Indigenous rangers in Australia’s Western Desert got a rare close-up with the northern marsupial mole, which is tiny, light-colored and blind, and almost never comes to the surface.

By Anthony Ham

May 1, 2024

If you saw a northern marsupial mole, you might be surprised. Known to the First Nations peoples in the Western Desert of Australia as the kakarratul, it is eyeless and has shaggy golden fur. Just four inches from nose to tail, the animal would fit in the palm of your hand. And unlike the mole species of North America, it is a marsupial.

But you probably wouldn’t see one: While the animals are plentiful, sightings remain extremely rare because northern marsupial moles live in tunnels beneath sand dunes, navigating them with a swimming-like motion using flipper-like front feet.

“This is the hardest of all the animals to find,” said Denzel Hunter, an Indigenous ranger who works to survey and conserve wildlife in the lands of the Nyangumarta people. “Every time we go out looking for northern marsupial moles, we find evidence that they’re there. But I’ve never seen one.”

Earlier this month, Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa Martu rangers found a kakarratul in the Great Sandy Desert, nearly 1,000 miles northeast of Perth. Their photographs of the creature, which has been spotted only a handful of times in the past decade, expand scientific knowledge of the species as well as of the wider desert regions that make up close to one-third of Australia’s land mass.

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Capitalism is now dead, in the sense that its dynamics no longer govern our economies. In that role it has been replaced by something fundamentally different, which I call technofeudalism. At the heart of my thesis is an irony that may sound confusing at first but which I contend makes perfect sense: the thing that has killed capitalism is… capital itself. Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host. What caused this to happen? Two main developments: the privatization of the internet by America’s and China’s Big Tech. And the manner in which Western governments and central banks responded to the 2008 great financial crisis.

If we do pay attention, it is not hard to see that capital’s mutation into what I call cloud capital has demolished capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits. Of course, markets and profits remain ubiquitous—indeed, markets and profits were ubiquitous under feudalism too—they just aren’t running the show anymore. What has happened over the last two decades is that profit and markets have been evicted from the epicenter of our economic and social system, pushed out to its margins, and replaced. With what? Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud rent. As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labor, but they are not in charge as they once were. They have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labor—in addition to the waged labor we perform, when we get the chance.

This great transformation, triggered by capital’s recent mutation, comes three centuries after capital’s original triumph in transforming feudalism into capitalism. Capitalism prevailed when profit overwhelmed rent, a historic triumph coinciding with the transformation of productive work and property rights into commodities to be sold via labor and share markets respectively. It was not just an economic victory. Whereas rent reeked of vulgar exploitation, profit claimed moral superiority as a just reward to brave entrepreneurs risking everything to navigate the treacherous currents of stormy markets. Nevertheless, despite profit’s triumph, rent survived capitalism’s golden age in the same way that remnants of the DNA of our ancient ancestors, including long-extinct serpents and microbes, survive in human DNA. Capitalist mega-firms, like Ford, Edison, General Electric, General Motors, ThyssenKrupp, Volkswagen, Toyota, Sony and all the others, generated the profits that outweighed rent and propelled capitalism to its dominance. However, like remora fish living parasitically in the shadow of great sharks, some rentiers not only survived but, in fact, flourished by feeding on the generous scraps left in profit’s wake. Oil companies, for example, have raked in gargantuan ground rents from the right to drill on particular plots of land or ocean beds—not to mention the unearned privilege to damage the planet at no cost to themselves.

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Because the likelihood of Li Bai dying from simple infirmity in 762 isn’t as strange and beautiful as the traditional story of his demise—that he drowned in the Yangtze River while drunkenly trying to embrace the moon’s reflection—the apocryphal tale is to be preferred. The greatest of classical Chinese poets deserves a death commensurate with his wild verse. Dying because he wished to possess the moon has about it the necessary resonance of parable: this is what the mystic is willing to do to merge with the infinite. “The birds have vanished down the sky. / Now the last cloud drains away,” Li Bai writes in the first of two couplets of “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain” as translated by Sam Hamill, concluding: “We sit together, the mountain and me, / until only the mountain remains.”

