Chemosynthetic ecosystems in the ocean are not a new discovery. The publication referenced in the article is about a new system for conducting experiments on them.
Interesting T-shirt choice by the woman on the right:
Are you deep enough in the timeline to know exactly who Aella is? Do you thrive in the weird, wild overlap of polyamory discourse and meme culture? Then this shirt was made for you. It’s bold. It’s niche. It screams “terminally online,” but make it fashion.
This shirt features a tongue-in-cheek slogan that blends alt-internet references, polycule humor, and a wink to the chaos of modern relationships. It’s perfect for sparking conversations (or ending them quickly, depending on the crowd).
Good point; it seems pretty self-evident in econ and political science, where the reigning orthodoxies disallow departing from the assumptions of liberalism, but given that literature also takes place within culture, it end ends up subject to the same constraints, blindly or deliberately imposed by publishers, critics, and readers.
I'm wondering if this is contributing to an increasing body of evidence that Western literature (and by extension literary criticism) is out of things to say. There was an article[^1] in n+1 a little while back that makes that point, and then there was the coverage of Your Name Here, which is being praised for being a difficult read in a sea of easy-to-read but shallow chaff, but seems like it's loaded with "self-aware" decisions like copying and pasting whole email exchanges, a decision that seems like a signal the author is infatuated with their own perceived cleverness rather than an actual innovation, and making a lot of references to other obscure/"difficult" books.
This latest bit almost does seem like performance art, a way of saying that all that's left to do is keep chopping up and regurgitating the same ideas in different combinations ad infinitum, but the level of self awareness needed to pull it off just isn't visible.
[^1]: "The latest crisis in literary studies feels different: more spiteful and less fertile, more terminally gloomy, a scene of death throes rather than birth pangs. It can seem that literature professors agree on little beyond a sense that something is irreversibly wrong."
By the late Middle Ages the feudal economy was doomed, faced with an accumulation crisis that stretched for more than a century. We deduce its dimension from some basic estimates indicating that between 1350 and 1500 a major shift occurred in the power-relation between workers and masters. The real wage increased by 100%, prices declined by 33%, rents also declined, the length of the working-day decreased, and a tendency appeared toward local self-sufficiency. Evidence of a chronic disaccumulation trend in this period is also found in the pessimism of the contemporary merchants and landowners, and the measures which the European states adopted to protect markets, suppress competition and force people to work at the conditions imposed. As the entries to the registers of the feudal manors recorded, "the work [was] not worth the breakfast" (Dobb 1963: 54). The feudal economy could not reproduce itself, nor could a capitalist society have "evolved" from it, for self-sufficiency and the new high-wage regime allowed for the "wealth of the people," but "excluded the possibility of capitalistic wealth" (Marx 1909, Vol I, 789).
It was in response to this crisis that the European ruling class launched the global offensive that in the course of at least three centuries was to change the history of the planet, laying the foundations of a capitalist world-system, in the relentless attempt to appropriate new sources of wealth, expand its economic basis, and bring new workers under its command. ... I refer to the social processes that characterized the "feudal" reaction" and the development of capitalist relations with the Marxian concept of "primitive accumulation"... Marx introduced the concept of "primitive accumulation" at the end of Capital Volume I to describe the social and economic restructuring that the European ruling class initiated in response to its accumulation crisis, and to establish (in polemics with Adam Smith) that: (i) capitalism could not have developed without a prior concentration of capital and labor; and that (ii) divorcing the workers from the means of production, not the abstinence of the rich, is the source of capitalist wealth. Primitive accumulation, then, is a useful concept, for it connects the "feudal reaction" with the development of a capitalist economy, and it identifies the historical and logical conditions for the development of the capitalist system, "primitive" ("originary") indicating a precondition for the existence of capitalist relations, as much as a specific event in time. (p 62- 63, emphasis Federici's)
I see your point on the transformation part, but I still think the analogy is relevant. In both cases (transformation from feudalism into capitalism and capitalism into fascism) you're seeing a shift in relations born from the reaction of the ruling class to a crisis. Capitalism was born out of the desire to preserve feudalism that was untenable; so fascism arises when preserving the existing capitalist relations is the desired goal but the outcome is no longer possible.
Yeah, I am too, but I'm assuming based on the email headers here that this is some sort of internal FBI discussion and that "salacious" is focusing on details that are relevant to legal proceedings (especially based on the note about the victim). An email Epstein sent himself isn't exactly actionable. I feel like dosing someone with medication without their knowledge and consent should be illegal but I'm not sure how they'd prosecute, especially if Melinda didn't want to pursue charges.
Oh no, she wants to turn off the orphan crushing machine, guys! We have to stop her!