* “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.
* 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.
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