Author: Art Diamond

Quiet, Modest Steinsberger Said Scientists Should “Be Interested in Learning About Nature,” Not in Seeking Prizes

(p. B12) Jack Steinberger, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for expanding understanding of the ghostly neutrino, a staggeringly ubiquitous subatomic particle, died on Saturday [Dec. 12, 2020] at his home in Geneva.

. . .

In 1988, The Economist said Dr. Steinberger “enjoys a reputation as one of the finest experimental physicists in the world.” The magazine continued, “In a field full of flamboyance and a fair bit of arrogance, he is a quiet, modest man; something of a physicist’s physicist.”

As if to prove the point, Dr. Steinberger told a meeting of Nobel laureates in 2008 that scientists should “be interested in learning about nature,” not prizes.

“The pretension that some of us are better than others,” he said, “I don’t think is a very good thing.”

For the full obituary, see:

Douglas Martin. “Jack Steinberger, Physicist Awarded a Joint Nobel Prize, Is Dead at 99.” The New York Times (Thursday, December 17, 2020): B12.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Jan. 20, 2021, and has the title “Jack Steinberger, Nobel Winner in Physics, Dies at 99.”)

Gerardo Guillén García del Barco Wants to Build in Cuba “Without Being Hindered by Bureaucracy”

(p. A10) HAVANA — Car dealerships, book publishing and hedge funds are still prohibited. Bed-and-breakfasts are not. Zoos, scuba diving centers and weapons production remain banned. Veterinary services aren’t.

As Cuba’s Communist government continues its piecemeal expansion of the fledgling private sector, Cubans are carefully parsing a list of the economic activities that the government proposes to keep under its control.

. . .

The new list seems to open major new space for manufacturing. Cubans will now be able to apply for licenses to open cheese, paint and toy factories, for example, though the government has not yet defined the permitted size of such ventures.

While some Cubans hailed the list as an important step forward in the country’s economic liberalization, it left others complaining that the government had not gone far enough.

“It’s messed up,” said Gerardo Guillén García del Barco, 26, an architect in Havana whose profession the government plans to maintain under its sole control. “Every time something appears that looks like a panacea, it ends in nothing.”

“My dream is to do exactly what I’m doing today but within a legal framework,” he said, explaining that he left a government firm and now works freelance without a license. “I want to do my own architecture without being hindered by bureaucracy.”

. . .

Last Saturday [Feb. 6, 2021], in announcing the planned expansion of private economic activity, Marta Elena Feitó, Cuba’s labor and social security minister, said that the changes would “unleash the productive forces” of the population.

For the full story, see:

Ed Augustin and Kirk Semple. “Cubans Study a Shrinking List of Prohibited Private Enterprises.” The New York Times (Friday, February 12, 2021): A10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 11, 2021, and has the title “Cubans Study a Shrinking List of Banned Private Enterprises.”)

Cancelled Slate Podcaster “Heartsick” That Ideas Cannot Be Debated and Words Cannot Be Spoken

(p. B5) The online publication Slate has suspended a well-known podcast host after he debated with colleagues over whether people who are not Black should be able to quote a racial slur in some contexts.

. . .

Mr. Pesca explored the argument over the use of the slur in a 2019 podcast about a Black security guard who was fired for using it. In one recording of the episode, Mr. Pesca said, he used the term while quoting the man, but asked his producer to make a version without the term. After consultation with his producers and his supervisor, who objected to his quotation of the slur, they decided to go with the version without it, he said.

“The version of the story with the offensive word never aired, and this is how I think the editorial process should go,” Mr. Pesca said in the interview.

No action was taken against him after a human resources investigation into his quotation of the slur, Mr. Pesca said. He said he had apologized to the producers involved.

. . .

Mr. Pesca, who has worked at Slate for seven years, said he was “heartsick” over hurting his colleagues but added, “I hate the idea of things that are beyond debate and things that cannot be said.”

Jacob Weisberg, Slate’s former chairman and editor in chief, who left the company for the podcast start-up Pushkin in 2018, called Mr. Pesca “a huge talent and a fair-minded journalist.”

