues in soothing uptalk. They’ve created a “safe harbor” for themselves. This is a “new path we were trying to forge.” Their work is about “creative activations” and “building community.” ........... Harry and Meghan have outdone Princess Diana’s collaborations with the press by taking full control. They are our first reality-TV royals. And in America, while it’s wrong for someone else to invade your privacy, it’s perfectly fine — even applauded — to exploit your own. ......... You can find them on Instagram, where they initially found each other and where they chose to announce their independence (as they would say, “stepping back rather than stepping down”). ....... Like many a TikToker or Substacker, Harry and Meghan relish taking charge of the narrative. They made their documentary, they say, because, as they put it, they’ve never been “asked” for their story and weren’t “allowed” to tell it. ....... Meghan “sacrificed everything that she ever knew, the freedom that she had, to join me in my world. And then, pretty soon after that, I ended up sacrificing everything I know to join her in her world.” .......... Despite the dents and holes in their well-honed and highly lucrative story, the Sussexes have delivered an especially American take on what the American Meghan calls a “modern fairy tale.” America loves a melodrama, an against-all-odds story, an us versus them. America loves an almost happily ever after and any gossip that keeps on giving. As is now abundantly clear, Harry and Meghan are giving their all to give America all of that.

Russia’s elite begins to ponder a Putinless future Once unthinkable, the president’s removal can at least be contemplated ........ “What is next? Is there life after Putin? How does he go and who replaces him?” Such are the questions that weigh heavily these days on the minds of the Russian elite, its bureaucrats and businessmen, as they observe the Ukrainian army advancing, talented people fleeing Russia and the West refusing to back down in the face of Vladimir Putin’s energy and nuclear blackmail. “There is a lot of swearing and angry talk in Moscow restaurants and kitchens,” one member of the elite says. “Everyone has realised that Putin has blundered and is losing.” ............ This does not mean that Mr Putin is about to bow out, be overthrown or fire a nuclear weapon. It does mean that those who run the country and own assets there are losing confidence in their president. .......... “Never before has Vladimir Putin been in such a situation in the 23 years of his rule,” says Kirill Rogov, a Russian political analyst. ..... “Now he is planning and executing operations that are visibly failing.” ....... The invasion of Ukraine on February 24th was a shock to the Russian establishment, which had persuaded itself that Mr Putin would not risk full-scale war. ......... the economy is starting to show the effects of sanctions and of the exodus of the most skilled and educated members of the workforce; consumer confidence is on the slide. ........ A ceremony on September 30th, in which, after a ranting speech against the West, Mr Putin annexed four provinces in Ukraine that he does not actually control, was so absurd that it probably undermined his aura of strength even within Russia. .......... A military defeat might well lead to the collapse of the regime, with all the associated risks for those who have supported it. Mr Putin’s bellicosity meanwhile “raises the question of whether the Russian elites are prepared to stick with Putin until the bitter end, particularly amid growing threats to use nuclear weapons” ............... The only way to stop the endless cycle of imperial nationalism, Mr Navalny argued, is for Russia to decentralise power and turn itself into a parliamentary republic. In what looked like an appeal to the Russian elite, Mr Navalny argued that parliamentary democracy is also a rational and desirable choice for many of the political factions around Mr Putin. “It gives them an opportunity to maintain influence and fight for power while ensuring that they are not destroyed by a more aggressive group.” ......... Russia’s dictator wants to turn Ukraine into a failed state. Instead, he is fast turning Russia into one.

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