Vinay Prasad

Of course, some academics were notably vocal during COVID-19, taking the thesis position – lockdown, school closure, masking, temperature checks – or the antithesis – that these interventions don’t work or did more harm than good. But notably most academics were silent.

I understand why laboratory scientists might have stayed out of it, but two groups puzzle me: global health advocates and early life course/ disparities researchers who were quiet.

Lockdowns might ultimately be the single most destabilizing event in the last 25 years globally. They have led to famine and extreme poverty like we have never seen in modern times. Oxfam warned last summer that 11 people die each minute from hunger, outpacing covid.

A generation of kids have lost their future. UNICEF reported in March 2021 that 168 million kids lost a year of school, and many lost more.

India faced some of the longest closures, mortgaging the future of tens of millions of kids, leading to catastrophic educational losses.

School closures in the USA were disproportionately in liberal strongholds and attitudes were temporaly linked to Trump’s advocacy. Closing school for more than a year is the greatest domestic policy failure of the last 25 years. As a lifelong Democrat/ progressive, I know with confidence that my team is responsible for this. 

Yet, throughout this pandemic, notice how many global health scholars were totally silent on lockdowns. How many global health researchers said nothing as India sacrificed the future of a generation with school closures? How many US based disparity researchers or early childhood advocates were silent on school closure? I believe most were quiet!

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

“Apparently they have extra Starships to go around. We are very excited. We weren’t part of the conversation but we got tagged by that other Twitter handle that was asking for it be by South Padre Island, and then he was the one that suggested well why don’t we do it near the airport since the airport serves both communities,” Partida said.

It cited as proof of that commitment designing “highly reliable, maneuverable” satellites designed to break up completely upon reentry; placing satellites initially in very low orbits after launch for initial checkouts; operating the entire constellation at altitudes below 600 kilometers, so that satellites will naturally reenter within 25 years of the end of their life if they are not deliberately deorbited; and the use of an autonomous collision avoidance system.

While the Biden administration claims that Putin bears all the blame for the current Ukraine crisis, Burns makes clear that the US helped lay its foundations. By taking advantage of Russian weakness, he argues, Washington fueled the nationalist resentment that Putin exploits today. Burns calls the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” And he describes the appetite for revenge it fostered among many in Moscow during Boris Yeltsin’s final years as Russia’s president. “As Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage,” Burns writes, “a gathering storm of ‘stab in the back’ theories slowly swirled, leaving a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades.”

Do Higher-Priced Hospitals Deliver Higher-Quality Care?

Maybe I am wrong—tragically wrong—but I cannot dismiss the suspicion that we are witnessing an elaborate charade, grossly magnified by prominent elements of the American media, to serve a domestic political end. Facing rising inflation, the ravages of Omicron, blame (for the most part unfair) for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, plus the failure to get the full support of his own party for the Build Back Better legislation, the Biden administration is staggering under sagging approval ratings just as it gears up for this year’s congressional elections. Since clear “victories” on the domestic woes seem increasingly unlikely, why not fabricate one by posing as if he prevented the invasion of Ukraine by “standing up to Vladimir Putin”? Actually, it seems most likely that President Putin’s goals are what he says they are—and as he has been saying since his speech in Munich in 2007. To simplify and paraphrase, I would sum them up as: “Treat us with at least a modicum of respect. We do not threaten you or your allies, why do you refuse us the security you insist for yourself?”

Last year, Germany shut down half of its last nuclear power plants. The other half will shut down by the end of this year.

Germany is torn between its industrial economy and its de-growth ethos.

Subscribers can read the new Bismarck Brief here: https://t.co/wFyogRw0eR

1/n pic.twitter.com/z704WeTF9N

— Samo Burja (@SamoBurja) March 2, 2022

Sipan Murad, a 22-year-old Yazidi survivor from Kocho, emerged six months ago from seven years of captivity in Syria and has described her ordeal in detail to a journalist for the first time.

The introduction of chocolate to the Catholic world caused a dilemma: could it be eaten? Should it be given up for Lent?

The Far Reach of the White House’s Zero Trust Memo

Some digital nomads cross borders multiple times a year, never staying in any one country long enough to become a “tax resident.” (More on tax residency in a future post.) However, Americans are always a tax resident of the US, no matter where they are.

Most of the new innovation we’ve seen in the past years have created BRAND NEW problems (when they originally promised us they would FIX PROBLEMS for us) if you look closely enough at them. Cough… Social Media… Cough…

The yearly turnover rate among long-haul truckers is 94 percent. And you wonder why you’re not getting your orders on time?

