* On Colette, the French writer and provocateur of her day. Today, there are maybe no taboos left in that domain, and thus a figure like Colette can’t exist.

* A depressing profile showing how bad literary “success” can be—never mind literary failure; one should read it as a warning against pursuing a literary life, particularly because a sense of lifelessness pervades. The winners of the literary marketplace aren’t doing so well, examined along many metrics. The books they’re writing don’t seem to matter; statements like “Gessen described him as ‘probably the most eloquent expositor of Marxian economics currently writing in the English language’” have to be read as comedy. That, or “They worked on novels and Ph.D.’s., and, in 2004, along with Marco Roth and Allison Lorentzen, started n+1. The journal was wildly successful[…]” “Wildly successful?” If this is the literary scene, it’s dead, deader than a corpse in an emergency room. After reading a novel like Lonesome Dove, all of the book described in the article seem tiny. You can predict what the tone will be, how narrow the comfort zone will be, and that there will be no contrarian surprises or revelations: that may explain why so many readers turn to wilder online writing.

* There are too many scams in higher education. A similar topic: “How to really fix higher ed.” Solutions are towards the bottom, but note: “Make higher-ed institutions put more skin in the game.”

* Arguments that we’re not going to get commercial fusion in the next decade, or realistically the next two decades. Either the writer, or Helion Fusion, will be proven right.

* Guy takes a massive corporation to arbitration.

* “Amazon and the Dystopian Future of Book Censorship.”

* CO2 levels are the highest in human history.

* Good interview with VC Katherine Boyle about the need to build things. And another article on the need to be able to build things, quickly. The status quo isn’t optimal in many domains.