Dear Commons Community,

Despite devastating outbreaks among unvaccinated people, Fox News has been encouraging its viewers not to take the COVID vaccines.  Repeated refrains on Fox prime-time shows hosted by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham send a message that is at odds with the recommendations of health experts, even as the  virus’s Delta variant and other mutations fuel outbreaks in areas where vaccination rates are below the national average.  As reported by The New York Times.

“Mr. Carlson, Ms. Ingraham and guests on their programs have said on the air that the vaccines could be dangerous; that people are justified in refusing them; and that public authorities have overstepped in their attempts to deliver them.

Mr. Carlson and Ms. Ingraham last week criticized a plan by the Biden administration to increase vaccinations by having health care workers and volunteers go door to door to try to persuade the reluctant to get shots.

“Going door-to-door?” Ms. Ingraham said. “This is creepy stuff.”

Mr. Carlson, the highest-rated Fox News host, with an average of 2.9 million viewers, said the Biden plan was an attempt to “force people to take medicine they don’t want or need.” He called the initiative “the greatest scandal in my lifetime, by far.”

Mr. Carlson’s guest on that episode, the veteran Fox News political analyst Brit Hume, pushed back slightly, saying, “What they’re trying to do is make it as easy as possible for people to get the vaccine and, for people who are hesitant, to perhaps encourage them that they have nothing to fear.” Mr. Hume was quick to add that “vaccines do have side effects” and said those who are hesitant “should be respected.”

Opposition to vaccines was once relegated to the fringes of American politics, and the rhetoric on Fox News has coincided with efforts by right-wing extremists to bash vaccination efforts.

Served up to an audience that is more likely than the general population to be wary of Covid vaccines, the remarks by Mr. Carlson and Ms. Ingraham echoed a now-common conservative talking point — that the government-led effort to raise vaccination rates amounted to a violation of civil liberties and a waste of taxpayer dollars.

The comments by the Fox News hosts and their guests may have also helped cement vaccine skepticism in the conservative mainstream, even as the Biden administration’s campaign to inoculate the public is running into resistance in many parts of the country.

Public health experts have said that a strong vaccination effort is critical for the United States to outrun the virus, which has killed more than four million people worldwide and continues to mutate.

The amplification of vaccine skepticism through conservative media channels could harden the reluctance of those who might otherwise have been persuaded to get a shot, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“If you have constant exposure to an outlet that is raising vaccination hesitancy, raising questions about vaccinations, that is something to anchor you in your position that says, ‘I’m not going to take the vaccine,’” Ms. Jamieson said.

A Fox News spokeswoman provided past statements by Mr. Carlson voicing his general support for vaccines. “I’ve had a million vaccines in my life, as we all have,” the host said on an April show. “I think vaccines are great.” The spokeswoman also noted that Ms. Ingraham had spoken in favor of adults choosing to receive vaccines if they wanted them.

White House officials said on Thursday that virtually all new coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths nationwide involved unvaccinated people. The five states with the worst outbreaks as of Wednesday had below-average vaccination rates; four of them voted for President Donald J. Trump in the 2020 election.

Vaccine resistance was greater among Republicans than Democrats, according to an April study by the Public Religion Research Institute. Among Republicans who watch Fox News, 45 percent said they were hesitant or unwilling to get a Covid-19 shot, compared with 68 percent of viewers who watch the niche right-wing news channels Newsmax or One America News Network.”

Fox News is a disgrace and does harm to its viewers!

Tony

A technician working with a robot in  Carrara, Italy

Dear Commons Community,

For centuries, the massive marble quarries above the Tuscan town of Carrara have provided the raw material for the polished masterpieces of Italian sculptors like Michelangelo, Canova, Bernini and, most recently, ABB2.

Carving with pinpoint precision, and at least some of the artistic flair of its more celebrated (and human) predecessors, ABB2, a 13-foot, zinc-alloy robotic arm, extended its spinning wrist and diamond-coated finger toward a gleaming piece of white marble.

Using the same marble found in Renaissance masterpieces, a team of robots is now accepting commissions. Their owners say tech is essential to Italy’s artistic future. The New York Times has an article this morning describing the transformation of the art of sculpting in this historic place.  Here is an excerpt.

“Slowly and steadily, ABB2 milled the slab of stone, leaving the contours of soft cabbage leaves for a sculpture designed and commissioned by a renowned American artist.

ABB2 is hardly a lone robotic genius, toiling away in anthropomorphic solitude. Just a few meters away, in a facility humming with robots, Quantek2 was rubbing away on another marble block, executing a statue envisioned by a British artist who had contracted out the manual labor to a robotic hand.

