* Things Ryan Holiday has learned from a decade of podcasts, note: “An essential piece of advice I got from the author Steven Pressfield: There are professional habits and amateur ones. Which are you practicing? Is this a pro or an amateur move? Ask yourself that. Constantly.” One downside of school is that it almost always inculcates and encourages amateur habits—without telling students what’s going on. Separately, after quitting or finishing a podcast (the former being vastly more common than the latter), I try to keep a log of what I’ve listened to and what I noticed in it, or remember from it. Then I re-read the log occasionally, which only takes a few minutes; this helps move podcasts from a “listen and forget” activity to a “change your ideas” activity.

* The Substack Discourse and the Self-Referentiality of Everything. A bad title for a good essay, on what happens when the institutional academic and journalist discourse gets poisoned. See also me, “Have journalists and academics become modern-day clerics?”

* Elon Musk moves from California to Texas: Prop 13 and NIMBYism claim more victims. Elon also “decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America.”

* Oracle is also moving its headquarters to Texas. Texas’s real question is still whether it will ban non-competes, since that ban is California’s vital secret sauce.

* “Cambridge University votes to safeguard free speech.” Heartening news that one wishes could be described as “normal” not “heartening.”

* Jesse Singal’s book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills is coming out soon.

* “Nick Kristof and the Holy War on Pornhub: Having declared victory in its war on Backpage and sex work, the liberal-conservative coalition has pivoted to porn.”

* “Researchers identify a new personality construct that describes the tendency to see oneself as a victim.” This explains some of what’s happening online and in schools. See also Haidt and Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind.

* “China launches ‘gray-zone’ warfare to subdue Taiwan.” Simultaneously, Apple wants to sell us out to China: in that respect, maybe it has much in common with the rest of Hollywood.

* “Earnestness,” by Paul Graham.

* “She Stalked Her Daughter’s Killers Across Mexico, One by One.” An incredible story one hopes to see made into a book, given the number of vague points in this relatively short article.

* More on carbon capture and storage, most of it familiar. I’ve been annoying my friends who posture as environmentalists by asking if they have a Climeworks subscription.