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Daily Archives: July 5, 2022

A Crisis Historian Has Some Bad News for Us

The Atlantic: “America and the world are living through what Adam Tooze, the internet’s foremost historian of money and disaster, describes as a “polycrisis.” As he sips a beer at a bar near Columbia University, where he is the director of the European Institute, Tooze talks through a long list of challenges: War, raising the specter of nuclear conflict. Climate change, threatening famine, flood, and fire. Inflation, forcing central banks to crush consumer demand. The pandemic, closing factories and overloading hospitals. Each crisis is hard enough to parse by itself; the interconnected mess of them is infinitely more so. And he feels “the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.” Not too long ago, Tooze was an obscure academic. Now he’s among the world’s most influential financial commentators, with loyal readerships in Washington, London, Paris, and Brussels, as well as on Wall Street. Tooze’s readers turn to him for his uncanny ability to know which numbers on a spreadsheet matter, or when a trend has hit the point at which it has started to shape history. He looks at trade, currency, equities, wage, employment, debt, and commodities data and somehow makes sense of it—not just in the moment but in the sweep of time. “Economic events have had such a huge influence on politics this century,” Robert Skidelsky, the John Maynard Keynes biographer, told me. Tooze “illustrates the interpenetration of economic policy and political events. It’s as simple as that…”

Keeping Your Smart Home Secure & Private

EFF: “…The last two decades have seen the internet move from living-room and office terminals to our phones, watches, appliances and lighting fixtures. And although so-called smart devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) have allowed us to automate some aspects of our lives, they’ve also been plagued with privacy and security problems, giving hackers… Continue Reading

The Pirate Library Mirror wants to preserve all human knowledge – illegally

The Next Web – A project to preserve over 7TB of books, articles, and journals: “A new project has just launched with the goal of preserving all human knowledge. The problem? It’s illegal. The Pirate Library Mirror is what it says on the tin: a mirror of existing libraries of pirated content. The project focuses… Continue Reading

Swords to Plowshares Northeast

Swords to Plowshares Northeast – “We are people passionate about gun safety and the value of gun buybacks to remove unwanted guns from homes and neighborhoods. We transform destroyed guns into gardening tools, jewelry, and works of art. Our program is focused on reducing gun violence in the communities in which our events take place. With… Continue Reading