Since at least the Renaissance, the creative output of Italy’s artistic workshops has been among the country’s best-known and most valued exports. The founders and employees of this robotics lab believe that embracing advanced technology is the only way to ensure the country stays at the artistic forefront.

“We don’t need another Michelangelo,” said Michele Basaldella, 38, a technician who calls himself the robots’ brain. “We already had one.”

One thing that hasn’t changed in hundreds of years is artists’ sensitivity about who gets credit for their work. In Florentine workshops, many artisans worked in obscurity, with a sculpture or painting created by many getting just one master’s signature.

Michele Monfroni, a sculptor, in his studio outside Carrara. “If Michelangelo saw the robots, he would tear out his hair,” he said.Credit…Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times

Now, it is Carrara’s robots who work anonymously. Many of the artists who employ them demand that their identities be kept secret.

“Artists want to perpetuate this idea that they are still chiseling with a hammer,” said Giacomo Massari, one of the founders of Robotor, the company that owns the sculpting robots. “It makes me laugh.”

Standing amid the quarry dust, and wearing sunglasses to block the glare bouncing off the tons of marble transported down from the nearby Apennine Mountains, Mr. Massari, 37, argued that abandoning traditional handmade techniques was the only way to allow Italian marble sculpture to survive and thrive.

Carrara’s prosperity has long depended on the appeal of its marble to artists.

During the town’s Renaissance boom years, Michelangelo roamed the surrounding quarries for weeks to find the perfect piece of marble for his Pietà masterpiece.

In the 18th century, Carrara’s marble was transformed into scores of neo-Classical statues, and dozens of ateliers opened up here.

But among Modern and contemporary artists, Carrara’s marble fell out of favor, the translucent, gray-veined stone becoming more the stuff of bathroom floors, kitchen counters and funerary monuments.

Mr. Massari said that many artists had dismissed marble as a medium because of the months or even years it took to complete a single statue by hand.

And fewer young people in Carrara were up for the crushing work of chiseling stone, not to mention the dust-eating and all the other health risks that came with it. Canova is said to have deformed his sternum by bending his chest on a hammer for hours.

At a warehouse down the mountain, where technicians were testing a gigantic new robot, Mr. Massari pointed at a reproduction of “Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss,” a masterpiece of neo-Classical sculpture. “Canova took five years to make this,” he said, “we took 270 hours.”

Mr. Massari and his partner initially bought their robots from local technology companies. But as clients — including, among those who can be named, global stars like Jeff Koons, Zaha Hadid and Vanessa Beecroft — gave them what Mr. Massari called “increasingly crazy” commissions, they started producing their own machines with homemade software and German parts.

Mr. Basaldella, the technician, said many of his former art school classmates were excellent sculptors but did not stand out, because manual dexterity is not new or in demand. But robots can achieve groundbreaking results if they are built “with an artistic sensitivity,” he said, sitting in a control room where he inspected a 3-D marble block scanned into his computer.

“I think our robots are a work of art,” he said.

He has even grown fond of some of his collaborators. He is doing everything he can to save one of the lab’s first, “very tired” models from the scrapyard.

“OK, it doesn’t talk, it does not have a soul,” he said, “but you get attached.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dear Commons Community,

Rachel Cernasky has a guest editorial in today’s New York Times raising an important issue for researchers and others who depend upon the scientific method and  “objective” means for  collecting data while being indifferent to the need for “Indigenous morals, values, and knowledge.”   Using the Maori of New Zealand as an example, Cernasky comments:

“Embracing Indigenous knowledge, as New Zealand is trying to do, can improve how federal governments manage ecosystems and natural resources. It can also deepen Western scientists’ understanding of their own research, potentially, by providing alternative perspectives and approaches to understanding their field of work. This is ever more urgent, particularly as the climate crisis unfolds. “It is Indigenous resilience and worldview that every government, country and community can learn from, so that we manage our lands, waters and resources not just across budget years, but across generations,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico and America’s first Native American cabinet secretary, said in remarks to the United Nations.

Indigenous scholars warn, though, that while traditional knowledge can be used to benefit the world, it can also be mishandled or exploited. Dominique David Chavez, a descendant of the Arawak Taíno in the Caribbean, and a research fellow at the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona and the National Science Foundation, says that, as Western scientists, “we are trained to go into communities, get that knowledge and go back to our institutions and disseminate it in academic journals.” That can be disruptive to traditional knowledge sharing, from one generation to another, she says, which should be the priority — ensuring that Indigenous knowledge systems are preserved in and supportive of the communities that developed them. In Puerto Rico, known by its Indigenous people as Borikén, Ms. Chavez is studying ways to restore the connections and traditional knowledge transmission patterns between elders and youth.

