John Hogan Morris

Reining in data centers sparks rare bipartisanship in statehouses With voters wary of AI and both parties’ ability to tackle it, the issue has not fallen along usual partisan lines, even in an election year.

"A rare source of bipartisanship has broken out in state capitols across the country: tackling data centers."

‘My ideas are a little revolutionary’: ecologist Suzanne Simard on intelligent forests, the climate and her critics Her research popularised the idea of the wood wide web, but the scientific backlash was brutal. As the author of The Mother Tree returns to the forest in a new book, she discusses her battle to reimag...

We have highly evolved organisms like trees and plants and algae ... more effective than anything we can possibly create ourselves.

#unlearn hubris and Descartes idea of organisms as mechanical

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

New Paper out with @financeandspace.bsky.social (open access!) about attempts to make voluntary carbon markets 'liquid' via legal standardization, and a source of climate finance for the Global South. Plenty of strange things happening in the process. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"Morality tales about virtuous entrepreneurs or predatory speculators are less descriptions of economic reality than prescriptive efforts to shape it. To label some capitalists as productive and others extractive is a political act – a way of trying to direct behavior toward socially desired ends."

Report – Hidden risks in NBFI: Mapping vulnerabilities from shadow banking | Finance Watch

www.finance-watch.org/policy-porta...

Is March the boogeyman for financial stability?

This month has an uncanny record:
🔹 March 2021 - Greensill Capital collapses
🔹 March 2021 - Archegos collapses
🔹 March 2023 - Credit Suisse collapses

A 🧵 on the role of shadow banks and what these episodes have in common 1/6

Report – Hidden risks in NBFI: Mapping vulnerabilities from shadow banking | Finance Watch

Risks that build up in the shadows don’t stay there. When shadow banks fail, losses spill back into the banking system, with public budgets & citizens’ deposits on the line!

It’s high time for a dedicated prudential framework.

Read more 👇 6/6

As Marx wrote, we are not fighting the machine, we are always fighting the capitalist application of the machine.

Fighting Not Drowning: Behind the Scenes at the ICJ Climate Hearings | Full Documentary YouTube video by The Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVG2...

Judging One’s Own Credit: Risks and Promises of an African Credit Rating Agency Faced with high borrowing costs, African leaders and the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) have selected Mauritius to host a continental...

www.megatrends-afrika.de/en/publicati...

An open letter to Grammarly and other plagiarists, thieves and slop merchants To everyone at Grammarly, I am writing a book right now, a really challenging endeavor that no doubt someone in Silicon Valley will think it’s fine to steal the day it’s published. I’ve been a profes...

I finally lost my shit about so-called AIs, LLMs, enshittification & everything fucking evil that @officialgrammarly.bsky.social is doing. I'm fucking furious, and not just about what 1 company has done. An open letter to Grammarly & the rest of the LLM hype machine www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...

🆕 Muskism - A Guide for the Perplexed

Join us for the launch of @quinnslobodian.com & @bentarnoff.com's new book: 'Muskism - A Guide for the Perplexed', featuring the authors in conversation with IIPP Prof. @ceciliarikap.bsky.social & PhD Candidate Iacopo Gronchi.

🔗 Register here: buff.ly/dlw2Ddw

Calculative Ethics: The Ambiguous Politics of Impact Finance Calculative Ethics examines social and development impact bonds as a form of ethical finance that adopts a fact-centred approach to addressing social ills. Impact bonds are shown to recast ethical inv...

I’m very pleased to share that my book 𝐶𝑎𝑙𝑐𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝐸𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑐𝑠 has been published in the RIPE Series in Global Political Economy by @routledgebooks.bsky.social. It examines impact bonds as a form of ethical finance and has been many years in the making, so it is wonderful to finally see it in print. 🧵

Latin America’s lithium triangle is now in the hands of the right A reversal of political fortune in the region has major implications for critical minerals

www.ft.com/content/0276...

Excited to be hosting a book talk by Austin Zeiderman in Sheffield on his book 'Artery: Racial Ecologies on Colombia’s Magdalena River' - 23rd March

More details inc link to Open Access copy of his book here 👇
sheffield.ac.uk/urban-instit...

🎉Announcement 🎉 For Women's History Month, @1autumnleaf.bsky.social and I have a special 4-part podcast mini-series on women who changed the world by applying mathematics to real-world problems
The first episode is out now @breakingmath.bsky.social👇🏻
(podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/p...)

parables.substack.com/p/the-two-de...

Blue Owl shopped debt for a CoreWeave data center. Lenders weren't sold. Blue Owl tried to line up debt for a Pennsylvania data center tied to CoreWeave, but lenders passed, underscoring growing caution around AI-linked credit.

Blue Owl is featured in this article as a bellwether. Not mentioned is that it is one of the key financiers of the data center boom, specializing in lending to firms like CoreWeave with "less-than-sterling credit." As this article suggests, investors are increasingly dubious. #AIbubble

Breeding Unicorns at the Federal Reserve: Patient Capital and the AI Boom How the Fed’s Quantitative Easing Policy fuelled the Tech Boom

wbateman.substack.com/p/breeding-u...

New in Area - 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝟑 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐬

'Alligator Alcatraz and the production of environmental carcerality in the Everglades' by Caitlin Jones et al.

This paper explores the weaponising of animals & landscapes to construct racialised geographies of fear in the U.S.

doi.org/10.1111/area...

How the UK mortgage market became so unstable The market has not been this jittery in decades — and that was before the Middle East conflict

How the UK mortgage market became so unstable ft.trib.al/i4VlNCh | opinion

My chapter in this book.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

✒️How do financing models reshape politics and spatial effects of infrastructure? Comparing two projects in Kenya, I show how G2G-PPP redistributes risk and control and essentially, who benefits. Please check out my new article in @urbanstudiesjournal.com: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Market Governance in Trumpworld Over the past year, the much-touted right-wing embrace of anti-monopolism has been reduced to a distant memory. What has emerged instead is a personalist form of market governance…

I’ve got a spicy essay on @lpeblog.bsky.social arguing Trump2 so far has been like 1979 deregulation returning as farce

lpeproject.org/blog/market-...

Projecting ambiguity in transnational environmental governance: who and what counts in accounting standards Transnational environmental governance is often characterised by its complexity, with overlapping initiatives pursued by actors with a mix of professional backgrounds and organisational types. Here...

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....