There’s also a few other benefits to using ships as a comparison. Unlike cars (where most production information is locked up with the producer), there’s a lot of publicly available data on ships and shipping cost. Because they’ve been produced for so long, and because ships can be built basically anywhere with water access, we’ve also seen a lot of cycles of shipbuilding moving to somewhere cheaper – America to Britain, Britain to Japan, Japan to Korea and China. And because shipbuilding is often considered a matter of national importance (for its connection to navies if for no other reason), these shifts tend to produce a lot of speculation on how x nation has lost their shipbuilding advantage, and how they might recover it, which is useful if you’re trying to understand the moving parts of the industry.

This post examines how market valuations and revenues of the major stakeholders in the semiconductor ecosystem have evolved over the last decade and illustrates the new contours taking shape in the semiconductor industry.

Woke, feminized CIA sentences to ponder

I love the aughts fashion, the use of the word “victim,” and the fact that “finger-guns” gets a hyperlink in the last caption. The woman in the photo gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the final image — she looks like she’s on the verge of tears — and her male counterpart couldn’t look more smug. The pictures are endearing and capture a kind of humanity you don’t find in your average stock photo.

Everyone is a “lockdown sceptic”. No one I have ever spoke with in favour lockdowns. They are failure public policy & ability use data wisely & act earlier with far less intrusive measures & prevent need lockdowns. March20 & much worse when the data was so clear in Sept/Oct 20

— Jeremy Farrar (@JeremyFarrar) February 20, 2022

Intel Unveils BonanzaMine, A Bitcoin Accelerator ASIC

But institutions … don’t work like that. Trading desks have quarterly P&L targets, and traders have annual bonuses they want to make. There’s a widespread culture of “what have you done for me lately?” — you can’t coast on past success. The implicit call option embedded in most traders’ compensation profiles exacerbates this.

The Lost Soul of the Dallas Cowboys

Will Our Military State Fail Us? II

Probably, one of the most dreaded software development methodologies might make sense again for small companies in a operational perspective.

If you’re gonna listen to any speech about #Ukraine ??, let it be this one.

The Kenya ambassador to the UNSC perfectly explains how people across Africa understand Ukraine, and what the Kremlin’s acts of aggression mean in our post-colonial world. pic.twitter.com/0gTuAni0DC

— Thomas van Linge (@ThomasVLinge) February 22, 2022

A lab leak in Wuhan, China, is now considered the most likely origin of the Covid pandemic “behind closed doors” in the Government, it has been claimed, after Boris Johnson signalled that security measures would be enhanced to prevent accidental escape….

American workers are going back to bars, movies, sports arenas and weddings—pretty much everywhere but their offices.

Subaru, Kia shut off some car features rather than adhere to ‘right to repair’ law

“Suzy Chaffee had this great idea, let’s throw some music into this,” Howard told me. Chaffee, who became one of the highest-profile stars of the sport, had a figure skating and dance background, he said.³“So she interpreted it in a dance way. I, on the other hand, was more interested in putting on some rock ’n’ roll in the background and just let it happen.”

Seventeen years ago, I bought a fourplex for $106,000 USD. Now, it’d sell for six or seven times that amount, even though inflation-adjusted wages are worth less than back then. No wonder Canadian household debt levels are the highest in the world. Hyper-corrupt Canada’s real estate pyramid scheme is getting worse by the day, but don’t for a minute think it’s nearing a breaking point.

Pujols ended up becoming one of the best baseball players of all time (currently ranked 32nd by WAR). His weight wasn’t a problem, but if you read scouting reports on other great players who were heavy or short, they were frequently underrated. Of course, baseball scouting reports didn’t only look at people’s appearances, but scouts were generally highly biased by what they thought an athlete should look like.

This is the story of how and why Hongkongers have been able to sustain their movement so long, even faced with an overwhelming enemy like China. The protestors have developed a range of tactics that have helped them minimise capture and arrests and helped keep the pressure up for five months: They include enforcing and maintaining anonymity, both in person and online, rapid dissemination of information with the help of the rest of the population, a policy of radical unanimity to maintain unity in the face of an overwhelming enemy and Hongkongers’ famous “be water” techniques, through which many of them escaped arrest.

