* 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.
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