Bridging Indigenous and Western science also means respecting the ecosystem of values in which the knowledge systems are embedded….”

The questions raised by Cernasky are also appropriate considerations for those studying  in cities, neighborhoods and areas throughout the world where there are local “Indigenous” populations with their own morals, values, and knowledge. The entire essay is below and should be read by all researchers.

Tony

——————————————————————–

The New York Times

In Indigenous Knowledge, Innovative Solutions

By Rachel Cernansky

July 10, 2021

Ms. Cernansky is a freelance journalist and the sustainability editor at Vogue Business. She writes frequently about the environment and social justice issues.

Nearly two decades ago, when the New Zealand highway authority was planning the Waikato Expressway, people from the Māori tribe Ngāti Naho objected. The highway would encroach on an area that, in Māori tradition, was governed by a water-dwelling creature, a taniwha.

The authorities took those concerns into account and rerouted the road to circumvent the area in question. As a result, a year later, when the area was hit by a major flood, the road was unharmed.

“I’m still waiting for the headline, ‘Mythical Creature Saves the Taxpayer Millions,’” said Dan Hikuroa, a senior lecturer in Māori studies at the University of Auckland and member of the Ngāti Maniapoto tribe. He has often wondered if, once the flood hit, the technical team later said, “Why didn’t you just say it’s a flood risk area?”

Like many Indigenous peoples around the world, the Māori have developed their understanding of their environment through close observation of the landscape and its behaviors over the course of many generations. Now the New Zealand Environmental Protection Agency regularly looks for ways to integrate traditional Māori knowledge, or mātauranga, into its decision-making. Mr. Hikuroa has been appointed the culture commissioner for UNESCO New Zealand, a role he said is centered on integrating Māori knowledge into UNESCO’s work.

Western-trained researchers and governments are increasingly recognizing the wealth of knowledge that Indigenous communities have amassed to coexist with and protect their environments over hundreds or even thousands of years. Peer-reviewed scientific journals have published studies demonstrating that around the world, Indigenous-managed lands have far more biodiversity intact than other lands, even those set aside for conservation.

Embracing Indigenous knowledge, as New Zealand is trying to do, can improve how federal governments manage ecosystems and natural resources. It can also deepen Western scientists’ understanding of their own research, potentially, by providing alternative perspectives and approaches to understanding their field of work. This is ever more urgent, particularly as the climate crisis unfolds. “It is Indigenous resilience and worldview that every government, country and community can learn from, so that we manage our lands, waters and resources not just across budget years, but across generations,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico and America’s first Native American cabinet secretary, said in remarks to the United Nations.

Indigenous scholars warn, though, that while traditional knowledge can be used to benefit the world, it can also be mishandled or exploited. Dominique David Chavez, a descendant of the Arawak Taíno in the Caribbean, and a research fellow at the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona and the National Science Foundation, says that, as Western scientists, “we are trained to go into communities, get that knowledge and go back to our institutions and disseminate it in academic journals.” That can be disruptive to traditional knowledge sharing, from one generation to another, she says, which should be the priority — ensuring that Indigenous knowledge systems are preserved in and supportive of the communities that developed them. In Puerto Rico, known by its Indigenous people as Borikén, Ms. Chavez is studying ways to restore the connections and traditional knowledge transmission patterns between elders and youth.

Bridging Indigenous and Western science also means respecting the ecosystem of values in which the knowledge systems are embedded. For instance, the practice of planting a diversity of crops and building healthy soil for water retention — today known as “regenerative agriculture” — has existed in Indigenous communities around the world throughout history. Yet the growing push to adopt regenerative agriculture practices elsewhere is often selective, using industrial pesticides, for example, or leaving out the well-being of people who farm the land.

“In Indigenous sciences, it’s not possible to separate the knowledge from the ethics of the responsibility for that knowledge — whereas in Western science, we do that all the time,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York in Syracuse and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The scientific method is designed to be indifferent to morals or values, she adds. “Indigenous knowledge puts them back in.”

Ideally, the shared use of Indigenous knowledge can help mend broken relationships between Indigenous and Western communities.

In upstate New York, Ms. Kimmerer points to sweetgrass, a native plant used for traditional basketry. She was approached by a tribe concerned about the decline of the plant and looking for a solution.

Government regulations had already restricted its harvest. “One thing people often think about is, is it being overharvested?” Ms. Kimmerer said. She helped to conduct studies that ultimately showed that harvesting sweetgrass, following Indigenous protocols, is the very thing that will help it to thrive. “If you just leave it alone, it starts to decline.”

