Global Risks 2013 explores catastrophes that are too big and unknown to hedge, even if many of them are already coming to pass. Its portfolio is fifty risk factors thick, with water shortages, liquidity crises and orbital debris, each precisely weighted by likelihood and potential impact and charted like commodities. Backlash against globalization is up. Extreme weather is up. Nothing is down. It’s never been clear exactly whose nightmares these risks are, and the lack of attribution is part of the point. They are supposed to rise up out of the data, objective and urgent, the voice of the planet demanding to be heard.

The data visualizations in Global Risks 2013, network charts and scatter plots of drifting risk points, look like graphic notation from the avant-garde wing of jazz. Simultaneously abstracting and reconstituting survey data into swarms of color, the graphics go for impact over legibility, sketching impressions of an intricate score that, if played as music, would carry a clear, smooth, rising melody.

-“The Slopes of Davos” by T. Paul Cox

The New Inquiry Magazine, Vol. 16: New World Order

The New Inquiry Magazine, Vol. 16: New World Order

From the Editor’s Note:

It’s been clear to most people for some time that the world we live in is ending. This has always been true and also never been true enough. But at least this world, the one where white men and their valets conspire to make money make money, is on its way out. The numbers aren’t adding up. People are getting jumpy. This much is obvious.

What was the world, and what ran it? The clues have been all around us. Yet the technocratic psychopath guild that controls the media — the Bilderberg group, the reptilians, the Masons — try never to let the narrative get so far out of their grasp that we’re able to piece it all together.

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-Keguro Macharia, “On Quitting”

When I returned to the U.S. from Kenya in December 2011, I could feel the poison re-entering my system: my skin changed again, as the hard Baltimore water scrubbed off the softer Nairobi water, and, with it, whatever healing Nairobi had effected. I returned to James MacArthur and Christopher Dorner, to the disposability and killability of black men; I returned to “jokes” about nine-year-old girls; to a panel discussion on Django Unchained hosted by film scholars at my university that did not, in the initial panel composition, include any single black scholar; I returned to a post-racial U.S., which meant that racist jokes could circulate with impunity; I returned to a world that Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois would have found too familiar, and mourned.

I returned to a world that Caribbean-born, Liberian intellectual Edward Wilmot Blyden described as uninhabitable. From the mid- to the late-nineteenth-century, Blyden had urged Afro-diasporic populations from the U.S. and the Caribbean to move to Africa, convinced that they could not thrive in western modernity. In helping to found a university in Liberia, he argued that any work produced during and after the Renaissance, the so-called age of exploration, was too racially toxic for African students. And so he attempted to create structures of knowledge devoid of toxicity. Reading Blyden shifted something in me and for me. I began to ask whether it was possible to live outside of toxicity. Whether, in fact, what felt like a utopian possibility rendered impossible by globalization could be any kind of model.

-“On Quitting” by Keguro Macharia

Drawing by Christopher Stackhouse.

Teens are always interesting. In a teen’s life, something is always going wrong. Very little actually happens, but all of it is of enormous consequence. Or at least that’s how we assume it feels, from our definitively creepy position of adult voyeur. Many tweets in the #followateen feed are extremely condescending, as is Thorpe’s original tweet. The description of a “little teen life” minimizes the teen. The appeal of #followateen as characterized is intrinsically connected to the smallness and inconsequence of the teen’s life. After all, we’re all sick of being grownups, sick of caring about large things like jobs and bills and marriage and aging. It’s probably no coincidence that #followateen caught on like wildfire right as all taxes were due in the U.S. If only our lives were smaller, and if only we still had so few big things to care about that the small things could feel big. In a teen’s experience, everything is a crisis — school, clothes, parents, cars, prom, shoes, backpacks, homework. Every tiny thing is crucial and worth crying about — or, in this case, worth tweeting about. Teens are the ideal tweeters because they are never happy and always interesting.

-Helena Fitzgerald, “All Our Little Lives”

The doctors tell B.A.D. girls to keep a “mood diary.” They use words like “document,” and “familiarize,” and “monitor.” And “manage.” I sigh: Do I have to? Isn’t this just, like, Twitter? And also impossible? (Ellen Forney in her graphic memoir of bipolarity, Marbles: “How could I keep track of my mind, with my own mind?” She almost doesn’t.) But slowly I learn to follow self-reportage like a script, eschewing a prescription, getting better by pretending to be more here, less here. I’m 25 and 26 and some days I’m fine, “asymptomatic.” Then I’m 27 and those days are fewer, then farther apart, and I dread the day after which no more days are fine.

In I, Mary MacLane, she writes to God and you know a time has come. There’s no more externalized bipolarity than MacLane turning to heaven from the depths of a death-mood, just as, fifteen years earlier, she waited for the Devil on a high.