This is startlingly religious verse. The disintegration of the soul, the extinguishing of the ego, the snuffing of the person is required so that one becomes a part of the cosmos’ warp and weft. It’s erotic verse as well, as only the truest of devotional poems can be, because it presupposes the desire to lose oneself in another, to twist into something greater. In that spirit, then, the “world is neither place nor thing. / The world is a spell,” claims a gnostic demiurge, a genderless, serpentine deity in The Invention of the Darling (W.W. Norton, 2024), the remarkable new collection by the Chinese-American poet Li-Young Lee. This is a gnomic, paradoxical book in which every word is a charm and every sentence a conjuration—a poetics of the body, the mind, and the soul.

It’s as risky to detect Li Bai’s intoxicated traces in Lee as it is to talk about Shakespeare’s effect on Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, or Whitman’s ghost in the verse of Philip Levine and Robert Pinsky. But Lee himself acknowledges the influence. In The City in Which I Love You (1990), he describes both Li Bai and Du Fu as “those two / poets of the wanderer’s heart,” an apt description of his own peripatetic youth. Lee was born in Jakarta to Chinese parents forced to flee Indonesia in 1959 during President Achmad Sukarno’s pogroms (“People have been trying to kill me since I was born,” Lee writes in his 2008 collection Behind My Eyes). The family variously settled in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, before arriving in the unlikely refuge of Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, a largely Italian-American community some 35 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that once featured the planet’s largest sheet steel mill. (“That scraping of iron on iron when the wind / rises, what is it?” Lee writes in Rose, his 1986 debut.) Having traded the dreamlike image of Li Bai’s Yangtze for the polluted reality of Vandergrift’s Kiskiminetas River, Lee still felt connected to Chinese culture. After all, he is the great-grandson of the first president of the Chinese Republic, and the son of a physician who once treated Mao Zedong. Lee’s is a life lived in exile east of Eden, for as he asks in Behind My Eyes, “Childhood? Which childhood? / The one that didn’t last?” He seems to have always desired a return to a lost home (the origin of religion), lusting for the consummation with something powerful and good (the origin of faith), where he is “Still talking to God and thinking the snow / falling is the sound of God listening.”

“you rigorously dissect it, you realize that everything is a shape of the totality of causes. What’s another name for the totality of causes? The Cosmos. So everything is a shape of Cosmos or God. It feels like something bigger than me— that I can’t possibly fathom—but am embedded in.”

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“The Chocolate War,” published 50 years ago, became one of the country’s most challenged books. Its author, Robert Cormier, spent years fighting attempts to ban it — like many authors today.

In the 50 years since it came out, “The Chocolate War” has become one of the country’s most challenged books. But the tensest battle over the novel may have been fought in Panama City, Fla., in the mid-1980s. That’s when an attempt to ban “The Chocolate War” divided the town, leading to arson and death threats against middle-school teachers.

Robert Cormier stayed up late at night, spinning Pete’s minor act of defiance into “The Chocolate War.” The book follows a small-town freshman named Jerry Renault, whose refusal to sell candy for his school earns him the ire of a manipulative headmaster and the vengeance of an underground student group known as the Vigils. By the book’s end, Jerry has been harassed, beaten and ostracized, leaving him just as alone as ever.

“The Chocolate War” wasn’t an easy sell: Several editors rejected the book, citing its violence, language and pessimistic message. But teens in the 1970s were eager for stories that reflected their angst and anxieties, and novels like S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders” and Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” had become hand-me-down hits.

The relatably bummed-out tone of “The Chocolate War” — paired with Cormier’s economical prose and hyper-specific recall of adolescent cruelty — was aimed at young readers who’d become skeptical of the grown-ups running their world.

Still, for all his regrets about the trouble “The Chocolate War” had caused for others, Cormier continued to defend it staunchly in the last years of his life.

“The message of ‘The Chocolate War’,” he noted, “is that evil succeeds when good people allow it.”

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