Lately, I have been mostly reading:

• The Past and Future of Political Economy — Jamie Galbraith reviews The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky for American Affairs: The gold standard and the quantity theory of money have been succeeded in our day by rational expectations theory and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modeling (don’t ask), and by their policy stepchild, inflation targeting. These are the doctrines of repute and respectability, the touchstones of academic and professional advancement in our time. They share an almost eschatological preoccupation with the condition of things in the long run—the economists’ version of the prophets’ paradise to come—and a willingness to absorb (or more accurately to inflict) pain and punishment in the present. Economists in this respect are unlike modern doctors. The arsenals of pain relief and fever reduction play little role in their toolkit—and where they do (“stimulus programs”) they are often treated as having long-term costs that offset the benefits in the short term. Our social doctors generally prefer to let events take their course, on the assumption that the patient always recovers. If intervention is indispensable, they say, then let it be surgery without anesthesia, so that the patient will remember next time that it is better not to get sick.
• Life Before the Pandemic — xkcd by Randall Muroe:
  
• Global Vaccine Equity Is Much More Important Than ‘Vaccine Passports’ — Steven W. Thrasher in Scientific American: I am a much bigger fan of creating global vaccine equity—by breaking intellectual property patents if necessary—to suppress the level of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in as many humans as possible as quickly as possible across borders than I am a fan of creating vaccine passports that only allow those with the privilege of getting a vaccine to cross borders. Borders in some countries are currently being used to determine who does and doesn’t get a vaccine. It would be even more unethical to use those borders to bar the movement of people who have been denied vaccination. As Stefan David Baral, Jean Olivier Twahirwa Rwema and Nancy Phaswana-Mafuya recently wrote in the BMJ, “being a citizen of certain countries grants people access to nearly the entire globe, whereas others face challenges just to legally leave the borders of the country they live in, even during times of conflict.” Not coincidentally, people in high-earning-income countries also have much greater access to vaccines than those in poorer countries with less mobility. But the idea that one “needs” to go on vacation or attend an academic conference abroad at this point in the pandemic is morally unjustifiable. This is especially true if you are traveling to or from a place where you know others do not have access to vaccines—and you want a special piece of paper proving that you do, which would allow you to cross the border.
• Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
  
• How Workers Really Get Canceled on the Job — Nathan Newman in the American Prospect: In her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about being given a personality test when interviewing for a housecleaning job, which asked such questions as whether “management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different sets of goals.” She also described alarming the tester for Walmart, by asserting some measure of independence on a couple of questions. Ehrenreich’s working-class job seeker was among the real victims of cancel culture in the U.S., not A-list writers and actors. For decades, millions of workers have been rejected for employment based solely on their answers to pre-employment personality tests administered by corporate America. Instead of social media mobs, inscrutable algorithms silently delete people from interview callbacks, without their résumé even being seen by a human being. And make no mistake, rooting out dissent is the primary goal of these hiring algorithms.
• Bizarro — by Wayno and Pirarro:
  
• North Carolina Republicans Want to Punish Gender Thoughtcrime — Sarah Jones in New York Magazine: In the race to stigmatize trans children, North Carolina Republicans have pulled ahead. If passed, Senate Bill 514 wouldn’t just ban people under the age of 21 from getting the transition health care they need, it would also require state employees to out trans and queer children to their parents. If a child displays “symptoms of gender dysphoria, gender nonconformity, or otherwise demonstrates a desire to be treated in a manner incongruent with the minor’s sex,” they must notify the child’s parents or guardians, the legislation mandates. Legislators in other states have proposed bills that would, similarly, prevent trans children from getting medically necessary care. North Carolina, however, is innovative. Co-sponsoring legislators have in essence devised a way to punish gender thoughtcrime. The bill is broad, and could affect tomboys and trans kids alike. A person’s definition of “gender nonconformity” depends first on their conception of gender — of what’s normal, and what isn’t.
• Who The #Resistance Was Actually #Resisting These Last Four Years — Caitlin Johnstone in/on Medium: The Resistance™️ was aggressively marketed by cynical liberal spinmeisters like Neera Tanden (who in a brazen middle finger to US progressives is also set to play a role in the Biden administration) with the goal of harnessing and maintaining the enthusiastic grassroots anti-establishment energy of the Bernie Sanders campaign and directing it against Trump. But what did it actually accomplish? In the end, all the so-called Resisters ended up doing was promoting a bunch of Russia conspiracy theories and an impeachment which failed to remove Trump, all while providing no actual resistance to Trump’s most pernicious policies. […] This is because the #Resistance was never actually intended to resist the evil agendas of the powerful, nor even to resist Trump. The #Resistance was not created to resist the powerful, it was created to resist you. The grassroots anti-establishment populism of the Bernie Sanders movement was cynically imitated by the Democratic establishment to ensure that the establishment is never inconvenienced in any way, and that progressives never take power in America.