For her, that speaks to a core flaw in Western approaches to land management: the belief that human interaction is necessarily harmful to ecosystems. “That’s one of the reasons Native people were systematically removed from what are today’s national parks, because of this idea that people and nature can’t coexist in a good way.” But Indigenous knowledge, Ms. Kimmerer said, is really all about, ‘Oh yes we can, and we cultivate practices for how that is possible,’” she said.

While combating wildfires last year, Australian authorities turned to Aboriginal practices. While researchers have connected the severity of the fires to climate change, Ms. Kimmerer added that how Australia’s land has been managed in the modern era may have also played a role. Aboriginal people had “been managing that land in a fire landscape for millenniums, ” she said. “The fact that Indigenous science has been ignored is a contributing factor to the fires there.”

As the world increasingly recognizes the accomplishments of many Indigenous communities that successfully coexist with ecosystems, there is much for Western society to learn.

“We have this notion that Western science is the pathway to truth. We don’t really even entertain the possibility that it could come from somewhere else,” said Ms. Kimmerer. “Resource managers, land managers need to understand that there are multiple ways of knowing.”

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Ross King’s new book, The Bookseller of Florence:  The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance. Ross is a best-selling and award-winning author of books on major Renaissance figures including Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci.,  In The Bookseller…, he examines the life of Vespaisiano da Bisticci who was “the king of all booksellers” at a time when books were made by hand.  Vespaisiano skill was to assemble talented people to uncover the knowledge and the source material from classical works that were a thousand years old and in many cases “lost’ to the literate world.  He would then manage the tedious and meticulous translation and transcribing of these works into beautiful manuscripts.  These projects minimally took months and in many cases years to complete.  His customers were among the most powerful individuals in Europe including kings, popes, and the Medici family.  King also provides interesting details of how print technology evolved from the work of hand scribes to the printing press. Below is a review that appeared in the  New York Times Book Review.

I highly recommend The Bookseller… to book lovers and to anyone interested in this period of Western history!

Tony

———————————————————————–

The New York Times Book Review

By Simon Schama

April 13, 2021

THE BOOKSELLER OF FLORENCE
The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance
By Ross King

Where are you off to, once the Great Confinement relaxes its bleak grip? A socially distanced movie house? A favorite pizza joint? Call me an elitist, but I’ll be heading to my local indie bookstore. Amazon has been delivering a steady supply of books to unchain our imaginative lockdown, but they have arrived in the same packaging that could just as well bring replacement light bulbs or moth traps. What’s missing is the ungloved, unhurried browse, the rifling through the stacks, the chat at the checkout desk. So if you want to celebrate the place that bookmaking and bookselling still have in our lives, notwithstanding all those hours captive to the digital glimmer, you could do a lot worse than immerse yourself in Ross King’s rich history of Vespasiano da Bisticci, “the king of the world’s booksellers,” in 15th-century Florence.

Books about books — their publishing, selling and collecting — are a specialized genre, but over the years they have included some brilliantly illuminating classics. Robert Darnton’s “The Business of the Enlightenment,” about the buccaneering publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke and the marketing of the Encyclopédie Méthodique, transformed our understanding of how Enlightenment ideas found readers and partisans. Alberto Manguel’s “A History of Reading” and “The Library at Night” are poetic meditations on the needful habit. Edward Wilson-Lee’s recent “The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books” is a plunge into the obsessive quest of Christopher Columbus’s son Hernando to canvass the entire world, not via the thankless ordeals of navigation but rather through a universal library of more than 15,000 works about absolutely everything, everywhere.

King is himself a compulsive bibliomane. His page-turning novel “Ex-Libris” had its bookseller hero traipsing around 17th-century Prague in search of replacements for a library destroyed in the English Civil War. But he is best known for a prolific output of popular and well-researched nonfiction books, each turning on heroic moments in the history of art: the raising of Brunelleschi’s dome for Florence’s cathedral; Michelangelo’s battle to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Vespasiano is an altogether more obscure quarry. Starting from modest beginnings as the son of a worker in the wool trade, he was forced to leave school at 11, owing to his father’s death and family impoverishment. But an apprenticeship with a bookbinding house launched a career that wound up with him as the go-to man for the libraries of humanist popes and princes, servicing the truism that the exercise of power was conditional on the absorption of knowledge. Five million manuscript books were produced in 15th-century Europe, and Vespasiano was at the hub of that spinning wheel of learning, piety and pleasure.

