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"I like this piece by Kate Aronoff looking back on WPA "boondoggles" in the context of a suddenly much discussed job guarantee. A lot of people deserve congratulations for the suddenly much-discussedness of job guarantee proposals. People like William Darity, Darrick Hamilton, and Mark Paul, Pavlina Tcherneva, Randy Wray, and others have worked doggedly through years of winter to keep this (by no means new) idea alive while no major political faction in the United States was willing to give it the time of day. Now, all of a sudden, Democratic Party(ish) bigwigs including Kristen Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders are racing onto the bandwagon. Persistence pays (although perhaps not quite a living wage). Let's get this part out of the way. I'm for it, if it's well implemented. What about a UBI? I'm for that too, if it's well implemented. Do we need both? Well, they do complement each other: Pairing a job guarantee with a UBI would mitigate the risk that the "guarantee" would transmogrify under political pressure into a punitive workfare program. Pairing a UBI with a job guarantee would mitigate the risk that we neglect the broader project of integrating one another into a vibrant society, that we let a check in the mail substitute for human engagement. If we could get both a UBI and a JG, that'd be great. (Of course, if we did get both, we'd want the numbers to be different than either as a standalone.)"

More than a year after COVID-19 emerged, many mysteries persist about the disease: why do some people get so much sicker than others? Why does lung damage sometimes continue to worsen well after the body seems to have cleared the SARS-CoV-2 virus? And what is behind the extended, multi-organ illness that lasts for months in people with 'long COVID'? A growing number of studies suggest that some of these questions might be explained by the immune system mistakenly turning against the body - a phenomenon known as autoimmunity.

A sweeping effort to map a hospital's microorganisms has found that infectious pathogens hide in a place that's all about cleaning: the sink. Niranjan Nagarajan at the Genome Institute of Singapore and his colleagues sampled bacteria from bed rails, sinks and other sites in a Singapore hospital. Microbes that tend to grow in slimy 'biofilms' and cause hospital-acquired infections were prevalent on sink traps and faucet aerators, whereas skin-dwelling bacteria were abundant on objects, such as door knobs and bed rails, that are often touched. Frequently touched sites harboured multidrug-resistant microbes such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which might persist in the hospital environment for more than eight years, the team suggested.

The complexity of an ecological community can be distilled into a network, where diverse interactions connect species in a web of dependencies. Species interact directly with each other and indirectly through environmental effects, however to our knowledge the role of these ecosystem engineers has not been considered in ecological network models. Here we explore the dynamics of ecosystem assembly, where species colonization and extinction depends on the constraints imposed by trophic, service, and engineering dependencies. We show that our assembly model reproduces many key features of ecological systems, such as the role of generalists during assembly, realistic maximum trophic levels, and increased nestedness with mutualistic interactions. We find that ecosystem engineering has large and nonlinear effects on extinction rates. While small numbers of engineers reduce stability by increasing primary extinctions, larger numbers of engineers increase stability by reducing primary extinctions and extinction cascade magnitude. Our results suggest that ecological engineers may enhance community diversity while increasing persistence by facilitating colonization and limiting competitive exclusion.

In hierarchical relationships-between employer and employee, parent and child, or teacher and student-social rank is understood and bolstered by social norms. In contrast, symmetric relations-between friends, neighbors, classmates, or coworkers- are equitable. One party can't claim dominance over the other. But when ambiguity persists about who holds the upper hand, the likelihood of conflict increases. Animal research yields parallel findings, suggesting that when two animals of the same species are similarly sized, conflict is more likely than when there is a size disparity.

"Since we first started carving notches in sticks, we have used things in the world to help us to know that world. But never before have we relied on things that did not mirror human patterns of reasoning - we knew what each notch represented - and that we could not later check to see how our non-sentient partners in knowing came up with those answers. If knowing has always entailed being able to explain and justify our true beliefs - Plato's notion, which has persisted for over two thousand years - what are we to make of a new type of knowledge, in which that task of justification is not just difficult or daunting but impossible?"