* “The Karikó problem: Lessons for funding basic research.” Katalin Karikó should, for her own self-preservation, probably have quit the university-industrial science system, but she didn’t. How many people who could’ve had impacts as transformative as hers, have quit, which is the “smart” thing to do from an individual perspective? How many looked at the madness of academia and went into adtech at Facebook or Google instead? How many look at the real estate prices caused by zoning and realized they had to make a lot of money, not university levels of money?

* “A Song of Shapes and Words.” On the “wordcel” and “shape rotator” distinction. Humorous, mostly, and more interesting than most “personality” talk.

* “Natural gas appliances emit much more methane than realized.” Switching to convection stoves is likely important and useful.

* Mergers are bad and are creating anti-competitive, crony-capitalism markets. We should block more of them, particularly but not exclusively among hospitals and hospital systems. The Boeing 737-Max fiasco emerges in part from merger disasters.

* A New Industrialist roundup: on the work towards real-world progress in terms of atoms, not just bits. Things can and should be better.

* The Rule of Midwits: subtler and deeper than you might think.

* “Why Germany Behaves the Way It Does.” Maybe. Hypocrisy is the norm, but even by normal standards Germany’s behavior is

* The iPhone 13 camera, which has impressed me.