The working assumptions of King’s book are traditional, but none the worse for that. The hunting down and editing of all-but-lost texts from classical antiquity, and the circulation of the results as bound codices in editions of hundreds, allowed the reawakened ancients — Plato, Cicero and Livy, for example — to become, paradoxically, the enablers of humanist modernity. The most powerful restatement of this history is Stephen Greenblatt’s brilliant “The Swerve,” which recounts how Poggio Bracciolini, a dogged manuscript hunter and prolific author in his own right (including of an anthology of jokes), unearthed in a German monastery a manuscript copy of “De Rerum Natura” (“On the Nature of Things”), by the epicurean writer Lucretius, with its startlingly modern assertions of gone-missing divinity: a world constructed from atoms, and earthly happiness as the essential point of life.

King retreads some of that story and his major characters are largely a roundup of the usual suspects: Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici; Marsilio Ficino, champion of a rediscovered Plato against his Christian prosecutors; and the one-eyed condottiere Federico da Montefeltro of Urbino, a merciless slaughterer of men while being a sophisticated patron of the likes of Piero della Francesca and the young Raphael.

Though Vespasiano himself was the author of a collection of biographies of “illustrious men,” the real pleasure of King’s book is its detailed evocation of the physical grind of bookmaking. A refined work of philosophy, copied from the ancients, would begin with a bookmaker’s visit to the butcher for the best possible hide for parchment: “After a week or two the hides would be fished from the [fermenting] vat, bathed in limewater and then attached with pegs to wooden frames and stretched tight as the remaining hair and flesh was scraped away with a crescent-shaped knife. Still taut on the frame, they would be rubbed with chalk or bone dust and scrubbed with a pumice stone, or perhaps the bone of a cuttlefish.” The true heroes of this book are less the mouthy showboaters of humanism than the hard grafters like Ser Antonio, one of Vespasiano’s master scribes, who in a single year turned out two manuscript copies of Leonardo Bruni’s 600-page “History of Florence.”

Into Vespasiano’s seductively tactile world of vellum and parchment — a world so fastidious that a page from the hairy side of the skin could face only a like hairy page, and a flesh-side page the same — crashed the clatter of movable type. But King rightly resists any simplified chronology of the transition inaugurated by the arrival of print from the German north that prompted scribes to lay down their quills. For much of the 15th century, the two forms of bookmaking lived alongside each other, much as electronic and paper books do in our own time. In its early years print was a business gamble; many more copies were made than necessarily found buyers. Different city-states opted for different media. Venice was hot for the presses while for many years — astoundingly — Florence had no printers at all, a rejection King attributes in part to their reputation for speed over exactness. Woe betide the thinking world should print find its way into the hands of the wrong people. Lorenzo de’ Medici’s librarian Angelo Poliziano thought that print ushered in “the most stupid ideas,” which “can, in a moment, be transferred into a thousand volumes and spread abroad.” Lorenzo himself was so devoted to the older form that he actually reversed expectations by having printed books copied out in manuscript.

If the quattrocento was the sunset of manuscript publishing, it was, then, gloriously prolonged. Ultimately, though, a whole new market for writing opened up that was a lot less exalted than philosophical contests pitting Aristotelians against Platonists. The production of satire, fiction, plays and ballads as well as religious and political polemics would ensure the victory of print. In a wonderful passage King describes an entrepreneurially minded friar, Fra Domenico da Pistoia, who established a commercially successful printing press at the convent of San Jacopo di Ripoli in the western outskirts of Florence, where nuns, many of whom were already scribes, were retrained as type compositors. It was one thing, though, to produce the “Legends of St. Catherine of Siena,” quite another to be let loose on Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” None of the Ripoli press nuns, not even the speediest of the compositors, could be allowed to set eyes on the story in which brides of Christ merrily fornicate with the convent gardener.

“The Bookseller of Florence” doesn’t pretend to wade into debates in the sociology of culture; if you’re looking for McLuhanite considerations on whether form conditions content you won’t find it in Ross King’s pages, although I was struck by the fact that print in its early history strove to emulate manuscript in both the style of its characters and the basic shape of a codex of bound pages. What you will find in abundance here is a historical celebration of the Greek humanist Cardinal Bessarion’s belief that books “live, they converse and speak with us, they teach us, educate us, console us.” Painfully deprived as we have been of the immediate joys of friendly chatter and animated argument, have we ever valued the company of books more dearly?

Dear Commons Community,

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is jumping into the weather forecasting game with a new channel, Fox Weather, to debut later this year, The New York Times reported.