“I don’t think he did anything that merits discipline or consequences, and I think it’s an example of a kind of overreaction and a lack of judgment and perspective that is unfortunately spreading,” Mr. Weisberg said.

For the full story, see:

Katie Robertson and Ben Smith. “Podcast Host Suspended After Debate Over Slur.” The New York Times (Weds., February 24, 2021): B5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 22, 2021, and has the title “Slate Suspends Podcast Host After Debate Over Racial Slur.”)

Journalism on the Left: “Nobody Censored What We Wrote”

(p. D7) James Ridgeway, an investigative reporter who exposed corporate dirty tricks, the secrets of environmental polluters and the horrors of solitary confinement in the nation’s prison systems, died on Saturday [Feb. 13, 2021] in Washington.

. . .

Mr. Ridgeway focused on the nation’s 2,200 public and private institutions of higher learning in “The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis” (1968). The book contended that colleges and universities, hiding behind tax exemptions and interlocked with private corporations and government agencies, were riddled with conflicts of interest in a corrupt system of profiteering.

“Ridgeway notes that 50 years ago, the universities were run by social reformers and scholars,” H.L. Nieburg wrote in a review for The Times, “while today they are operated by teams of middle-management executives more involved with pyramiding financial holdings and keeping faculty in line than in undergraduates.”

. . .

In 2012, after the death of Alex Cockburn, with whom he had shared a column in The Voice, Mr. Ridgeway wrote in Mother Jones: “We did our reporting in a way that most people in the press would die for. Nobody censored what we wrote. Nobody messed with how things were written, or dreamed of questioning a political opinion.”

For the full obituary, see:

Robert D. McFadden. “James Ridgeway, a Journalist Who Attacked Skulduggery, Is Dead at 84.” The New York Times (Monday, February 15, 2021): D7.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Feb. 14, 2021, and has the title “James Ridgeway, Hard-Hitting Investigative Journalist, Dies at 84.”)

James Ridgeway’s book on higher education was:

Ridgeway, James. The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis. New York: Random House, 1968.

Sometimes Progress Requires “Tearing Things Down and Rebuilding From Scratch”

(p. B6) In 1931, glass bottles of sparkling soda began rolling off the assembly line at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in downtown Indianapolis. It’s unlikely that the factory’s architect gave much thought to the possibility that shifting consumer habits would make the glass bottle a relic within a couple of generations.

Instead of slipping into obsolescence, the factory went on to have multiple lives. After the Coke factory closed in 1971, the building was briefly used to house Indy 500 racecars, then spent decades as a school bus garage before becoming a 139-room boutique hotel anchoring a new entertainment district last year.

A century ago, developers didn’t give the future much thought, but today, they don’t have the same luxury. A combination of pandemic disruptions and constantly changing technology has brought the hazy, distant horizon much closer.

As a result, a growing number of projects are racing against the clock as profitability and utility are squeezed into the ever-shortening life of a commercial building. Statistics illustrating the acceleration of building life cycles are scarce, but experts in the industry are starting to take heed.

“The cycle of changing is becoming shorter,” said Jefferson Duarte, associate professor of real estate finance at Rice University. Projects that developers once could have collected rents on for half a century or more don’t allow that anymore.

. . .

Consumer and worker needs are changing more quickly than they used to, driven by technology, shifting supply chains and expectations of greater amenities.

. . .

The core problem is that commercial construction is an industry producing highly durable goods in a world that is asking for greater flexibility with changing tastes and economic conditions, Professor Duranton said.

. . .

“Sometimes the right thing will involve tearing things down and rebuilding from scratch,” Professor Duranton said.

For the full story, see:

Kevin Williams. “The Ever-Shrinking Shelf Life of Buildings.” The New York Times (Weds., February 24, 2021): B6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 23, 2021, and has the title “As Buildings’ Life Spans Shrink, Developers Try to Adjust.”)

Successful Chinese Entrepreneur Stands Trial for Defending Free Speech

(p. A10) Like many entrepreneurs in China, Geng Xiaonan found a space in which to make a small fortune — in her case, publishing books on cooking, health and lifestyle.

But unlike many Chinese entrepreneurs, she mixed with critics of the party, organizing dinners and salons that brought together liberal intellectuals, retired officials and longtime dissenters.

