* Escalation Theory: Compliance, Violence, and Overachievement In Society. Interesting, and perhaps overstated in places. Reminds me of reading The Last Psychiatrist. I’m subscribing to the RSS feed.

* “Status diffusion as a check on elite competition.” The title is about South Korea but the article’s most interesting material concerns how elites form and compete. It’s surprisingly congruent with the “Escalation Theory” article.

* “What Conversation Can Do for Us.” (NY’er, $)

* “How to be More Agentic.”

* “Bad stuff going down at the American Sociological Association,” which is trying to avoid open access to government-funded research. Crazy!

* All the Carcinogens We Cannot See (NY’er, $). By Siddhartha Mukherjee, impressive, and possibly germane to my own cancer situation, although in ways not obvious right now.

* “Book Stores Refuse To Host An Event For Rob K. Henderson’s Book.” If you’re wondering why a lot of bookstores now suck, read this article. Bess and I went to Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe, Arizona, maybe a year and a half or two years ago, and most of the books there were terrible: like the most inane woke syllabuses from the worst college classes had been turned into novels and nonfiction. If you are wondering why Substack often seems far more vital than books right now, this is a good choice, much like that one interview with Alex Perez.

The key word in the preceding sentence is “right now.” Good trends rarely last forever and the same is true of bad ones.

* ‘This Has Been Going on for Years.’ Inside Boeing’s Manufacturing Mess. (wsj, $) The sad story of Boeing being taken over by McDonnell Douglas, MBAs, and finance people, at the expense of engineers and engineering. Fundamentally the real world matters.

* “Smothered & Suppressed Gazan Voices & Perspectives.” Some material on Twitter punctures much of what one reads in the legacy media.

* How Gabriel Mays is (re)learning math as an adult. Consistent with Barbara Oakley’s essay “How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math,” which I used to assign to students. You can be more agentic when it comes to math and many other topics!

* “What Happened to the US Machine Tool Industry?” Depressing, important.

* “Ultraviolet light can kill almost all the viruses in a room. Why isn’t it everywhere?”

* “The Republican Party is Doomed?” The keys to the argument: “Increasing age and education polarization means that Republicans are rapidly losing the capacity to run public institutions at all levels other than electoral, and this trend cannot realistically reverse within a generation” and “even when Republicans win electoral power, they lack the human capital at all levels of governance to accomplish what they really want with it.” Not sure this is accurate—the Federalist Society has a lot of members—but it’s plausible.