James' World 2

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My interest in capitalism began with an observation. I worked as an economics reporter for six years, from 2013 to 2019, for some of the biggest radio shows in the US. In that time, I never once used the word “capitalism” on air.

Then, in the summer of 2017, during a zeitgeisty taping of The Nod podcast, a panel discussion turned to the economic message embedded in Jay-Z’s new record, 4:44. Vinson Cunningham, a writer for the New Yorker, asserted that “capitalism is not the answer for Black people.”

It hit me: Economics reporters like myself weren’t talking about capitalism. Everyone else was. I reported this observation to skeptical econ-colleagues, who chalked it up to youthful nonsense — but I spent years thinking about what had happened and why.

Now, years later, some of those thoughts have crystallized in a new Today, Explained series, “Blame Capitalism.” In the four-part series, which is airing on Fridays in September, we talk to economists, thinkers, and regular Americans about what happened to change our attitudes about our economic system. Why did we lose faith? Can we get it back? And should we try?

The best way to understand capitalism is to live it. We have no choice. The second best way to understand it is to read about it. Below are five new-ish books, and one very old one, that I read while reporting the series.

You can listen to “Blame Capitalism” and Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.

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A first edition of Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith’s book The Wealth Of Nations is displayed at the Dutch House of Representatives library in The Hague on May 31, 2018. Bart Maat/AFP via Getty Images

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Eva Redamonti

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On May 17, 1986, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum unleashed its flying reptile at Andrews Air Force Base. Known as Q.N. to the engineers and experts who created the flyer, the model was a half-size replica of the immense pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus northropi that had just been discovered a decade before. Technically called an ornithopter, because it was meant to be birdlike in the way it flew, Q.N. was a mock-up with an 18-foot wingspan. “We had to go through the evolutionary cycle in our development, just like nature did. But we were going about a million years a week,” project leader Paul MacCready told the Los Angeles Times earlier that year. Q.N. had chewed through $700,000 in funding and staggered through a series of crashes before the flapping aircraft was finally ready to fly.

More than 300,000 people gathered at the air base, ready to see a pterosaur—or something pterosaur-like—take to the air for the first time in 66 million years. The reptile-like flying machine had done just fine out in the arid desert of Death Valley, where it was filmed for the IMAX movie On the Wing, so a tour around Andrews seemed simple enough. But crowds may have left the event wondering how such animals could have taken to the air in the first place. Soon after being released from a tow line used to get Q.N. into the air, the mechanical pterosaur began to spin and turn so sharply that the faux-reptile’s neck snapped, and it crashed, headless, to the ground.

Despite Q.N.’s public embarrassment, however, the ornithopter’s inspiration has lived on. In the early 1990s, when Q.N. was still in storage at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, curator Russell Lee made the case that the pterosaur should be accessioned into the collection as an important part of aviation history. “A lot of thought and effort went into developing this thing,” Lee says, adding Q.N. was a state-of-the-art aircraft despite its failure. And now, the spirit of Q.N. lives on as experts are going back to these ancient creatures to find new ways to fly, from aircraft with pterosaur-like crests to pterosaur-inspired spacecraft exploring the nooks and crannies of Mars.

Despite the family resemblance, pterosaurs were not dinosaurs. Rather, they were close evolutionary cousins of the dinosaurs that shared many of the same biological hallmarks. A hot-blooded metabolism, bodies covered in multicolored feathers, and lightweight bones assisted the rise of the pterosaurs at the same time that dinosaurs were beginning to stalk around on land around 243 million years ago. But what makes pterosaurs immediately distinctive are their wings.

The wing of a pterosaur was much more like a bat’s than a bird’s. Pterosaurs all shared extremely elongated fourth fingers—the equivalent of your ring fingers—that could be longer than the entire rest of their bodies. These hyper-elongated digits supported thin membranes that connected to the reptile’s sides and legs, sometimes with some accessory membranes attached between the legs and hips. Even though pterosaurs also had feathers on their heads, necks, and torsos, they relied on these leathery wings to get aloft. But how they used their membrane-based wings stumped paleontologists for nearly two centuries.

