* “Unpopular Speech in a Cold Climate.” It’s like we have to learn all over again why we have free speech, the right to be represented by an attorney, etc.

* “Gwern’s AI-Generated Poetry.” I wonder how many people would be able to pick out “real” poems compared to AI-generated poems. I’m not sure I always can.

* How to Create Reality: “So a funny thing happened on Twitter this week, which almost changed the world a little bit. Someone sent me a beautiful 3-D mockup of a fictional, car-free city of 50,000 people, set in the scenic nook of land* between Boulder, Colorado and Longmont, where I live.”

* “Science, Small Groups, and Stochasticity.” In short, we are doing the structure of science wrong.

* “Defense Disaster: Russia and China are Crushing the U.S. Military in War Games.” Are we still fighting the last war?

* U.S. Firms Are Helping Build China’s Orwellian State.

* “The Art of Being Single,” a depressing article that is congruent with Lost Connections.

* A Big Little Idea Called Legibility. A great essay.

* “Nihilist in Chief: The banal, evil, all-destructive reign of Mitch McConnell.” He is the truest villain in modern politics, yet no one seems to notice. Also, “How Not to Lose to Donald Trump.” Lessons the left may not have learned.

* “Smart Is Not Enough: What Marc Benioff Taught Me When I Was 15 Years Old.”

* Owning a Car Will Soon Be as Quaint as Owning a Horse? I’m less optimistic, but the analogies are interesting.

* Writing Sex for Money is Hard F*cking Work.

* Funny screed against Bret Easton Ellis’s recent book, although it sounds like the reviewer is doing many of the same things Ellis is doing. Pot, kettle, black, and all that. I’m also not a fan of attacking writers based on demographic categories, though that seems to be on the rise.

* “Vitalik Buterin Is Embracing a New Role: Political Theorist.” There are either details missing in this story or I’m not fully getting it.

* “Write of Passage, a new online course on how to accelerate your career by writing online.”

* US cities need to learn from Copenhagen, stat. Likelihood of this happening? Low.

* “The corporations devouring American colleges.” Based on a decade working in them, I’d observe that colleges are businesses with extremely good PR and marketing arms.