David Blaska:

Principal Smith is outraged that her scholars recorded another fight at her institution. (Is Don Dunphy at ringside?) Outraged enough to alert parents. Not about the fight, about the recordings. A school wide dragnet is underway to bring the young videographers to justice. No one with an iPhone is above suspicion. The interim principal warns:

“It is important to note, any student who records and shares videos of an altercation is subject to consequences following the Behavior Education Plan, leading up to out-of-school suspension. We will be working to identify and follow up with students who engaged in taunting, baiting, and inciting the altercation. [Oxford comma inserted.]

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

One critical offset to the tightening market is the current upswing in shale output from the U.S., which could add more than 900,000 barrels a day this year. Without the resurgence in U.S. supply, oil prices would likely be even higher. With new export capacity coming this year, the U.S. will become the world’s largest LNG exporter, ahead of Australia and Qatar. In a tight global gas market, U.S. LNG is critical to avoid a world-wide shortage and keep the lights on in Europe, as demonstrated by the flotilla of tankers headed to Europe.

Did rogue techies spy on the president? Maybe. The one-sided Durham filing can’t be trusted, right-wing misinterpretations of that filing even less so.

Also worth watching the US funded (star-studded) “fake news” propaganda campaign (in the eyes of the Soviets) in support of the Polish dissident fight against the communist govt, and in support of free, rather than controlled opposition, elections

In Munich, many USA plane loads full of diplomats, officials and lawmakers pic.twitter.com/DTCHyGbZCK

— John Hudson (@John_Hudson) February 19, 2022

The whitepaper released today details findings from the first research phase. In this phase, researchers selected concepts from cryptography, distributed systems, and blockchain technology to build and test platforms that would give policymakers substantial flexibility in the potential creation of a CBDC. The paper describes the following findings:

The Cutting Room Files, Part 3: The Future of Canada

Pilots required to wear trackers in Hong Kong.

She is in the very safe hands of the Communist party. They will make sure she behaves exactly according to the party. She may already be thinking she made a mistake in exposing this very deep, dark relationship. She has put her family, friends, career at stake. There is no spirit for her any more. She has become another person, and whatever she tells you is not true.

You’re listening to KUOW … like it or not: Mysterious glitch has Mazda drivers stuck on public radio

The Weird and Wonderful Black Hole Photographs: Censored Images From America’s Great Depression

A Genetic Chronicle of the First Peoples in the Americas

Later this year, US merchants will be able to accept Apple Pay and other contactless payments simply by using iPhone and a partner-enabled iOS app

How does UTF-8 turn “?” into “F09F9882”?

I Used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS Tracker to Watch My Husband’s Every Move

Turbine ‘torture’ for Greek islanders as wind farms proliferate

How the Golden State can grow up and fix its crisis

New plant-derived composite is tough as bone and hard as aluminum

“They’re the ones who say, ‘Hey, I’m controlling access to all the big insurance companies. If you want this insurance company to sell your drug, you’ve got to pay the cover charge. All these drugs pay the cover charge to these PBMs through rebates, and because they’re paying the cover charges, the prices are jacked up,” Mr. Cuban told NPR. “We said we’re going to create our own PBM, we’re going to work directly with the manufacturers, and we’re not going to charge the cover charge.”

Anna I. Krylov, Jay S. Tanzman, Gernot Frenking, Peter M. W. Gill

Censorship – „the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security“ – has been used by illiberal regimes throughout history to suppress viewpoint diversity. Scientists who challenged dominant ideologies have been subjected to various forms of cancellation – ostracism, imprisonment, exile, and death.^1–3)

America’s Favorite Pickup Truck Goes Electric

Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy

How I Discovered Thousands of Open Databases on AWS

American has challenges, but it baffles me why so many think a state that is –

1. A net importer of fuel
2. A net importer of food
3. A net importer of culture
4. A net exporter of talent
5. Beginning the largest peacetime population collapse in history

will run the century.

— John Dulin (@JohnDDulin) January 31, 2022

FT US staff seeks union.

It increased revenue for the state that was placed in the cash fund that then disbursed funds to hospitals to supplement their Medicaid reimbursements, rather than directly pay for actual services rendered.

Question 15 asks, “How can Congress work to bolster Americans’ confidence in public health institutions,” particularly in light of “historical wrongs” and “skepticism of more recent public health measures”?

This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. The software for this search engine is all custom-built, and all crawling and indexing is done in-house.

BlackBerry sells mobile patents to patent troll for $600M

Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS

Why do you need the ability to explain an idea? Here’s a secret: many people in our industry aren’t idea-literate.

