* “How China uses foreign firms to turbocharge its industry: China uses global industry leaders like Apple and Tesla to get technology and upgrade its industrial ecosystem.”

* Bess on “Debugging the Doctor Brain: Who’s teaching doctors how to think?”

* Skepticism towards 3-D printed housing.

* Covid was almost certainly of zoonotic origin.

* Gary Shteyngart sent on a massive cruise ship and, surprise! he finds it distasteful and absurd, though in a humorous way. I mean, people on cruise ships would probably find book festivals boring, too. I would likely find a car or horse race unbearably tedious, and so I don’t go to either.

* “From Intellectual Dark Web to Crank Central.” Consistent with my read. A publication like Quillette is impressive because it has retained its taste for heterodoxy without lying, or ignoring important things that are true. I heard someone say that often the only people worse than the institutionalists are often the anti-institutionalists—maybe it was in “Losing Faith In Contrarianism: There are institutional incentives that make contrarian views that catch on mostly wrong.” Granted, “contrarianism” over time scale? Yesterday’s contrarianism is often today’s obviously right belief.

* Americans are still not worried enough about the risk of world war.

* “‘The Small Press World is About to Fall Apart.’ On the Collapse of Small Press Distribution.” Despite me writing about how literary culture is dead, this is still bad.

* The leadership philosophy of Jensen Huang.

* Baseball is dying. It seems tremendously boring to watch, even moreso than football. Yet football seems to be thriving, for reasons not obvious to me, though it is more fun than baseball.

* On fonio, the grain of the moment.

* That article about NPR’s extreme political bias. I stopped listening more than ten years ago; the problems go back further, I think, than this guy says. Their new CEO says things like “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

* “Opening a small business in San Francisco is still a nightmare.” Part of the challenge faced by the left right now is showing really good governance in the places, like SF, that’re ruled by the left. Ezra Klein has been good on this—this recent article about a $1.7 million toilet in San Francisco is an example.

* Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing.

* FTC announces rule banning non-competes. Good. Non-competes impede the formation of new firms and retard the circulation of ideas. California remains a startup hotbed because the state bans non-competes, which means that startups continue to congregate there despite many poor governance choices.