* “Kids Today Can’t Read – Even College Kids: The bite-sizing of books.” Fortunately, GPAs keep going up. Still, I wrote two years ago that Most people don’t read carefully or for comprehension, and I’m not sure that things have changed all that much in the last two decades.

* “Club Med: Dispatches from the Adderall Epidemic.” Often entertaining. Are all writers on Adderall or similar medications, as is asserted and/or implied here?

* Debugging the Doctor Brain: Who’s teaching doctors how to think?

* We Need Major, But Not Radical, FDA Reform. Consistent with my ongoing experiences.

* “America’s Magical Thinking About Housing: Austin built a lot of homes. Now rent is falling, and some people seem to think that’s a bad thing.” Falling rent is good!

* Early-onset cancer burden increased by ~50% from 1990 – 2019. The “early-onset” part indicates this isn’t about people getting older.

* “The Crime Rings Stealing Everything from Purses to Power Tools.” Implicitly about the need for basic law enforcement, and the way a small number (and percentage) of people cause a disproportionate number of problems.

* “Do 10x as much.”

* Is classical education making a comeback? That, like micro-schools, may be a response to the current problems in schools, including the ineffective and foolish ideologies being spread by many teachers training programs. Relatedly, in Wisconsin, Alex Tabarrok reports that the state mandated teachers be paid for performance, not seniority, and teacher qualify improved—as you’d expect.

* “Hospitals Are Adding Billions in ‘Facility’ Fees for Routine Care.” We really need price transparency in healthcare and seem to be nowhere near it.

* “Los Angeles is laying the groundwork for a better urban future.” Probably true, but neither the city nor the county have managed to build substantial amounts of new housing; the future, as measured by population growth, is presently happening in Texas, as noted above. Also, market-rate housing will make your city cheaper, which is obvious, and yet a noisy minority of people don’t seem to understand it. Overall, “There is nothing except political will stopping us fixing our housing crisis. And doing so is free. All we need to do is get a planning system that allows people, all other things being equal, to build houses on land those people own.” Obvious, and yet commonly fought over.

* “The War at Stanford: I didn’t know that college would be a factory of unreason.”

* “Why It’s So Expensive to Live in Phoenix.” Short answer: the same NIMBY problems that plague all of America. See also “Government of the NIMBY, for the NIMBY, by the NIMBY.”

* Covid’s origins are likely zoonotic.

* “Cancer-vaccine trials give reasons for optimism.”

* “Mahbod Moghadam: An Obituary.” He made Rap Genius (later just “Genius”), but a brain tumor felled him. He may be another of the dead at the hands of slow FDA. I’m a year younger than him.