Monday Night Links

• The court holds for the foregoing reasons that IEEPA does not authorize any of the Worldwide, Retaliatory, or Trafficking Tariff Orders. The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs. The Trafficking Tariffs fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders. This conclusion entitles Plaintiffs to judgment as a matter of law; as the court further finds no genuine dispute as to any material fact, summary judgment will enter against the United States. The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined. [United States Court of International Trade]
• The combination of ultra-conservative Christians and left-leaning university types living in close proximity has turned Moscow into an on-the-nose symbol of life in a divided America: On the five-block stretch of shops that makes up Moscow’s downtown, a slew of kirker-owned businesses stand side-by-side with organic food co-ops and coffee shops displaying Pride flags and Black Lives Matter signs in their windows. On the Sunday morning of my visit, the kirker who offered to drive me to church gently ribbed me after I asked him to pick me up at one of the liberal-aligned coffee shops downtown. I had no choice, I protested. All the kirker-owned ones were closed for the sabbath. [Politico]
• “I’m as French as you are” is the phrase that provokes this reflection. Indeed, on more than one occasion Camus says he has heard an immigrant claim to be “more French” than him. But, as he says, “If this lady is right, being French is nothing: it’s a pure mockery, a failed joke turned sour, a stamp on an administrative document.” While Camus can be blunt, his thinking can also be subtle—certainly nuanced. He concedes things that no outright racist or sectarian ever would. He allows, for instance, that a person can join a people because he cares for their language, literature, way of life, and more. But he contends that on the collective level, “Peoples who remain peoples cannot join other peoples. They can only conquer.” [The New Criterion]
• Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain is enormous, bland and remote — it squats over Twain’s career like a McMansion. Chernow, who has previously written lives of financial titans, war heroes and founding fathers, misses the man William Faulkner called “the father of American literature” almost entirely. He demonstrates little feeling for the deeper and least domesticated regions of Twain’s art, or for the literary context of his era. His book is an endurance test, one that skimps on the things that formed Twain and made him the most lucid, profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty American of his time. Hardy will be the souls who tour this air-conditioned edifice all the way through and glimpse the exit sign. [NY Times]
• The central model here is the gravity model of trade which in simplest terms predicts the amount of trade between two places as proportional to the economic “mass” of the two places (e.g their population or GDP) and inversely proportional to the distance between them, echoing Newtonian gravity. Usually, the gravity equation takes the distances and masses of countries or cities as an input and outputs a prediction of trade between them. The authors of this paper flip this around. They have some data on the amount of trade between cities, as well as the location of some known cities, and they use this to back out what the size and location of all the other cities is likely to be. They take two steps to estimate the locations of lost cities using their model. First, they use the trade between cities with known locations to estimate the distance elasticity of trade, i.e how much does trade decrease as the distance between two cities increases. Then, they try to fit the model’s predictions over the shares of trades between each city pair in the network to the observed data by choosing different latitudes, longitudes, and productivities for each city. [Maxwell Tabarrok]
• Vitamin K2, specifically MK-7, activates special proteins, allowing the body to properly utilize calcium. Two of these proteins are osteocalcin (OC) and MGP. The former attracts calcium to where it is needed most, namely into bones and teeth; the latter keeps calcium away from where it is not needed, namely soft tissues. [NattoPharma ASA]
• None of that has lifted the price of timber, which never recovered from the 2007 housing bust. Logs for softwood lumber averaged $22.50 a ton across the South last summer, the least since 1992, according to TimberMart-South, a pricing service affiliated with the University of Georgia’s forestry school. “If you put inflation on it, it’s really sad,” said Mr. Hopkins, the Georgia timber grower. Adjusted for inflation, prices for the logs used to make lumber are at their lowest in more than 50 years. [WSJ]
• In my last post a couple of days ago (May 28), I was critical of the blizzard of injunctions issued by the courts against seemingly every policy change that President Trump seeks to implement.  I went so far as to call this the “opposite of democracy.”  But I also noted that there are instances where judicial restraints on the executive are legitimate, most notably where the statute on which the President relies to implement a sweeping policy does not in fact grant him the authority he claims.  Thus, on finding a lack of grant of authority in the statutes cited, the Supreme Court had reined in President Biden when he sought to implement policies forgiving student loans and banning fossil fuel power plants. I ended that article by asking whether President Trump’s actions with regard to imposition of tariffs may fall into the same category of overreach as Biden’s student loan and power plant gambits. [Francis Menton]