And people have concerns, given the right-wing spin of Murdoch’s other Fox outlets — in particular Fox News ― whose personalities have often denied the very existence of the climate crisis itself.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said earlier this week (see video above)  he was “hard-pressed to think of someone worse” than Murdoch to run a weather channel, warning he “will try to do for the world’s climate what he has done for American democracy; deny it, undermine it, lead it to the brink of destruction.”

Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri penned a spoof programming list for the new channel, featuring shows such as “Worst Weather Moments of the Obama Administration” and “Static Shots of Trump Golf Courses Where the Weather Is Very Nice.”

It is likely that Murdoch’s  Fox News disinformation company will do everything possible to sully weather reporting.

Tony 

Zaila Avant-garde

Dear Commons Community,

Zaila Avant-garde is the new national spelling bee champion.  The 14-year-old from New Orleans was named the winner of the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee yesterday, spelling words such as “querimonious,” “ancistroid,” “solidungulate.” It was “Murraya,” a genus of flowering citrus plants in Asia, that won Avant-garde the competition after runner-up Chaitra Thummala misspelled “neroli oil” in the 17th round.

Avant-garde becomes the first African-American winner in the 93-year history of the storied competition, and just the second Black champion overall.  Jody-Anne Maxwell of Jamaica won the event in 1998, still the only winner from outside the United States.

It was a historic, impressive win for the eighth-grader, and yet, spelling hasn’t been the focus of her life. 

As the Associated Press documented heading into the event, Avant-garde didn’t start spelling competitively until she was 12 years old. Instead, the focus has been on basketball.

So far, that basketball career has been going pretty well. She already has three Guinness World Records, including for most bounce juggles in one minute. 

Avant-garde has already parlayed that part of her athletic career into a featured spot in a commercial with Stephen Curry.

Before the confetti dropped for Avant-garde, the spelling bee saw one of its more controversial moments when finalist Roy Seligman was asked to spell “ambystoma.”

Seligman appeared to spell the word correctly, but then the competition’s stewards decided to take a look at the tape and see if he had used “i” instead of “y” for the fourth letter of the word. Replay review determined Seligman had, leading to this surreal moment, The situation was awkward enough that the Spelling Bee addressed it on Twitter, praising Seligman, the first finalist ever from the Bahamas.

Congratulations Ms. Avant-garde!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman analyzes the current semiconductor chip shortage that is affecting the sales of durable goods including cars and appliances squarely on Donald Trump and his  trade policies.  Here is an excerpt.

“When Trump took us into a trade war with China, there was clearly a lot he and his advisers failed to understand about modern world trade. Among other things, they didn’t seem to grasp that modern trade consists not of simple exchanges of goods — they sell us cars, we sell them aircraft — but of complex supply chains, in which the production of a given item often involves activities spread across the globe.

Given this reality, the structure of the Trump tariffs was, well, stupid: They focused mainly on intermediate inputs like semiconductors and capital equipment, which American companies need to compete in the world market. As a result, multiple studies have found, the tariffs actually reduced U.S. manufacturing employment.”

Trump’s gross incompetence just keeps giving and giving.

Krugman’s entire column is below.

Tony

—————————————————————————-

The New York Times

The Trumpian Roots of the Chip Crisis

July 8, 2021

By Paul Krugman

What’s the current state of the U.S. economy? A quick summary might be “booming with bottlenecks.”

And some of those bottlenecks reflect the mess created by Donald Trump’s trade policy.

Where we are now: Employment is growing at a rate we haven’t seen since 1984. So, probably, is gross domestic product, although we don’t yet have an official estimate for the second quarter. We are, however, suffering from shortages of many items, which are crimping production in some areas and leading to sharp price increases in others.

Some of these shortages are getting resolved. For example, two months ago, lumber cost almost four times as much as it did before the Covid-19 pandemic; since then, its price has fallen more than 50 percent. Other bottlenecks, however, seem more persistent. World trade is being held back by an inadequate supply of standard-size shipping containers — the ubiquitous boxes that carry almost everything, because they can be lifted directly from the decks of ships onto railroad cars and truck beds — and experts expect the shortage to last at least until late this year.

And there’s another bottleneck that may be an even bigger deal than the container shortage: a global shortage of semiconductor chips.

You see, these days almost everything contains silicon chips. So an insufficient supply of chips is a problem not just for producers of computers and smartphones; there are chips in just about all durable goods, including household appliances and, crucially, cars.

As a result, the chip shortage has had large and perhaps unexpected ramifications. Lack of chips is limiting production of automobiles, leading some people to buy used cars instead. And soaring used-car prices are a surprisingly big contributor to inflation — in fact, they accounted for about a third of May’s total rise in consumer prices.