A thesis: most websites are implicitly designed with a short lifetime

Big Board owner Eric Flannery becomes emotional speaking with GOP lawmakers in his bar tonight: “When people ask me, ‘where are you going to get on the other side of this,’ I don’t know. I just know that I’m doing the right thing. And this place is supposed to be open.” pic.twitter.com/2ui30ypa5y

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) February 2, 2022

I have to emphasize this, you couldn’t order a pizza in the vast majority of Italian restaurants in America prior to 1945. And the reason you couldn’t order a pizza in Italian restaurants is because pizza isn’t Italian.

Winners of the 8th International Landscape Photographer of the Year competition

And they have the credibility to turn the entire organization, in particular, to impose short-term costs for long-term benefit to cannibalize or disrupt, in the colloquial sense, an existing product for a new one. … The state’s solution to the financial crisis was to stop issuing commercial bank charters for almost a decade and to reward failure by regulating away competition via Dodd-Frank. …. And I think the continental scale of it, which again was accidental by acquisition of territories peacefully and not peacefully, but generally Europe was stuck in a centuries old grid of monarchies, feudalism and all the other baggage they had carried. It just wasn’t able to have a frontier mentality. I sometimes think that that conquest of land, that the open horizons is reflected in the dynamism and the ability to invent that followed. And so block explorers like Blockchain.com or btc.com, that are indexes of the Bitcoin blockchain, or Etherscan.io [which] indexes the Ethereum blockchain. Those don’t look like search engines to people, really, because the data structures they were indexing were things that weren’t really things you thought of as being on Google.

Still, just 0.5% of Americans commuted on bikes in 2019, reports National Geographic.

• Compare that with the Netherlands, where 27% of the country commutes by bike.
• The difference is infrastructure. Per a recent National Geographic survey, 70% of people in the U.S.’s 50 biggest metro areas say they’re interested in biking, but half of them say they’re too afraid to bike in the street.

The inside story of Facebook Marketplace

Alabama farmer sues John Deere for ‘right to repair’

Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship

Uniqlo dangles $8.8m salaries to draw talent in Big Tech showdown

Reflecting on a Career in Product Management

A striking feature of the excerpts released in the committee’s January 11, 2022 letter is that the virologists had little doubt that the virus bore the fingerprints of manipulation. The focus of their attention was a genetic element called a furin cleavage site. This short snippet of genetic material is what makes the virus so infectious for human cells. Scientists sometimes add this element to laboratory viruses to make them more virulent, but in nature, viruses usually acquire runs of genetic material like this by swapping them with other members of their family. The furin cleavage site in the Covid virus sticks out like a sore thumb because no other known member of its family—a group called Sarbecoviruses—possesses a furin cleavage site. So how did the virus acquire it?

Instead, we have collectively been subjected two years of draconian and coercive public health policies that implicitly presuppose that each individual, regardless of age or metabolic health, is at equal risk. This strategic omission of fact, and ignorance of scientific reality, has formed the basis for an insidious and seemingly coordinated re-shaping of society by governments around the world.

The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 Did Not Go as Planned

Pilotless operation has several advantages, according to Yutko: “It’s safer. 80% of the accidents in Air Transport are because of pilot errors. With a certified autonomous system, this type of crashes will be minimized. It will take time to come to the safety level needed to get approval for autonomous flight, but once there, it will be safer than piloted flight.
It saves cost: To make future short-haul air transport available for everyone we need to reduce costs. The cost of a pilot is a big piece of the cost of air taxi services as the number of passengers over which to spread the cost is a fraction of regular air transport.”

Drawing Matter recently acquired this design for a table, below. Although the work’s last sale in 1972 attributed the drawing to Thomas Chippendale, we are (perhaps wishfully) hoping that it might be an architect’s own design for desk.

We are all vulnerable to the kind of social manipulation Susan and Mitnick and DePayne honed in those early years at the convergence of telephone and computer history. No password can protect us from trusting the wrong person. Our past is no longer just a story we tell ourselves; it’s a rich store of data that can be mined, studied, and used against us. Even Susan Thunder, in the end, left enough of herself behind for me to track her down. We are all potential social engineers, and we are all potential targets. That’s her legacy, too.

The Old Internet Shows Signs of Quietly Coming Back Despite the new gatekeepers’ best efforts, the old Internet never completely disappeared. Personal websites created by individuals that have always been the meat of the old Internet are still around. They are still about exploration, innovation, fun, and all the rest. Try as the new gatekeepers have, they simply have not had the power to eradicate the old Internet completely. All they can do is pretend it does not exist. And, that is exactly what they do. This means that one does not pursue, peruse, or pour over the old Internet on mainstream search engines like Google or explore it on FaceBook or other mainstream social media platforms. One does not stumble upon the old Internet by chance. If one is to locate it, one must ordinarily go looking for it. Fortunately, the practical difference between the old gatekeepers and the new gatekeepers is that we do not need the new gatekeepers. We can still speak freely and be heard on the old Internet without the permission of any gatekeeper standing guard over the mainstream Internet.

