This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• Against Economics — David Graeber reviews Robert Skidelsky's latest book: To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths. […] As a result, heterodox economists continue to be treated as just a step or two away from crackpots, despite the fact that they often have a much better record of predicting real-world economic events. What’s more, the basic psychological assumptions on which mainstream (neoclassical) economics is based—though they have long since been disproved by actual psychologists—have colonized the rest of the academy, and have had a profound impact on popular understandings of the world.
• Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
  
• I wasn’t just a brain in a jar — Christian Lorentzen reviews Permanent Record by Edward Snowden in the London Review of Books: Snowden still faces three felony charges, two of them under the Espionage Act, under which the government can withhold public presentation of the evidence against the defendant by claiming the interests of national security. Obama declined to pardon him. In the wake of Russiagate, it’s common to hear people, even left-leaning journalists, speculate that Snowden has been a Russian agent all along, especially now that the US intelligence services have rebranded themselves as the strongest institutional branch of the #Resistance to the current president. Meanwhile the government’s machines of repression, those carefully cooled datacentres, hum along in Maryland, Utah and Hawaii.
• How America’s Elites Lost Their Grip — Time Magazine, ironically late to the zeitgeist as always, runs a compensatory cover story by Anand Giridharadas: If a single cultural idea has upheld the disproportionate power of this class, it has been the idea of the “win-win.” They could get rich and then “give back” to you: win-win. They could run a fund that made them sizable returns and offered you social returns too: win-win. They could sell sugary drinks to children in schools and work on public-private partnerships to improve children’s health: win-win. They could build cutthroat technology monopolies and get credit for serving to connect humanity and foster community: win-win. As this seductive idea fizzles out, it raises the possibility that this age of capital, in which money was the ultimate organizing principle of American life, could actually end. Something could actually replace it. After all, a century ago, America was firmly planted in the first Gilded Age—and then it found its way into the Progressive Era and the New Deal, an era of great public ambition. Business didn’t go away; it wasn’t abolished; capitalists didn’t go into gulags. It was just that the emphasis of the society shifted. Money was no longer the lodestar of all pursuits. The choice facing Americans is whether we want to be a society organized around money’s thirsts, a playground for the whims of billionaires, or whether we wish to be a democracy.
• The Web began dying in 2014, here's how — André Staltz: The internet will survive longer than the Web will. GOOG-FB-AMZN will still depend on submarine internet cables (the “Backbone”), because it is a technical success. That said, many aspects of the internet will lose their relevance, and the underlying infrastructure could be optimized only for GOOG traffic, FB traffic, and AMZN traffic. It wouldn’t conceptually be anymore a “network of networks”, but just a “network of three networks”, the Trinet, if you will. The concept of workplace network which gave birth to the internet infrastructure would migrate to a more abstract level: Facebook Groups, Google Hangouts, G Suite, and other competing services which can be acquired by a tech giant. Workplace networks are already today emulated in software as a service, not as traditional Local Area Networks. To improve user experience, the Trinet would be a technical evolution of the internet. These efforts are already happening today, at GOOG. In the long-term, supporting routing for the old internet and the old Web would be an overhead, so it could be beneficial to cut support for the diverse internet on the protocol and hardware level. Access to the old internet could be emulated on GOOG’s cloud accessed through the Trinet, much like how Windows 95 can be today emulated in your browser. ISPs would recognize the obsolescence of the internet and support the Trinet only, driven by market demand for optimal user experience from GOOG-FB-AMZN.
• Prince Floppyknife — Phil Are Go!:
  
• Trump Attacked the Women of Color Who Led the Push for Impeachment. Then CNN Erased Them. — Natasha Lennard, the Interccept: According to a weekend CNN feature, credit for the impeachment effort should instead go to four freshmen members of Congress — all of them white women with backgrounds in national security work. These women, who rather unbearably call themselves “the badasses,” only came around to supporting impeachment in the last two weeks. On the air, CNN host Jake Tapper, following up on a Trump campaign adviser’s remarks, questioned whether two early advocates for impeachment — Tlaib and Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, who is black — undermined the seriousness of the pursuit. “Do those members of your party,” Tapper asked Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich. — one of the “badasses” — on his Sunday show, “undermine the seriousness with which you and other colleagues of yours want to proceed?” (Slotkin simply said she couldn’t speak for others and returned to her talking points.) Taken together, the picture speaks to an even more grim dynamic: While Trump demonizes Congress’s progressive women of color, CNN erases their work.