So why are we facing a semiconductor shortage? Part of the answer is that the pandemic created a weird business cycle. People couldn’t go out to eat, so they remodeled their kitchens, and they couldn’t go to the gym, so they bought Pelotons. So demand for services is still depressed, while demand for goods has soared. And as I said, practically every physical good now has a chip in it.

But as Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics documents in an important new article, the Trump administration’s trade policy made the situation much worse.

When Trump took us into a trade war with China, there was clearly a lot he and his advisers failed to understand about modern world trade. Among other things, they didn’t seem to grasp that modern trade consists not of simple exchanges of goods — they sell us cars, we sell them aircraft — but of complex supply chains, in which the production of a given item often involves activities spread across the globe.

Given this reality, the structure of the Trump tariffs was, well, stupid: They focused mainly on intermediate inputs like semiconductors and capital equipment, which American companies need to compete in the world market. As a result, multiple studies have found, the tariffs actually reduced U.S. manufacturing employment.

But Trump’s trade policy wasn’t just poorly conceived. It was also erratic. Nobody knew which products might face new tariffs or whether the tariffs he had imposed would remain in place. And in high technology, especially semiconductors, Trump began imposing export restrictions, again in an erratic fashion (and with an apparent lack of awareness that, in many cases, China could simply turn to other suppliers).

As I wrote at the time, the problem was less that Trump was a self-proclaimed Tariff Man than that he was a capricious, unpredictable Tariff Man. And this messed up business planning, especially in semiconductors.

Consider foreign producers selling into the U.S. market. Such producers had little incentive to add capacity, because for all they knew, they might suddenly face high tariffs. But U.S. producers also had little incentive to invest, because for all they knew, the tariff protection they were relying on might go away overnight — or they might abruptly find themselves barred from selling into foreign markets.

Basically, international supply chains don’t work very well when the policies of one of the world’s key economies are governed by the whims of a leader who gets his ideas from cable TV.

Notice that I’m not being a free-trade purist here. There’s a good case for interventionist government policy to ensure reliable supply chains — and the Biden administration is moving in that direction. It’s important, however, that this policy be designed by people who understand the issues and that the rules of the game be clear enough to let businesses plan.

In other words, we need a policymaking style that’s the opposite of what we had in the previous administration.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think bad policy is the main cause of the bottlenecks we’re experiencing, nor do I believe that these bottlenecks will prevent a rapid economic recovery. But Trump’s tantrum-based trade policy did real damage, and we’re still paying the price.

Dear Commons Community,

The news for Rudy Giuliani keeps getting worse and worse. Yesterday it was reported that he was suspended from practicing law in Washington, D.C., just two weeks after he was barred from doing so in New York over his lies related to the 2020 election.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals said the order would remain in effect until disciplinary hearings in New York concluded.

Last month, a New York state appellate court said Giuliani would be temporarily barred from practicing law in the state for making “false and misleading statements” about the 2020 election, pending further proceedings into his behavior. 

“There is uncontroverted evidence that respondent communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at reelection in 2020,” the court wrote in its decision at the time.

Giuliani was one of Trump’s most vocal defenders following his defeat to Joe Biden in November, repeatedly claiming without evidence that the election had been stolen through widespread voter fraud. The court said such work only deepened partisan divisions across the country and eroded confidence in U.S. elections.

“The seriousness of respondent’s uncontroverted misconduct cannot be overstated,” the court said in its 33-page decision. “This country is being torn apart by continued attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election and of our current president, Joseph R. Biden.”

Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and the former head prosecutor for the federal Southern District of New York plans to go to court to fight the New York decision. According to USA Today, he has been licensed to practice law in New York since 1969 and in Washington, D.C., since 1976.

Another schemer whose reputation was destroyed by his association with Trump!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last fall, male undergraduate enrollment fell by nearly 7 percent, nearly three times as much as female enrollment, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. The decline was the steepest — and the gender gap the largest — among students of color attending community colleges. Black and Hispanic male enrollment at public two-year colleges plummeted by 19.2 and 16.6 percent, respectively, about 10 percentage points more than the drops in Black and Hispanic female enrollment. Drops in enrollment of Asian men were smaller, but still about eight times as great as declines in Asian women. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Men as a whole aren’t usually the group that comes to mind as needing a leg up. But for colleges, declining male enrollment means less revenue and less viewpoint diversity in the classroom. For the economy, it means fewer workers to fill an increasing number of jobs that require at least some college education, and a future in which the work force is split even more along gender lines.

In the late 1970s, men and women attended college in almost equal numbers. Today, women account for 57 percent of enrollment and an even greater share of degrees, especially at the level of master’s and above. The explanations for this growing gender imbalance vary from the academic to the social to the economic. Girls, on average, do better in primary and secondary school. Boys are less likely to seek help when they struggle. And they face more pressure to join the work force.

