* Reading fiction helps your career, but reading poetry helps more?
* Joe Rogan interviews Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk; usually Rogan is not to my taste, but The same forces Palahniuk describes in publishing are also at work in academia. If you’re wondering why so much of contemporary academia is so boring and sterile, that’s part of it.
* Imagine a world without mandatory college diplomas. Related: “The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined.” Schools have no skin in the game; should we be surprised?
* “Marine scientist predicts ‘a planetary catastrophe.’”
* “Venezuela’s great socialist experiment has brought a country to its knees.” The current vogue for socialism in some quarters, where people ought to know better, is strange.
* “Never Cook at Home: Trust me, I know it’s a drag.” A completely charming article and of course wrong. You should read it!
* Real art is bound to cause offense. I hope so!
* “America Has Fallen Out of Love With the Sedan.” You know all those articles about how bad global warming is getting? This is an article that basically says, “Americans don’t care.”
* “The Nuclear Power Plant of the Future May Be Floating Near Russia.”
* “The Humanities Face a Crisis—of Confidence.” Not the best article on this subject, but it’s okay.
* ‘We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things.’
* “The Shakespeare Requirement” Is a Sad-Professor Satire That Burns with Moral Anger. I have read too many academic novels to be interested in them anymore, but this one is probably fine.
* Early Work by Andrew Martin Mixes Lust With the Directionless of Youth.
* “GlobalFoundries Stops All 7nm Chip Development.” Non-technical people are likely to skip right past this one, but it has profound implications for the future: GlobalFoundries is one of the largest chip makers in the world, and if it can’t do 7 nanometer, it’s possible that the others can’t, or can’t effectively, either. For the last ~50 years, integrated circuit design has been a huge bright spot in the economic and technological picture—and underappreciated by most people.
* Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jordan Peterson. Much better than you think based on the title.
* People Are Bad at Being Productive in a Limited Time.
* Baylor University used “mole” to aid communications department during sexual assault crisis? This story is crazy enough to be unbelievable in fiction. I read it and think, “Maybe universities should go back to focusing on teaching and research?”
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