In that moment, whenhe finally arrives:

It feels as if sparks of fire and ice crystals ran riot in my veins with my blood; as if a thousand pinpoints pierced my flesh, and every other point a point of pleasure, and every other point a point of pain; as if my heart were laid to rest in a bed of velvet and cotton-wool but kept awake by sweet violin arias; as if milk and honey and the blossoms of the cherry flowed into my stomach and then vanished utterly; as if strange, beautiful worlds lay spread out before my eyes, alternately in dazzling light and complete darkness with chaotic rapidity…

This is genius but not mad, only the extremest poesis of manic lust. Even mild upswings make me feel invincible enough to love whoever can hurt me the most, and so, in the summer, I ride on the back of a motorcycle down Mulholland Drive. In the fall I climb onto the unprotected ledge of a hotel looming over the West Side Highway. Come winter I don’t fuck with condoms, and by spring I’m forgetting to not to say I love you.

-“A Woman Under the Influence” by Sarah Nicole Prickett

In I, Mary MacLane the word “genius” occurs in one turn of phrase, used just twice. “There is no Cleverness in this I write,” she says (the capital C implying not clever, which is elsewhere uncapitalized and used differently, but something like pretentious). “There is writing skill and my dead-feeling genius.” Two hundred pages earlier, she’d ended said elegy with: “I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting dead-feeling genius. And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.”

At 36 it is too late to say she’s mad, anyway. Were MacLane alive in the ‘70s or the ‘90s or now, it would have been said by her psychiatrists at 19 or at 21 or certainly by 27, when she had left cities and begun to keep diaries again. But in 1917, in Butte, Montana, much of the grandeur had gone from her madness, and the delusion from her genius, and maybe there was no genius without the delusion. But what a delusion! To claim the fatherly crown, whether deserved or not, is a radical and astounding act, and it happened a hundred and ten years before, say, Sheila Heti’s “female genius” debate. There had never been as defiantly of-herself a heroine, or, as MacLane said in I Await, a not-heroine.

-Sarah Nicole Prickett, “A Woman Under the Influence”

In a time of war, the FBN began the first in a long series of collaborations with pharmaceutical conglomerates and drug cartels, which continued in some form throughout the twentieth century. To achieve national security objectives, the drug enforcement agencies that divided cartels from corporations by legal fiat collaborated to produce drugs for which they otherwise threw people in prison. These alliances strengthened the power of these agencies to determine the public understanding of what was legal and what wasn’t. They also allowed the feds to work with drug companies and cartels alike during the Cold War to develop various chemical military technologies and leverage on-the-ground power. But this double-dealing led to schizophrenic outcomes. Most spectacularly, during the Second World War, the U.S. Treasury Department gold vaults held 3,000,000 pounds of raw Macedonian opium, while the military was court-martialing G.I.s for marijuana use.

-“Dens of Bureaucracy” by Renata Limón.

CHAT ROOM: Activist Microcelebrities

An edited gchat about the perils and possibilities for activists seeking attention for movements through social media.

By Rob Horning and Nathan Jurgenson.

Pop sounds from the People’s Republic of China walk a fine line between dabbling in adventurous experimentalism, selling out to the lure of big business, and negotiating political pressures. When I visited the capital last year, the finishing touches were being put to Beijing’s Dada club, which had already started hyping appearances from a whole host of dubstep pioneers including Pinch and Kode9. Meanwhile the vast National Centre for the Performing Arts, nicknamed ‘the Egg’ for its organic, titanium architecture, was featuring an evening of patriotic opera. One night in Beijing offers a kaleidoscope of incongruities, from manic pop-stardom to triumphalist hipsterdom.

But while the cacophony on the surface might suggest that China’s market reforms have eroded the Party’s capacity for cultural control, the reality is far more sober. The seeming diversity of Chinese pop only masks how institutionalized it is. While Chinese pop stars like Cui Jian, the grandfather of subversive Chinese rock, and the gender-transgressive Li Yuchun, who found fame in 2005 on Super Girl, an Idol-like contest that attracted hundreds of millions of viewers in an unprecedented “democratic moment” for the Chinese pop-music industry, seem to suggest diversity, their talent was nurtured by the music-conservatory system. Beijing’s cultural academies are inextricably bound up in the state’s system of rewarding those who play the game with prizes and prestigious tenure. Li YuchunMusicians like Li Yuchun form a singularly useful component in the state’s cultural project, stifling truly dissident art in a haze of superficial unorthodoxy. And in 2012, Beijing officials announced a £1.4 billion “China Music Valley” project, encompassing studios, music schools and five-star hotels, fully displaying the state’s persistent investments in soft power.

-“Power Pop” by En Liang Khong

-“A Guy Named Frank” by Danielle King