What advice would you give younger creatives, especially those who have been active and engaged during this time?

There’s an odd combination of intuition and intelligence that has to be mustered to do this work. The part that is logical is only half the job. The other half is truly intuitive and comes out of some part of the brain that you can’t control. It’s the reconciliation of those two aspects that makes things happen. Since the brain is an instrument that holds everything in the universe, it’s there somewhere.

— Milton Glaser

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Amid the sensory swirl of the airplane hangar in Freeland, Michigan, the leader slow-walks toward us, fist pumping slowly, with that trademark ponderous tread of his (dating back at least to his boardroom entrances in The Apprentice), adjusts the mike, leans slightly sideways, and lances into it all with a stark declaration: “We brought you a lot of car plants, Michigan! We brought you a lot of car plants. You know that, right?”

Comes in prompt response the ear-splitting roar of affirmation, clear as clear can be: Yes, Mr. President, we know that! A joyful knowledge, a knowledge to celebrate: all those jobs in all those car plants! But what exactly is it possible to know about those car plants? I could not have been the only one in that obstreperous crowd, made up overwhelmingly of Michiganders, to know the presumably important fact that, well   … those car plants didn’t exist. Any member in good standing of the ancient “reality-based community” could have told you that since the coming of Trump no new car plants had been built in Michigan, that since his ascension not less than three thousand Michiganders had lost jobs in the vital auto sector. Perhaps it wasn’t Trump’s fault, but it was a fact. But what was a fact exactly?

In the imagination of the crowd Trump was an original but the lineaments of that imagination, its workings and its cravings, are anything but new. Those surrounding me were not poor (though poorer now than six months before); white working class, middle class, they could see clearly enough what they didn’t have: power. What had become increasingly obvious over the decades of dwindling wages and pointless wars and now this endless pandemic was the extent of their own powerlessness. They needed not only someone to blame — immigrants, anarchists, affirmative action beneficiaries, Black Lives Matter protesters, a corrupt and devious elite who for its own self-interested reasons let them all have free run — but a voice to articulate it.

The dynamic playing out before me was ancient: Already Nietzsche was calling it “ressentiment,” and had he been transported to Freeland, Michigan the German philologist would have recognized instantly what he was seeing enacted before him, a kind of Mummers’ revolt of the powerless:  “The ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with imaginary revenge. … This No is its creative deed.”

Trump, the tribune of the powerless, the unmasker of the powerful, the denouncer, the insulter, the despoiler of idols — Trump was their “imaginary revenge.” He entertained them, flattered them, and from his strength they drew encouragement. Here before me, among those hooting and hollering at fanciful car plants and sacrificing themselves, maskless, to the leader’s imagination was Nietzsche’s futile “resentment of the lambs for the bird of prey,” and it was on that soul-deep instinct that Trump played like a virtuoso.

— Mark Danner (excerpted from the New York Review of Books)

The Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corals.

‍Earth breaks September heat record, may reach warmest year. Wildfire smoke in U.S. exposes millions to hazardous pollution.

‍Nearly half of the U.S. is in drought. It may get worse.

It may get worse.

It may get worse.

It may get worse.
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It may get worse.

It may get worse.

U.S. billionaires gained almost $1 trillion in wealth during the pandemic.

‍Billionaire climate philanthropists will always be part of the problem.

The case against JPMorgan Chase for manipulating precious-metals and Treasury markets has many of the usual features. On September 29th it admitted to wrongdoing in relation to the actions of employees who, authorities claim, fraudulently rigged markets tens of thousands of times in 2008–16. The bank agreed to pay $920m to settle various probes by regulators and law enforcement. Some of the traders involved face criminal charges. If convicted, they are likely to spend time in jail.

The traders are alleged to have used “spoofing”, a ruse where a marketmaker seeking to buy or sell an asset, like gold or a bond, places a series of phoney orders on the opposite side of the market in order to confuse other market participants and move the price in his favour. A trader trying to sell gold, for instance, might place a series of buy orders, creating the illusion of demand. This dupes others into pushing prices higher, permitting the trader to sell at an elevated price. Once accomplished, the trader cancels his fake orders.

The practice was explicitly outlawed in America in 2010, but the rise of algorithmic traders — which rapidly analyse order books to work out where prices might move next — has made it more tempting for human traders to spoof them. According to prosecutors one JPMorgan trader described the tactic as “a little razzle-dazzle to juke the algos”.

— Excerpted from the Economist