In an effort to turn things around, colleges are adding sports teams and majors in fields that tend to attract more men than women, such as criminal justice and information science. They are creating mentoring and advising programs for men, particularly those who are Black and Hispanic. And at least one is hiring a director of Black and males of color‘s success.

But programs and positions catering to men remain relatively rare, said Adrian H. Huerta, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California who studies programs for men of color. Those that do exist tend to be untested and underfunded — “a person who is dedicating 25 percent of their time and asked to produce miracles with no money,” he said.

James Shelley, who founded one of the nation’s first men’s resource centers at Lakeland Community College, in 1996 — “the prehistoric period,” he calls it — said many college leaders still view men as a privileged class.

“One thing I often hear is that men still have most of the power, they still make more on the dollar than women, so why create a special program for them?” he said. “It’s not an easy sell.”

Young women have outpaced young men in college enrollment since the late 1980s but the gap in favor of Black and Hispanic women goes back even further.

In 1972, when white women between the ages of 18 and 24 trailed their male counterparts by 10 percentage points in college enrollment, Black and Hispanic women were only 5 and 3 percentage points behind their male counterparts, respectively.

By 1980, Black and Hispanic women had caught up and surpassed their male peers. White women wouldn’t overtake men for another decade.

Thomas A. DiPrete, a professor of sociology at Columbia University and co-author of The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, attributes this disparity to a history of labor-market discrimination.

Up until the 1960s, many of the jobs that required a college degree were essentially closed to white women and people of color, in general. Women of all races still went to college to become nurses and teachers, but “Black men didn’t have the same incentives to get college degrees that white men had,” DiPrete said.

We are losing a generation of men to Covid. We need to be really creative about how we get them back in the pipeline.

This pattern persisted even as the labor market began to open up more opportunities for women, prompting more women of all races to enroll. In 2018, the female-male gap in enrollment among 18- to 24-year-olds stood at eight percentage points for Black and Hispanic students, andsix percentage points for white students. Over all, nearly three million fewer men than women enrolled in college that year.

Some of this difference may be due to the belief among some young men that college “isn’t worth it” — that they’re better off going into the work force and avoiding the debt.

“In a lot of communities of color, there’s this mind-set that the man should work, the man should provide,” said Michael Rodriguez, director of the Men’s Resource Center at Kingsborough Community College, in Brooklyn, which is part of the City University of New York. “They think, ‘if I sit around and go to school, I may not be looked at as a functioning provider in my home.’”

Though the decision to work after high school may make short-term economic sense, it deprives these men of thousands in lifetime earnings, and deprives colleges of the perspectives they would bring to the classroom — both as students and as future professors, Rodriguez said. “For colleges to really thrive, all voices need to be heard,” he said. “A gender gap creates unhealthy institutions.”

Until relatively recently, men who skipped college could count on a family-sustaining wage in a male-dominated, blue-collar field like manufacturing. But those types of jobs have become scarcer, while the earnings gap between men with high-school diplomas and college degrees has grown wider. Today, men with bachelor’s degrees make roughly $900,000 more in median lifetime earnings than high-school graduates who lack higher degrees, according to the Social Security Administration.

Though well-paying jobs are still available for men without a four-year degree — jobs in the skilled trades, and advanced manufacturing, for example — most require at least a certificate or associate degree.

“I don’t know if there has been a full coming to grips with the way the economy has changed,” said DiPrete. “We’re still close enough to this world that, in some senses, has gone past, a world where a man could support his family without a college degree, working in a factory.”

But labor-market factors alone can’t fully explain the growing gulf in college completion between men and women. Academic preparation and gender norms play a role, too.

The differences between boys and girls emerge as early as elementary school, where boys lag in literacy skills and are over-represented in special education. Boys are also more likely than girls to be punished for misbehaving — an experience that can sour them on school.

The disparities in discipline are the most pronounced among Black boys, who made up 15 percent of public-school students in the 2015-16 school year, but accounted for 31 percent of law-enforcement referrals and arrests.

Boys are also less likely than girls to seek or accept help for their academic and emotional struggles, having been socialized to be self-reliant. By the time they’re in middle school, some boys have disengaged from school entirely. Even if they manage to graduate from high school, these boys lack the skill — or the will — to succeed in college.

Meanwhile, parents and schools “are pointing fingers at one other,” trying to place the blame for the gender divide, Huerta said.

“Is it the institution’s fault, or the family’s fault?” he asked.”

It is likely both!

Tony