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An artist’s illustration of Quetzalcoatlus flying De Agostini via Getty Images

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The long evolutionary journey that created modern humans began with a single step—or more accurately—with the ability to walk on two legs. One of our earliest-known ancestors, Sahelanthropus, began the slow transition from ape-like movement some six million years ago, but Homo sapiens wouldn’t show up for more than five million years. During that long interim, a menagerie of different human species lived, evolved, and died out, intermingling and sometimes interbreeding along the way. As time went on, their bodies changed, as did their brains and their ability to think, as seen in their tools and technologies.

To understand how Homo sapiens eventually evolved from these older lineages of hominins, the group including modern humans and our closest extinct relatives and ancestors, scientists are unearthing ancient bones and stone tools, digging into our genes, and recreating the changing environments that helped shape our ancestors’ world and guide their evolution.

These lines of evidence increasingly indicate that H. sapiens originated in Africa, although not necessarily in a single time and place. Instead, it seems diverse groups of human ancestors lived in habitable regions around Africa, evolving physically and culturally in relative isolation, until climate-driven changes to African landscapes spurred them to intermittently mix and swap everything from genes to tool techniques. Eventually, this process gave rise to the unique genetic makeup of modern humans.

“East Africa was a setting in foment—one conducive to migrations across Africa during the period when Homo sapiens arose,” says Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program. “It seems to have been an ideal setting for the mixing of genes from migrating populations widely spread across the continent. The implication is that the human genome arose in Africa. Everyone is African, and yet not from any one part of Africa.”

New discoveries are always adding key waypoints to the chart of our human journey. This timeline of Homo sapiens features some of the best evidence documenting how we evolved.

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Homo sapien skulls on display at the Hubei Provincial Museum, China. (Public domain/Wikimedia Commons)

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In the constellation Aquarius, invisible to the naked eye, lies a star that might change history. Home to seven mysterious planets—each around the size of our own Earth—the TRAPPIST-1 system is regarded by some as the crown jewel of astronomy’s efforts to find life in the Milky Way. With not one, but three worlds orbiting in the so-called habitable zone, where water can flow and life can thrive, TRAPPIST-1 is one of humanity’s best and brightest opportunities to chase the discovery of a lifetime.

More than science is at stake: what we find—or don’t—on these worlds will shape science forever.

What sets TRAPPIST-1 apart is its striking commonality. At the heart of this system is a small, dim star called a red dwarf. Ranging between 8 percent and 57 percent of the mass of our own sun, red dwarfs quietly make up a remarkable 73 percent of all stars in the galaxy, and are suspected to harbor at least three planets per star. Naturally, this has piqued the curiosity of those who study life in the cosmos—astrobiologists. Could alien life thrive around these small red suns?

The possibility tantalizes the philosopher, but even more so the astronomer: planets around red dwarfs are easier to find than around any other type of star. In fact, the TRAPPIST-1 system was discovered in 2016 with a telescope only two feet across. Because the star is small even by red dwarf standards, its Earth-sized planets stand out easily; when they cross, or transit, the star, they block roughly half a percent of its total light output. For comparison, the Earth only blocks 0.01 percent of our much larger sun’s light when it passes in front of it. In terms of detectability, red dwarfs seem to be the clear winner, and out of 445 red dwarf systems (I asked Jessie Christensen, the scientist who maintains the NASA Exoplanet Archive, what the latest count was), TRAPPIST-1 is one of the brightest that transits, making it a favorite target for astrobiology.

But red dwarfs have a dark side. They are not simply smaller, redder versions of our own well-behaved sun; they are turbulent, active sources of extreme radiation. While Earth experiences violent solar outbursts called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) roughly once every 25 years, a planet that orbits TRAPPIST-1 experiences them weekly. And the bigger the host star, the more powerful the CME. If a planet does not have a strong magnetic field to protect it, a CME can strip away its atmosphere until it is a barren, uninhabitable rock.

