Just for you. 

Reparations for black America: this is a careful, lucid, and seriously detailed proposal.  Not just for why, but also for how to make it happen.  Worth reading. And for the Brookings Institution to publish this?  Times they are a-changing, when policy wonks and revolutionaries get together.  A good sign, I think.

A good review—in the sense that it takes it seriously, and respects its ambitions, even where it dissents from its formulations--of Frank Wilderson’s new book Afropessimism.  

This is interesting to me. It identifies a distinction between policy and politics in a democratic electoral system, that I think is very correct, and astutely diagnoses part of the problem as a very emaciated theory of politics and political change, emerging out of Marxist systems’ utopian belief that political change will happen as a part of the necessary evolution towards a new socio-political situation for humanity.  (Think of “the withering away of the state“.)  So I say, someone provocatively, something like this may be true: liberalism may be better at politics that it is at policy, while more extreme forms of leftism (like Marxism but beyond that) may be more insightful about policy than they are capable of politics.

Robert Pippin on Hegel as a social critic of the current economic mess we are in. It’s an ok summary, though some people gush about it.

This is really thoughtful—Adam Tooze, a smart British commentator on politics, thinking about a leftist analysis of The Economist’s history over the past 150-plus years.

During the Cold War the Economist’s position was clear cut. But the escalating tensions with China are far more ambiguous in their implications. Thanks to the globalism of the 1990s and 2000s our economies are deeply entwined, and no government in Europe sought that connection with China more actively than the conservative administration of David Cameron, for which the Economist was a cheerleader. What happens when a serious superpower rivalry is superimposed on deep economic integration? The only comparable situation is that of the rise of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. But as dangerous as that situation turned out to be, it would be belittling to equate the resurgence of China with the modest European rearrangement brought about by Bismarck. Given the hardening of the position not just in Washington but Beijing, how will a liberal paper like the Economist respond? So far it has limited itself to calling for restraint on all sides.

Similarly, the Economist has no time for climate change denial. But that does not answer the question of how a liberalism whose moment of birth was the optimistic mid 19th century will navigate the environmental limits to growth. The answers so far are markets and technology— proper pricing of fossil fuels and ever-cheaper renewables. That was the answer that the 19th century delivered to Malthus. But as far as the contemporary planetary challenge goes, will such eco-modernism be too little, too late?

The Z` Boson, we’re gonna catch it soon!

This should be bigger news than it will be.  Then again, it should have been obvious all along.  US education policy has subtly (and not so subtly) shifted te achers’ focus, and principals’ focus, from teaching humans to constructing good test-takers.  There is—to quote Gomer Pyle, surprise surprise!—a difference.