* “To most people, reading and writing are boring and unimportant.” It starts:

Robin Hanson says: “… folks, late in life, almost never write essays, or books, on ‘what I’ve learned about life.’ It would only take a few pages, and would seem to offer great value to others early in their lives. Why the silence?”

Interestingly, or not, I’ve been working on essays and posts along these lines.

* Paul Graham interviewed by Tyler Cowen on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent. Excellent.

* On the Marble Cliffs. Which is also a history of Germany. And a history of Europe. And some other things.

* “China hacked Japan’s sensitive defense networks, officials say.”

* “I thought I wanted to be a professor. Then, I served on a hiring committee.”

* How the car came to L.A., and destroyed it.

* The frontiers of tunnel boring. We should have more subway tunnels and tragically don’t.

* “America’s Top Environmental Groups Have Lost the Plot on Climate Change.” “But as the pace of electrification picks up, new clean energy projects are facing opposition from what seems like an unlikely source: large environmental organizations.” The extent to which environmental groups have achieved the opposite of their stated, intended effects is amazing; their opposition to nuclear power, for example, meant we spent decades relying on coal and then gas.

* Too much comfort is itself bad.

* “How does credit card debt collection actually work?”

* How Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) block medical breakthroughs. Congruent and consistent with my complaints about the FDA slowing medical discovery and dissemination, which I’m now paying for with my life.