In addition, red dwarfs are born hot, and cool over time. This means that a planet may have its water inventory boiled away before it gets the chance to settle into the habitable zone, or that a planet may begin its life habitable before freezing over. Finally, red dwarf planets live very close to their star, and when two things in space orbit close together, one will eventually come to face the other—the way the same side of the moon is always facing the Earth. In the case of TRAPPIST-1’s planets, this means that one hemisphere may experience eternal daytime, and the other, eternal night: perhaps unideal conditions for life to evolve.

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This illustration shows the seven Earth-size planets of TRAPPIST-1, an exoplanet system about 40 light-years away, based on data current as of February 2018. The image shows the planets’ relative sizes, but does not represent their orbits to scale. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt, T. Pyle (IPAC)

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In a neat little neighborhood in Venice, Calif., there’s a block of squat, similar homes, filled with mortals spending their finite days on the planet eating pizza with friends, blowing out candles on birthday cakes, and binging late-night television. Halfway down the street, there’s a cavernous black modern box. This is where Bryan Johnson is working on what he calls “the most significant revolution in the history of Homo sapiens.” 

Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls his “biological age.” That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates aging—like eating a cookie, or getting less than eight hours of sleep—as an “act of violence.” 

Johnson is not the only ultra-rich middle-aged man trying to vanquish the ravages of time. Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel were both early investors in Unity Biotechnology, a company devoted to developing therapeutics to slow or reverse diseases associated with aging. Elite athletes employ therapies to keep their bodies young, from hyperbaric and cryotherapy chambers to  “recovery sleepwear.” But Johnson’s quest is not just about staying rested or maintaining muscle tone. It’s about turning his whole body over to an anti-aging algorithm. He believes death is optional. He plans never to do it. 

Outsourcing the management of his body means defeating what Johnson calls his “rascal mind”—the part of us that wants to eat ice cream after dinner, or have sex at 1 a.m., or drink beer with friends. The goal is to get his 46-year-old organs to look and act like 18-year-old organs. Johnson says the data compiled by his doctors suggests that Blueprint has so far given him the bones of a 30-year-old, and the heart of a 37-year-old. The experiment has “proven a competent system is better at managing me than a human can,” Johnson says, a breakthrough that he says is “reframing what it means to be human.” He describes his intense diet and exercise regime as falling somewhere between the Italian Renaissance and the invention of calculus in the pantheon of human achievement. Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel; Johnson has his special green juice. 

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I was told the monkeys would be here, although nothing about this spot seemed particularly suitable for wildlife. On a stifling morning in late July, I stood in a large parking lot near Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, about 40 miles north of Miami. Cars drove in and out. Planes passed low overhead. It reeked of gasoline.

The only visible natural habitat was a sliver of forest, just a few hundred feet wide, wedged between the paved lot, a field of oil tanks, and a highway. I couldn’t find monkeys in the lot, so I tried my luck in the forest.

It turned out to be more of a swamp. With each step, thick mud crept past my ankles, making it difficult to move. A thorny underbrush etched puffy red lines into my bare legs.

Half an hour in, when I was about to turn back in pursuit of air conditioning and a fresh pair of socks, I heard a rustling overhead. I froze in place and looked up. There, through the branches, I saw the unmistakable face of a monkey.

To see exotic animals in Florida, one could visit Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Busch Gardens, or Zoo Miami. Or they could just step outside.

The Sunshine State is utterly brimming with nonnative species. More than 500 of them have been reported here, which is more than in any other state, and many of them are considered “invasive,” meaning they harm humans or ecosystems. For most of their evolutionary history, these species have never set foot in Florida — they’ve never been near a Publix, or Magic Kingdom, for that matter.

In the last few decades, Florida has become an unmanaged zoo, an uncontrolled experiment. And each year, the decision of what to do with it gets harder.

