* “Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life.” And other existential thoughts occasioned by aging and witnessing people become no longer people.

* “Becky is depressed.” A speculative essay on life purpose and meaning. Maybe it’s too often addressing strawmen, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

* The U.S. has way too much parking, and some municipalities are finally doing something about it. Parking lots are antithetical to living the good life, and hasten death. I was listening to an interview with Kelly Starrett, the guy who wrote Become a Supple Leopard, and he emphasize the importance of walking.

* You’d be happier living closer to your friends. Why don’t you? Parochial U.S. zoning. Excess parking requirements. We should allow missing middle housing. Let freedom reign!

* Building A New American Arsenal.

* The Democratic Senator Who Says Liberals Have Lost Their Way on Housing.

* “The Unbearable Costs of Becoming a Writer: After years of hard work and low pay, the risks I took to work in publishing are finally paying off. But now, I wonder about the price my family paid, and whether it was too steep.” See also me in “The death of literary culture.” Plus, the tools for writing and disseminating writing are now so cheap that making money as a writer is somewhere between “harder than ever” and at least “different from before.” A few writers make it work via Substack, for example, but most don’t. The pre-2009 paths to being a “writer” are mostly closed, or dead, and many of the more important “writers” today are people who do other things but also write.

* Before politics, there is the world.

* The golden age of aerospace.

* How to be an intellectual.

* The ‘real’ reasons the English department died.

* “Less Cars, More Money: My Visit to the City of the Future.”

* “Lessons from the 19th Century:” “Americans were a people with an extraordinary sense of agency. This is one of the central reasons they transformed the material, cultural, institutional, and political framework of not only the North American continent, but the entire world. That people is gone.” The word “were” is key in the first sentence, and it sets up the last sentence. Can we recover a sense of agency and action, or are we going to be permanently stuck mired in complacency? Maybe we need a new frontier, consisting of O’Neill Habitats, or similar, to re-open the frontier.

* Are teachers actually natural conservatives?

* “What hunter-gatherers demonstrate about work and satisfaction.”

* “Global Supply of Cocaine Hits Record Level, U.N. Says: Coca cultivation rose 35% from 2020 to 2021, new report says.” At what point does one declare defeat, legalize, and move on? Like the war in Afghanistan, when do we admit stalemate?

* Looks like RSV vaccines will be available by next winter, which is great!

* Orwell, Camus, and the truth. “Both of these writers took the view that truthfulness was more important than ideological allegiance and metaphysics, that the facts should be derived from the real world, rather than the world of ideas. They were similar stylistically too: both wrote candidly, clearly and prolifically.”

* “Education Commentary is Dominated by Optimism Bias.” The title makes it sound more sedate than it is.

* “Living the writing life means living with failure.” Though this underestimates the extent to which the writing world has changed in the last two decades.

* “The Great Feminization of the American University.”

* On Sebastian Berry; a promising-sounding writer if you’d like more Irish history.

* “Surprise Computer Science Proof Stuns Mathematicians: For decades, mathematicians have been inching forward on a problem about which sets contain evenly spaced patterns of three numbers. Last month, two computer scientists blew past all of those results.”

* The subway is for transportation: it seems like this ought to be obvious, but here we are. Ezra Klein dubbed the tendency not to focus “everything-bagel liberalism.”

* “Progressives need to embrace progress.” Also seems obvious, but I’ve not seen it argued this way before.

* The Uncomfortable Truth About Why Buying Furniture Is So Miserable.

* Nuclear power’s economic stack.

* “America is fighting the wrong university wars.” The bigger problem, in this writer’s view, is the non-elite, non-exclusionary public schools that act as “student warehouses,” and that don’t accomplish much.

* Argument that China is unlikely to invade Taiwan.

* On Brandon Sanderson, who appears to be a bad writer at the sentence level but is popular nonetheless.

* How to Build a Kitchen (and Why).

* On Henry Green, a most unusual writer.

* “I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory.” On TSMC, among many other topics.

* If you’d like to see the government-mandated shortage of housing in action.

* “Professional Sedation: Tenure is allowing humanities scholars to write and teach our profession into well-earned irrelevance.”

* Conservatives win all the time. These are some political examples, but it’s not clear that there are deeper, more cultural wins: the feel of how people behave may not show the types of win. That’s kind of what Douthat is discussing in “How the Right Turned Radical and the Left Became Depressed.”

* Melatonin’s apparent virtues. The right substances at the right doses augment the human mind and increase well-being, it seems.

* How loneliness reshapes the brain.

* “The age of average.” Don’t be dissuaded by the boring title, as it’s a deeply considered and interesting essay, and one that’s compatible with “Meditations on Moloch.”

* Bicycle. Really impressive, and non-standard, illustrations here.

* “Aviators Make Biden an All-American Badass.” Maybe?

* “The Build-Nothing Country.” Which is bad.

* “Americans Are Losing Faith in College Education, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds.” How could they not, would be another form of the question. Or, alternately: “Why did it take this long?” Back in 2017 I wrote a post about the (apparent) rise of apprenticeships, which seemed like a good thing: years of teaching college students shows that a lot of people who are in college shouldn’t be there—if for no other reason than they don’t like sitting in desks doing abstract symbol manipulation.

* “Many wealthy people are considering leaving China.” Can you blame them? Wouldn’t you?

* Machines of mastery and the power of deliberate practice—which is becoming more available over time.

* On the book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning by Nigel Biggar. I’ve not read the book but am interested in plausible, counter-narrative arguments.

* “How The Netherlands Built a Biking Utopia: In the 60s and 70s the Dutch government was building car-centered cities. Here’s how and why they pivoted.” We get the behaviors and practices we build for. If we build for cars, we get cars. If we build for other things, we get other things. Choices matter.

* “Russia’s population nightmare is going to get even worse.” The level of long-term, strategic thinking being displayed in Russia is, to put it mildly, not high. One theory is that democracies win over dictatorships because the quality of the information and decision-making degrades terribly in the latter over time.

* Related to the above: “Jeff Sonnenfeld’s Bombshell About the Russian Economy.”

* The genius of mathematician James Glimm.

* Do nonprofits drive social change?

* Reasons Heterodox Academy is failing? I’m not sure it is, and it’s hard to define “success” well.

* “The Age of American Naval Dominance Is Over: The United States has ceded the oceans to its enemies. We can no longer take freedom of the seas for granted.” Things we seem not to be paying attention to.

* On Ernst Jünger.

* Humorous review of Bronze Age Mindset, by Bronze Age Pervert (BAP).

* Dan Wang’s 2022 letter on China.