* FYI, you don’t need an ID to fly on a plane for a domestic trip within the United States: courts have consistently found that such a rule is an unfair limitation on the freedom to travel and on interstate commerce. Just because a government agent tells you something is true, does not mean that it is true.

* “How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time.” Substack writers are doing a lot of disproportionately interesting work.

* “What a Second Bauhaus Movement Means for Europe:” the potential to build lots of new housing and thus lower the cost of housing—something that seems to elude the United States.

* “More Doctoral Programs [in the humanities and social sciences] Suspend Admissions. That Could Have Lasting Effects on Graduate Education.” Maybe word is finally getting out?

* “As everything else changes, my Dover paperbacks hold up.” I note:

The right paperback encountered at just the right moment — the Fawcett Crest edition of “Good Grief, Charlie Brown!” I got in Florida when I was 7 or 8; the Collier edition of Thomas Helm’s “Shark! Unpredictable Killer of the Sea” my father gave me a few summers later, in 1974 — became an object out of time, a marker that would last forever.

Although the books from my childhood wouldn’t become “a marker that would last forever,” because most were printed on pulp paper that yellows and falls apart with age. this obscure tax case is part of the reason publishers use such crappy paper today. There are exceptions: The New York Review of Books imprint makes really physically good paperbacks, but they mostly specialize in literary oddballs.

One problem with having physical books over the long term is the sheer number of moves many people make today. For that reason I’ve shifted to a lot more Kindle reading, even though the totality of the experience is worse.

* On mushrooms’s moment. A charming story: I hope Smallhold succeeds.

* “Adam Tooze on World Order, Then and Now: Do fiscal constraints matter? How contingent was WWII? Can Nazi Germany teach us anything about the CCP? Did the West Win the Cold War? Plus, Xinjiang and Soviet Gulags.” Unusually substantive.

* On the destruction of America’s best high school. Views rarely heard.

* “The Day Nuclear War Almost Broke Out.” Nuclear war is an issue that should be much closer to the top of various policy agendas, and global fears, than it is.

* “People are leaving San Francisco. After decades of growth, is the city on the decline?” For anyone but a startup founder, SF does seem like an awful place to live.