A Double Bank-shot of Conjecture

The Sunday Night Reader for 3/27/22

Mar 27, 2022

IL-13 Race is Under Way

It was clear from this week’s forum for Democratic candidates in the Illinois 13th congressional district that Nikki Budzinski considers herself to be on a glide-path to the nomination. Hand-picked by Dick Durbin, time working on the $15 minimum wage with Governor Pritzker, a spot at the Office of Management and Budget with President Biden, years with major unions — she’s probably earned it, even if it a bit dispiriting for it to seem a forgone conclusion. My heart was with the underdogs, David Palmer and Ellis Taylor. But Budzinski was a quantum leap better than Betsy Dirksen Londrigan has been the last couple of cycles, so I won’t complain too loudly.

I also won’t complain about how aggressive, thoughtful, and current the questions were from the forum’s hosts: Bend the Arc, the Ubuntu Project, and Indivisible Illinois. Well done to them.

My live-captured notes of the event are here, if you’d like to read in detail.

An Appreciation: The Virgin Suicides

I revisit Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel every few years, but, somehow, I’ve never been so struck by the narration previously. The collective boys next door always speak as “we.” Their names are rattled off throughout, but we (the collective readers, I suppose) never know which one is putting this down. Every et. al. has a primary author, and we’re given no asterisk to know him by.

It’s a perfect affectation. They’ve issued their collective report from the Lisbon Sisters’ still, secret house. Rumors, photos, interviews with broken men. “Exhibits,” they call them from their “strange curatorship,” attached to a case file addressed to no one in particular (just us). Which is fitting, their entire relationship with the girls, even before their deaths was passed in code. Bedroom lights flicked on and off across the street. Missals and prayer cards in bike spokes and albums played back and forth over the telephone.

“The girls’ signals reached us and no one else, like a radio station picked up by our braces. At night, afterimages flashed on our inner eyelids, or hovered over our beds like a swarm of fireflies. Our inability to respond only made the signals more important,” they tell us.

Later, “[W]e had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them…It didn’t matter in the end how old they’d been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time.”

It’s life at its most swept-up and teenaged, and it’s the truth we try to ignore. Intimacy is staticky supposition — a double bank-shot of conjecture, a shared investigation riddled with gaps.

Poster for The Virgin Suicides, showing a girl's face as she lies facing the camera in close up. Light washes out the top of the picture. The text about the movie is at the bottom. — Sofia Coppola did a very nice job with The Virgin Suicides in 1999.

‘It’s Not Even Close’

Russia has oil. Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and America have tech. An optimistic take on the economic Cold War that the invasion of Ukraine is likely to breed. The Wall Street Journal’s Gregg Ip clarifies a lot of cross-currents.

“This Cold War will be much more of an economic contest than the first, and the balance of economic power favors the U.S. and its allies. And it’s not even close…

While sanctions on Russia demonstrate the West’s control of the global financial system, long-run economic advantage will come from technology and knowledge. In pure science — such as space travel and atomic energy — Russia and China certainly hold their own. But in commercially useful technology, Western companies lead in almost every field, from commercial aviation and biotechnology to semiconductors and software…

Catching up with the West is no easy task, as semiconductors illustrate. Western companies dominate all the key steps in this critical and highly complex industry, from chip design (led by U.S.-based Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm and AMD and Britain’s ARM) to the fabrication of advanced chips (led by Intel, Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung ) and the sophisticated machines that etch chip designs onto wafers (produced by Applied Materials and Lam Research in the U.S., the Netherlands’ ASML Holding and Japan’s Tokyo Electron ).

Russia and China have made efforts to reduce this dependence. Russia developed locally designed microprocessors called Elbrus and Baikal to run data centers, cybersecurity operations and other applications. Though neither has achieved significant market share, they ‘represent the pinnacle of local design capability,’ said Kostas Tigkos, principal at Jane’s, a defense intelligence provider. Russia hoped that they would eventually displace chips made by Intel and AMD, he said. ‘This would not only have been the foundation for diversifying their installed base, but a stepping stone for exports of those processors to other friendly nations.’ But without manufacturers like TSMC to make the chips, Russia is facing ‘the complete disintegration of their aspirations to develop their own industry.’

China has a much bigger semiconductor industry than Russia, and its partly state-owned national champion, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. (SMIC), could in theory make Russia’s chips, but that would take at least a year, Mr. Tigkos said. Moreover, its efforts to catch up to its Taiwanese competitor have been set back by sanctions.” Read more.