Now, Ms. Geng is set to stand trial in Beijing on Tuesday [Feb. 9, 2021] and may spend years in prison for her support for those at odds with China’s deepening authoritarianism, her supporters say. She and her husband, Qin Zhen, have been charged with illegal business activities related to their publishing company. Friends and sympathetic legal experts maintain that her real offense in the eyes of the government was straying from business into sympathizing with critics of Communist Party power.

Ms. Geng, 46, came under growing surveillance last year after she leapt to the defense of Xu Zhangrun, a law professor in Beijing who was suspended after publishing essays scathingly critical of the party and its top leader, Xi Jinping.

“This is simply political persecution,” said Cai Xia, a former professor at the Central Party School in Beijing, who said she had been friends with Ms. Geng for about eight years. Ms. Cai has moved to the United States, where she has denounced the Chinese Communist Party’s tightening of political controls.

“It’s a selective system of enforcement,” Ms. Cai added. “They can make up whatever they want when they want to slap a crime on you.”

Ms. Geng is the latest among a handful of Chinese entrepreneurs detained or imprisoned since last year as the party draws a harder line on businesspeople it deems challengers of Beijing’s rule.

For the full story, see:

Chris Buckley. “Chinese Entrepreneur Was Model of Success, Then She Got Too Close to Critics of the Party.” The New York Times (Tues., February 9, 2021): A10.

(Note: bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 8, 2021, and has the title “This Chinese Businesswoman Was a Model of Success. Then She Angered the Party.”)

Many Chinese Have “Desperate Need” to “Hear Different View Points”

(p. A1) One by one, the chatroom participants took the digital microphone as thousands quietly listened in.

A Chinese man said he did not know whether to believe the widespread reports of concentration camps for Muslims in the far western region of Xinjiang. Then a Uighur woman spoke up, calmly explaining that she was certain of the camps’ existence because her relatives had been among those interned. A man from Taiwan chimed in to urge understanding on all sides, while another from Hong Kong praised the woman for her courage in coming forward.

It was a rare moment of cross-border dialogue with people on the mainland of China, who are usually separated from the rest of the online world by the Great Firewall. For a short time, they found an open forum on the social media app, Clubhouse, to discuss con-(p. A10)tentious topics, free from the usual constraints of the country’s tightly controlled internet.

By Monday [Feb. 8, 2021] evening, the inevitable happened: The Chinese censors moved in. Many mainland users reported receiving error messages when they tried to use the platform. Some said they could only access the app by tunneling through the digital border using a VPN, or virtual private network. Within hours, more than a thousand users had tuned in to hear a discussion about the ban in a chatroom titled “Walled off, so now what?” Searches for “Clubhouse” on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo were blocked.

To many users in mainland China, it was a brief window into an unfettered social media. Under China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the government has been ramping up its efforts to assert near-total digital control over what its citizens read and say online.

. . .

“Clubhouse is exactly what Chinese censors don’t want to see in online communication — a massive, freewheeling conversation in which people are talking openly,” said Xiao Qiang, founder of China Digital Times, a website that tracks Chinese internet controls. “It’s also a reminder that when there is an opportunity, many Chinese have a desperate need to talk to each other and to hear different view points.”

For the full story, see:

Amy Chang Chien and Amy Qin. “A Virtual Space for Chinese Debate Disappears.” The New York Times (Tues., February 9, 2021): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Feb. 25, 2021, and has the title “In China, an App Offered Space for Debate. Then the Censors Came.”)

Diamond’s Innovation Unbound Lecture Posted to YouTube

Dr. Derek Yonai of the Koch Center for Leadership and Ethics posted on Tues., March 9, 2021 my half-hour lecture on how regulations bind innovators. The lecture is related to my book:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

In North Equatorial Africa, Air Pollution Declines with Economic Growth

(p. A9) LAGOS, Nigeria — Rapidly growing countries generally see sharp increases in air pollution as their populations and economies expand. But a new study of air quality in Africa published on Monday [Feb. 8, 2021] has found the opposite: One of the continent’s most vibrant regions is becoming less polluted.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that levels of dangerous nitrogen oxides, a byproduct of combustion, in the northern part of sub-Saharan Africa have declined sharply as wealth and population in the area have increased.