But looking back, Wilkinson thinks Google’s luxurious on-site perks have made workers too dependent on the company, a situation he calls “dangerous.” “This notion that you can provide everything that would support a worker’s life on campus might appear to be extremely generous and supportive,” he said. “But it also has a whole range of potentially negative impacts.”

Robot vacuum cleaner escapes from Cambridge Travelodge

Restaurant reservations in cities with vaccine mandates tank compared to cities without: OpenTable data

Lady al Qaeda: The World’s Most Wanted Woman

Last month, Union Pacific sent L.A. D.A. George Gascon a letter about the mass looting of their trains & expressed frustration with Gascon’s soft on crime policies. 100+ arrests, most suspects released within 24 hours on zero bail. UP now considering avoiding LA County. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/9UDRuHLvtd

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) January 15, 2022

Why don’t we have a street like that anymore? After WWII, our city along with the rest of the country changed how we developed our cities. We started re-developing our cities to accommodate increasing car ownership and ended up building cities that are unsustainable and cannot support themselves. We built big houses with big yards out on the edge of town. We started to build big box stores and a mall on the edge of town, putting downtown out of business. All those big stores and houses required big new roads, new water infrastructure, and took up a lot of land. Every city did this, but what makes Galesburg different? Why are we out of money?

Netflix raised the price of its subscription plans in the US and Canada last week. The company’s standard plan went from $13.99 /month to $15.49 /month in the US, a +10.7% price increase. That same plan in 2011 was priced at $7.99, meaning Netflix has increased prices at an average rate of +6.2% annually over the last 11 years. During the same period, industry prices for cable and satellite television services increased +3.2% annually and US inflation rose +2.0% annually, meaning that in the US, Netflix’s prices have risen approximately 2x faster than cable prices and 3x faster than inflation.

“Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine,” said the letter. “These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than 24 hours. Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to Union Pacific by these same criminals.”

The Graphical User Interface History

Artificial intelligence is being taught to fly warplanes. Can the technology be trusted?

Okay, but what is a Cyclorama?

Comprehensive and up-to-date policial information is critical in civic tech, academia, data journalism, PEP checking, and many other areas. And Wikidata is going to be a key element of all those areas. So: explore and play, help make the data even better, and let us know how you get on! Tony Bowden created the EveryPolitician project at mySociety in 2015, and led it to becoming a key dataset of politicians worldwide. For five years before that he ran a funding and training program for civic tech projects across Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the South Caucasus, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

How Campbell Soup Turned New Jersey Into a Tomato-Growing State

Security flaw found in smartphone app for Olympians in Beijing

The differences among these many styles can be as profound as the difference between, say, the pit-smoked brisket you might find in Central Texas and the oven-baked carrot-and-onion-smothered brisket that you might be served in Brooklyn. So it’s important to not paint with too broad a brush when using the phrase “Mexican food.”

Arm Predicts Stagnation if Nvidia Deal Fails

Since my credentials at the IRS will soon no longer work, I opted to create an ID.me account and share the experience here. An important preface to this walk-through is that verifying one’s self with Id.me requires one to be able to take a live, video selfie — either with the camera on a mobile device or a webcam attached to a computer (your webcam must be able to open on the device you’re using to apply for the ID.me account).

Who could have believed a year ago that America would now beg Saudi Arabia and Russia to pump more oil—as we pulled our own oil leases, and canceled pipelines and oil fields? Our path to systems collapse is not due to an earthquake, climate change, a nuclear war, or even the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, most of our maladies are self-inflicted. They are the direct result of woke ideologies that are both cruel and antithetical to traditional American pragmatism.

Prayer-Bots and Religious Worship on Twitter: A Call for a Wider Research Agenda

Give yourself full permission to interview your future managers back. When they ask “Do you have any questions for me,” take the opportunity to expose what your next 1+ years under this person might be like.

Here are 5 questions I have or wished I’d asked of my future managers:

— Lily Konings (@lilykonings) January 21, 2022

For detractors of new styling, it means all BMWs are going to be ugly, not just the electric ones. That might be a tad harsh.

Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.