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A veiled chameleon in a patch of trees near a canal east of Fort Myers.Benji Jones

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Singapore’s prime minister has described climate change as “life and death.” He has reason to worry: Stifling temperatures and humidity already last all year, and the city-state has warmed at twice the global average over the past six decades.

Heat like this isn’t just uncomfortable. It can cause chronic illness and death, including heat exhaustion, kidney damage, and even heart attacks. With two-thirds of the global population expected to live in urban areas by 2050, urban heat is an enormous global health challenge.

Rapid urbanization has made Singapore hotter. A big part of the problem is how almost every global city is built.

Preventing climate change is out of Singapore’s control: The city-state emits less than 0.1% of global carbon emissions. But there is a surefire way to limit city temperatures, researchers say: Revive the natural processes that cooled the land before urbanization.

Most cities do not have Singapore’s wealth and centralized political system, which allow it to move quickly to build new infrastructure. But while some of Singapore’s strategies to reduce excess heat are expensive, many of them are straightforward, and cheaper than planning for, say, floods or hurricanes.

As temperature records were shattered around the world this summer, Singapore’s blueprint for slowing the urban impacts of extreme heat is gaining urgency.

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Singapore is rethinking its sweltering urban areas to dampen the effects of climate change. Can it be a model?

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In the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” an astronaut travels through a seeming tunnel of light. (In the novelization, he radios to mission control: “The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it’s full of stars!”) Earlier this summer, Artechouse, an organization producing immersive, technology-based art, started offering a science-backed version of a similar trip at its New York venue. The show, titled “Beyond the Light,” is a looping twenty-six-minute journey through space and other realms inspired by images from the James Webb Space Telescope (J.W.S.T.). Artechouse began talks with NASA about a show in 2018, and started pulling this one together earlier this year, after the first images captured by J.W.S.T. were released to the public last July.

There’s a long tradition of art about the stars. More than sixteen thousand years ago, cave explorers in what’s now Lascaux, France, painted animals that are believed to represent the constellations. A few hundred miles away and many centuries later—near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in 1889—Vincent van Gogh made “The Starry Night,” a swirling blur of color looming over a village. “I’m sure people have been painting the heavens for as long as they’ve been looking at them,” Maggie Masetti, the NASA social-media lead for the J.W.S.T. mission, told me. “Beyond the Light” is high-tech—video is projected on three walls and the floor of a vast room, while a powerful sound system thrums—but it’s also connected to traditional astro-art in the way it’s largely abstract and impressionistic (sometimes even Cubist). Although the show makes use of images taken by the Webb telescope, it is mostly imaginative. Splashes of color, bubbles, tubes, machinery, and glowing rocks covered with runes flow across the room in response to what the telescope has found.

When the show premièred, in June—its D.C. première is this Friday—a number of researchers involved with the J.W.S.T. were in attendance, among them Stefanie Milam, a NASA astrochemist; Macarena García Marín, an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency; and Mike Menzel, NASA’s mission-systems engineer for the Webb. They stood talking with Sandro Kereselidze, one of Artechouse’s founders. “It’s absolutely fantastic and beautiful,” Milam said. “We already tried to do our own art,” she went on—scientists producing images with the Webb had used “different components of the instruments, different wavelengths, or different filters, to really tell the story about a given image, because we want you to see the baby stars being formed in a giant cloud, or to see the Great Red Spot on Jupiter in multiple colors, or other storms in planetary atmospheres.” But now artists were telling other kinds of stories using the images. “What we do is sort of amateur art,” Milam said.

“We designed the telescope to wow the scientists,” Menzel agreed. Now, he said, “We’re here in an art show, watching some images that we helped produce becoming things that are almost iconic.”

Kereselidze saw similarities between the artists he worked with at Artechouse and the scientists. “We speak the same language,” he said. “We have the passion for expressing what we discovered.” There were some small science exhibits on a mezzanine, but the venue wasn’t trying to be a science museum. Instead, Kereselidze said, “The goal is to open up curious minds. If everything is, like, ‘A, B, C, D,’ it becomes like PowerPoint, right?”

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