* “Where the Suburbs End,” regarding California’s efforts to increase the supply of housing. California is moving, albeit with agonizing slowness, on this front.

* “We Are Republicans With a Plea: Elect Democrats in 2022”

* “Washington Is Getting China Wrong: A crisis at a property company exposes deep, dangerous, and often unrecognized weaknesses in the Chinese economy.” Part of the answer too may be that no one knows what the future holds, and thus: “Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”

* “Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web.” This is bad and, also, I’m not sure the word “reluctant” belongs in the title.

* “Please Don’t Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change,” a more detailed version of what I’d say. The level of innumeracy required for that fundamental belief is striking, and the kinds of people likely to be persuaded by such an argument are also likely the kinds of people who’d have kids who’d make fundamental breakthroughs in energy and chemistry. Note too:

So 20 tons of near-term carbon offset at $500/ton, plus 350 tons of long-term carbon offset at $50/ton = $10000 + $17500. Round up for uncertainty, and my guess is you can offset your child’s lifetime carbon emissions for about $30,000.

This is a lot of money, but most of the people considering not having children for climate reasons are pretty well-off. Most privileged parents are already resigned to having to pay $100,000 – $200,000 to get their kid into the best college; surely they should also be willing to pay $30,000 to let their kid exist at all.

A person sufficiently worried about CO2 emissions right now can do a lot about it, given sufficient money.

* “In Global Energy Crisis, Anti-Nuclear Chickens Come Home to Roost.” The metaphor and imagery may be confused, but the point is well taken.

* “That One Side Would Like to Utterly Destroy the Other Side Seems Significant, To Me: Democratic messaging debates are bizarre because one group has been empowered to terrorize those they disagree with.” Fairly accurate. I like his description of the left’s ecology, including: “There’s an island of misfit toys of left and leftish critics of social justice politics like me.”

* The great feminization of the larger society?

* “The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning.” If you’re like me, you thought: “Huning who?” But the essay turns out to be about China, yes, but also about the rest of the world and the United States. If you want to skip to the U.S.-centric parts, search for the phrase “A Dark Vision,” and read from there, about Wang’s experiences in the United States. Allan Bloom appears as a key influence.

* “A Yale Law Student Sent a Lighthearted Email Inviting Classmates to His ‘Trap House.’ The School Is Now Calling Him To Account.” Yes, it’s an outrage story, and you might’ve read enough of those already, but the article also seems like part of a larger trend, and one consistent with Haidt and Lukianoff’s book The Coddling of the American Mind.

* Jonathan Kay’s life as a ghostwriter, with lots of entertaining bits. The celebrity memoirs and business how-tos that make up much of the publishing industry are mostly written by ghostwriters: you’ve likely interacted with their work, without necessarily realizing it.

* Free parking is killing cities, and driving up the costs of housing.

* “American Gentry: Local Power and the Social Order.”

* “The Economic Mistake Democrats Are Finally Confronting,” an important piece that covers how attempting to increase demand with extra funding won’t work if supply doesn’t concomitantly increase. Housing is the star of this story but education is similarly strangled.

* “Head Start grant writers and early childhood education program staffing woes:” a grant-related post, but one that may be of general interest.

* “China Is a Declining Power—and That’s the Problem: The United States needs to prepare for a major war, not because its rival is rising but because of the opposite.” An alternate theory to the ones you’ve read around here before.

* “So You’re About To Be Cancelled: A group called Counterweight assists people whose bosses and co-workers are forcing them to endorse ‘social-justice’ beliefs.”

* How Miami seduced Silicon Valley.

* “The White Backlash That Wasn’t: Opposition to critical race theory is broad and bipartisan.” Don’t like the overly divisive framing of the headline, but there is some substance within.

* “‘Don’t leave campus’: Parents are now using tracking apps to watch their kids at college.” This seems insane to me, and one has to hope it’s not real, or rarely real.

* “On American campuses, students are biting their tongues: Students of all kinds are self-censoring, especially if they don’t agree with the perceived campus wisdom about race and criminal justice.”

* On the roots of progress and how to achieve greater technological progress now.

* Good New Yorker report on the state and history of nuclear fusion. Proof-of-concept is conceivable by 2025, with actual contributions to the power grid conceivable by 2030.

* Twitter thread from a former marine about what the Taliban knew about us, versus what we knew about them, along with cultural mismatch and many other topics.

* “At the heart of Shor’s frenzied work is the fear that Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe.” Not just the usual political bs. Note: “Senate Democrats could win 51 percent of the two-party vote in the next two elections and end up with only 43 seats in the Senate.” About David Shor and many other topics.