* “Willingness to look stupid.”

* “Launching the University of Austin; the headline says: “We Can’t Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We’re Starting a New One. I left my post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis to build a university in Austin dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.” Maybe it’s slightly related that the WSJ says: USC Pushed a $115,000 Online Degree. Graduates Got Low Salaries, Huge Debts: The prestigious private university hired a for-profit firm to recruit students to its social-work master’s program; ‘You don’t feel like you’re part of an elite school.’” Making the University of Austin announcement on Substack also seems like a sign and harbinger.

* Andrew Sullivan: “The Betrayal Of Our Gay Inheritance.”

* “Simping and the Sexual Marketplace.”

* “How Alan Sokal Won the Battle but Lost the ‘Science Wars.’” It seems that, the richer we are, the more able we are to adopt some maladaptive beliefs.

* “Is College Worth It? A Comprehensive Return on Investment Analysis.” Depends on degree, above all else.

* “The Evangelical Church Is Breaking Apart: Christians must reclaim Jesus from his church.” Martin Gurri is never mentioned, but this may be another example of the challenge of maintaining institutional coherence in the social media age: “What happened at McLean Bible Church is happening all over the evangelical world.” Splintering and incoherence and attacks on institutions, without trying to build new ones, seem common.

* The diary of Claude Fredericks, who is the model for Julian Morrow in The Secret History; it’s the last bit that makes him interesting, as he seems to have been an indifferently skilled writer, overall.

* “I’m Still Here: the same old materialist civil libertarian Marxist I’ve always been.” The title makes it sound awful, but the emphasis on moral universalism, civil liberties, and the need for true material progress are welcomed; it seems strange that those positions might be associated with something like the Libertarian right today, when not long ago they were more associated with the left. Perhaps there’s a possible left-right synthesis around the need to build stuff. Also from Freddie: “Two Examples of the State Enforcing Social Justice Norms.”

* Tales From the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies. Taken together, they are an argument for not becoming involved in academia.

* “Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV,” among many other ideas.

* Is Protonmail worthless?

* New Macbook Pro review 1; another one; others have been trickling out. Consensus is “expensive, but also amazing.”

* “At Yale Law School, a party invitation ignites a firestorm.” Law students are typically age 22 and up, and law school administrators are typically older still. One has to wonder not only what is wrong with these people, but what is wrong with the institution they inhabit, and the institutional incentives of the bureaucrats involved.

* On the Fatty Arbuckle scandal and how it presages modern scandals or pseudo-scandals; notice this: “The next day, Universal wrote a morality clause into its contracts, mandating nonpayment to performers who ‘forfeit the respect of the public,’ and other studios followed. (Morality clauses have made a comeback in recent years.)” That which is old is new again, or, alternately, that which is new has older roots.

* Francis Fukuyama’s Defense of Liberalism.

* Efforts by an Australian mining and minerals baron to go green(er). Detailed.

* “‘I Don’t Know That I Would Even Call It Meth Anymore’: Different chemically than it was a decade ago, the drug is creating a wave of severe mental illness and worsening America’s homelessness problem.” Also detailed, although I can’t tell how much of it may be a scare story. Still, the war on drugs continues to fail, and we continue to collectively fail to try different approaches.

* “Beware shoveling money at overpriced service industries.” A reasonable point, which means that politicians (and by extension the voters electing them) will likely mostly ignore it.

* What to learn. Don’t be dissuaded by the title.

* “How Alan Sokal Won the Battle but Lost the ‘Science Wars:’ A brilliant parody was the harbinger of a dreadful future.” On the other hand, the total number of humanities majors has fallen substantially: a lot of people presumably see through the nonsense and respond accordingly. Sokal may have “won” in some sense.

* “What Could Drive China to War?“