Hello! I am Lars E. Schonander, a writer for MediaFile and a blogger on international affairs, tech, and general wonkery. Happy Monday! Here is my weekly newsletter with a weekly analysis with interesting data, along with links related to things I found particularly interesting that week. Any Questions? Send me a message or just respond to this email!
The Weekly Data:
This week, the dataset is from the government, from the Federal Student Aid department of the Department of Education. Foreign Gifts to universities, such as donations from foreign non-profits to American universities have to be reported to the government, with the last six years of foreign gifts being directly available.
To start, I decided to look at the top countries based on mean gifts and then see how much they changed over time. Unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia is number one at the start and remains number one throughout the six year reporting period.
Then, I decided to look at the distribution of gifts for the top ten recipients of gifts in the United States.
It’s the log for the X (y) axis because the way it was originally distributed was most of the gifts were clustered at the bottom, with a very few extreme gifts. By taking the log of how much each gift costed, it is easier to visualize the distribution of the gifts. As seen, there is quite a bit of variance overall, but to no surprise, Harvard is number one.
Finally, I decided to map the total amount of gifts given to each American state. A map is better in this case to show what states did not manage to receive any donations from foreign donors as at all.
Some states did not receive any donations, include Alaska and Hawaii, which are not pictured on this map. California being the recipient of the majority of gifts makes sense when one notes that Stanford is in California along with the entirety of the UC system, and then some.
Now, some links…
Samuel Huntington (The National Interest): Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite
Debates over national identity are a pervasive characteristic of our time. In part, they raise rhetorical questions, but they also have profound implications for American society and American policy at home and abroad. Different perceptions--especially between the citizenry and the more cosmopolitan elites--of what constitutes national identity generate different national interests and policy priorities.
Toby Shorin: The Desire for Full Automation
What does “fully automated” mean, and what can we learn about the desire for “full automation?”
These two words usually come attached to another pair: “luxury communism.” Originally proposed by Aaron Bastani, the phrase’s popularity was compounded by the release of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ 2015 book Inventing the Future. Intentionally or not, “fully automated luxury communism” has become the calling card of left acceleration, the basic political stances of which I will now briefly rehearse.
Pankaj Mishra (NYRB): A Long Undeclared Emergency
Ambedkar, however—as Gyan Prakash writes in Emergency Chronicles, his acute analysis of the sudden collapse of democracy in India in the mid-1970s—was “convinced that Indian society lacked democratic values.” India’s new ruling elite “had not broken from the hold of the privileged landed classes and upper castes.” Inheriting power from the country’s departing British rulers in 1947, they presided over a “passive” revolution from above rather than a radical socioeconomic transformation from below. This is why Ambedkar felt that in a society riven by caste and class, where neither equality nor fraternity was established as a principle, “political democracy” urgently needed to be supplemented by broad social transformations—the end, for instance, of cruel discrimination against low-caste Hindus.
Justin Bachman (Bloomberg Businessweek): Hedge Funds Are Tracking Private Jets to Find the Next Megadeal
If you have a meeting with Warren Buffett in Omaha and you want to keep it a secret, consider driving. The airports are being watched.
In April, a stock research firm told clients that a Gulfstream V owned by Houston-based Occidental Petroleum Corp. had been spotted at an Omaha airport. The immediate speculation was that Occidental executives were negotiating with Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. to get financial help in their $38 billion offer for rival Anadarko Petroleum Corp. Two days later, Buffett announced a $10 billion investment in Occidental.
N+1: The Intellectual Situation
A Diary
[Part 1]
Wake up late. Headache from somewhere. We drag ourselves to the front door to pick up the mail, sweating. At least if there were something to read! The mailman folded a certain thin magazine to fit it into the slot. We recognize it. Oh, we know it all too well.
Designated Haters
The New Republic, for quite a while now, has been a Major League culture magazine supporting a farm team political bureau. The authoritative back of the book lends its stature to young political writers, who lash out from their Beltway cribs. In the late 1990s this arrangement reached its apotheosis. While Martin Peretz, the owner, became the George Steinbrenner of magazine chiefs—impatient with editors, prone to embarrassing pronouncements (on Israel)—and the political writers got brattier, the literary section achieved an unprecedented standing. When The New Republic took a writer down—as it notoriously did with Toni Morrison, Judith Butler, Frank Bidart, Don DeLillo, Elaine Scarry, Colson Whitehead, Kurt Andersen, Sharon Olds, Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Barbara Kingsolver—people noticed. It was the best literary section in the country.
What I’m Reading
Currently reading a book on the lives of the people who ran the Frankfurt School called The Hotel Abyss.
What I’m Working On
Whipping up a webpage doing d3 visualizations of the foreign gifts dataset. Mainly to play around with d3-geo and do some fun stuff with tooltips, such as having graphics in the tooltips like in this Axios map.
I’m also currently writing two seperate pieces. One on the relation between the liberal arts and the tech industry and another why the best analog to the United State’s current situation is not the Weimar Republic, but 19th century Tsarist Russia.
Thanks!
Thanks for taking the time to read this, I will be back next Monday. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter or reach out via email.