* Why the media is honest and good. A work from an interesting quarter!
* “Among many U.S. children, reading for fun has become less common, federal data shows.” Another bit of data that supports my own essay: “The death of literary culture.”
* But, maybe contra the above: “Novels as models.” Are you making the corpus more complete, or less? Why? The problem, however, remains getting paid for producing those novel / models. Maybe writing them will become an almost purely hobby business. Or maybe people will get subscriptions and release novels slowly again.
* On the benefits of writing a book on Substack, by someone doing it.
* Why The Right Is Losing The Young. In a similar vein: “The GOP Is Just Obnoxious: It’s why they keep losing elections.” There’s a kind of tyranny of the minority going on in the Republican party, with the specific minority being primary voters.
* Closing Industry Frontiers, which compares the closing of the American frontier to the filling out of the Internet software industry over the last ten years.
* “It’s Time to Get Serious:” Extended adolescence is bad. As someone who majored in English and then went to grad school in it (this is a horrible idea), I’ve been contemplating this topic even before I read this particular essay. Whenever most forms of academic grad school last worked effectively—some put it in the mid-1970s—it hasn’t now for decades.
* Why the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) Deserves More Funding. Modern vaccine approaches may take out a large number of diseases in the 2020s and that’s great.
* One “secret” of writing is to write every day.
* In light of this, it’s interesting to recall the number of people who not long ago held up the UK healthcare system as a desirable one to emulate.
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