* “Exit Strategy: The Case for Single-Stair Egress.” One of these policies that seems minor but is in fact important to human flourishing.

* “How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab.” It’s hard.

* “Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production.” Good if true.

* “The positive case for Joe Biden.” Arguments rarely heard, and it’s largely about policy, unlike the identity and horse-race nonsense that predominates what passes for coverage. This is interesting too: “Biden led by 49 points among voters who relied on newspapers.” By contrast, “Among voters who rely on social media, Trump led by four points. Among voters who rely on cable news, Trump led by eight. Voters who get their news from YouTube and Google favor Trump by 16 points.” Many if not most people have poor epistemology, and, as Bryan Caplan argues in The Myth of the Rational Voter, most people don’t bear direct costs for that.

* Debugging tech journalism. Like most journalism, there’s a strong pull, driven by audience interest, in negativity and salaciousness. We get what we ask for, which is consistent with the links immediately above this one.

* The importance of your coaching tree.

* The Austin, TX freeway expansion and the ills of induced demand.

* Dmitri Alperovitch on the New Cold War with China. Grim but also important.

* Argument that supernormal returns to real estate are over. I’d probably bet against this, at least for high-productivity cities, because I think knowledge-spillover effects from in-person proximity are likely to continue, and are not likely to be replicated from working at home. The best argument against my view is self-driving cars: self-driving cars will obviate the need for most parking lots, which will open huge amounts of existing urban / suburban land to development, which should reduce prices. What we think of as “the age of the car” is really “the age of the parking lot.”

* Eli Dourado on sociopolitical collapse. The bits about the complexity ratchet are notable. Still, I don’t think any “civilizations” have collapsed in the ways he’s describing since the Industrial Revolution, though there are ways to imagine this now (nuclear weapons, pandemics).

* “The problem is that in his search for teachable moments, his memoir acquires the cardboard tone of a middling opinion column.” A fun takedown, full of quotable insults.

* “Is the backlash to universities becoming real? Taxpayers, politicians, and employers are realizing that campus leftism has gone too far. The question is whether it’s too late to stop it.” Maybe.

* “Revolution of the Broletariat: From the christ-like resurrection of america’s frat boy to the chad-ification of tech, anti-masculinity is over; chad maximalism has arrived.” Maybe? Entertaining, though not sure I buy it.

* FDA approves initial clinical trial for an Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) vaccine. EPV is probably much worse than is commonly realize.