. . .

The reason, according to researchers, is that an increase in pollution from industry and transportation in the area studied — from Senegal and Ivory Coast in the west to South Sudan, Uganda and Kenya in the east — appears to have been offset by a decline in the number of fires set by farmers.

For the full story, see:

Shola Lawal. “As Economies Get Bigger, Air Pollution Falls in Africa.” The New York Times (Tues., February 9, 2021): A9.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 8, 2021, and has the title “A Surprise in Africa: Air Pollution Falls as Economies Rise.”)

The National Academy of Sciences study mentioned above is:

Hickman, Jonathan E., Niels Andela, Kostas Tsigaridis, Corinne Galy-Lacaux, Money Ossohou, and Susanne E. Bauer. “Reductions in No≪Sub≫2≪/Sub≫ Burden over North Equatorial Africa from Decline in Biomass Burning in Spite of Growing Fossil Fuel Use, 2005 to 2017.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 7 (2021): e2002579118.

Chinese People Yearn for Freedom of Speech

(p. B1) For years, the Chinese government has prevented its 1.4 billion people from speaking freely online. A digital wall separated them from the rest of the world.

Then, for a precious few days, that wall was breached.

Clubhouse, a new social media app that emerged faster than the censors could block it, became a place for Mandarin Chinese speakers from the mainland and anywhere else to speak their minds. They had a lot to say.

. . .

The Chinese government blocked the app Monday [Feb. 8, 2021] afternoon. I knew it was coming, and yet I still didn’t expect to feel so dismayed.

For that brief moment, people in China proved that they are as creative and well spoken as (p. B6) people who enjoy the freedom to express themselves. They lined up, sometimes for hours, to wait for their turns to speak. They argued for the rights of the government loyalists to speak despite their disagreements. They held many honest, sincere conversations, sometimes with tears and sometimes with laughter.

Those conversations helped illuminate why the Chinese government blocks free speech online in the first place. Those free-flowing exchanges threaten to debunk the caricatures that the state-controlled media often foists upon the Chinese people. The state media dismisses people like the Tiananmen protesters, pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong or those in Taiwan who want the island to take a different path from the mainland.

Likewise, mainlanders got a chance to prove that they aren’t brainwashed drones. People who had been demonized got a chance to speak out and be humanized.

Over the past two decades, Beijing has developed the most sophisticated online censorship system in the world. Big online platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were blocked long ago. Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, a growing number of topics have become off limits on the Chinese internet. Clubhouse gave mainland Chinese users a chance to flock to chatrooms focused on those taboos.

. . .

Several chatrooms were devoted to the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square, a heavily censored topic on the Chinese internet. Cai Chongguo, a student leader during the protests, talked for about four hours, sharing his stories and answering questions from thousands of people.

. . .

Even during the freewheeling conversation, censorship was on the minds of many. On Monday afternoon, one room that reached Clubhouse’s maximum of 5,000 users featured speakers sharing their concerns over whether they would be questioned by the authorities for speaking out on the app.

. . .

A few hours later, mainland users began to report that the app had been blocked. Several rooms were set up immediately for people to chat it over. I joined a room for people to mourn the blocking.

The title of the room featured three candle emoticons. People lined up to share their most memorable experience. A few speakers cried.

. . .

Ms. Sun, who lives in Germany, had never talked about such politically sensitive topics with strangers. Then, on Saturday, she had waited more than two hours to speak in a chatroom about those very topics with thousands of people from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other parts of the world.

Someday, she said in an interview, Chinese people would be able to talk freely. Many Eastern Germans didn’t expect the Berlin Wall to fall in 1989, she added, but it happened.

“Nobody can predict the future,” Ms. Sun said. “We should believe in humanity and humanity’s yearning for freedom.”

For the full commentary, see:

Li Yuan. “THE NEW NEW WORLD; China’s Spirit Shines Behind Firewall.” The New York Times (Wednesday, February 10, 2021): B1 & B6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb. 9, 2021, and has the title “THE NEW NEW WORLD; The Great Firewall Cracked, Briefly. A People Shined Through.”)