* Thoughts on American Tea Culture.

* Why Don’t You Do Something Other Than Sit at Your Computer? (Side question: “Is your computer depressing you?”)

* “Most citizens are consumers, not investors [. . . ] “They don’t recognize the benefits to consumers that come from investment.” Question from me: are you more than just a consumer?

* How to find a mentor (and succeed even if you don’t); compare this sentence: “What it means is that if you want a mentor to help you make something out of your life, you have to stop waiting and hoping they will come to you; you must be proactive and go create that relationship” to my essay “How to get your Professors’ Attention — along with Coaching or Mentoring.”

* Tyler Cowen on Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.

* Amazon’s knock-off problem.

* Steve Randy Waldman on The Great Stagnation. HT Marginal Revolution.

* Terry Teachout: “When Criticism is No Laughing Matter.” See also: “Why Straight Plays Can’t Make It on Broadway.”

* Testing the Teachers, and how do we know what we’re actually getting out of college?

* A college diploma isn’t worth what it used to be. To get hired, grads today need hard skills.

* Dirty Medicine: How medical supply behemoths stick it to the little guy, making America’s health care system more dangerous and expensive.

* “Why do lovers of literature take such joy in criticizing the critics?” I would also guess that critics generate many responses in the same fashion that books, movies, or any other forms of art generate varied responses: tastes differ, and people also use taste to signal fundamental moral beliefs, which generates much of the vituperation around art.

* “The Man Who Hacked Hollywood;” This is yet another indication that “sexting” is or will soon be perceived as normal.

* Roosh: now banned / discouraged by the Brazilian government. Allegedly, the quote about non-violent activism goes like this: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

* Why Malcolm Gladwell will argue that college football should be banned.

* “[. . .] winning the immediate battle is really only the tip of the iceberg of what the right is trying to accomplish with this feigned outrage and claims that Savage is a ‘bully’ because he accurately recounted what is in the Bible. It’s an attempt to redefine acceptable discourse so that statement of uncomfortable facts is considered off-limits, and, in fact, is redefined as ‘bigotry.‘”

* Curiously, on the same day, people found this blog by searching for “dick in ass” and “the portrait of a lady henry james”. Coincidence? Could they possibly be the same person? And I wonder what a short story based on this person would read like. Another amusing search query: “sexting examples”.

* Why the U.S. has an artificially low savings rate: we take money from the young, who might save for later and have a low discount rate, and give it to the elderly, who want to spend it now because they have a high discount rate.