Metric spaces nonembeddable into Banach spaces with the Radon-Nikod\'ym property and thick families of geodesics

We show that a geodesic metric space which does not admit bilipschitz embeddings into Banach spaces with the Radon-Nikod\'ym property does not necessarily contain a bilipschitz image of a thick family of geodesics. This is done by showing that any thick family of geodesics is not Markov convex, and comparing this result with results of Cheeger-Kleiner, Lee-Naor, and Li. The result contrasts with the earlier result of the author that any Banach space without the Radon-Nikod\'ym property contains a bilipschitz image of a thick family of geodesics

Metric characterizations of superreflexivity in terms of word hyperbolic groups and finite graphs

We show that superreflexivity can be characterized in terms of bilipschitz embeddability of word hyperbolic groups. We compare characterizations of superreflexivity in terms of diamond graphs and binary trees. We show that there exist sequences of series-parallel graphs of increasing topological complexity which admit uniformly bilipschitz embeddings into a Hilbert space, and thus do not characterize superreflexivity

Total subspaces with long chains of nowhere norming weak∗^* sequential closures

If a separable Banach space $X$ is such that for some nonquasireflexive Banach space $Y$ there exists a surjective strictly singular operator $T:X\to Y$ then for every countable ordinal $\alpha$ the dual of $X$ contains a subspace whose weak$^*$ sequential closures of orders less than $\alpha$ are not norming over any infinite-dimensional subspace of $X$ and whose weak$^*$ sequential closure of order $\alpha +1$ coincides with $X^*