* “Cancer Is Capsizing Americans’ Finances. ‘I Was Losing Everything.’ Higher drug prices, rising out-of-pocket costs and reduced incomes create economic strain for many patients” (wsj, $). Don’t I know it: the time taken by treatment combined with fatigue and exhaustion are murderous to real work, and even to thinking. The side effects of many cancer treatments are themselves so deleterious.

* Turns out that Darling 58, the newly modified chestnut tree that was supposed to be resistant to chestnut blight, is actually Darling 54, which is not so resistant. And so now progress in restoring the American chestnut has been set back years, if not decades.

* “Why a California Plan to Build More Homes Is Failing: Only a few dozen people have built housing under a law allowing them to construct duplexes alongside single-family houses” (wsj, $). It’s notable how few people say things like: “I want my city or state to be governed like California.”

* New Framework laptops are out, with new Intel processors. Framework laptops are famous because they’re designed to be modular, and with easily replaced parts. My big complaint so far is that they don’t offer an OLED screen option, but for a “big complaint,” it’s minor.

* Cold War 2 update. It still seems like hardly anyone is taking this seriously, and building new stuff in the U.S. remains maddeningly difficult.

* “Protesting the Decline of Reading.” Good luck!

* “Is Congress having its YIMBY moment?” Let’s hope so. YIMBYism should transcend left and right, too; shouldn’t we all want affordable housing? Maybe “A New Centrism Is Rising in Washington: Call it neopopulism: a bipartisan attitude that mistrusts the free-market ethos instead of embracing it.” I wouldn’t quite agree with the framing, but it is obvious that China is gearing up to attack Taiwan, and that requires thinking differently about a lot—China might not actually pull the trigger (Xi shouldn’t), but it’s putting itself in position to do so.

* “The solar industrial revolution is the biggest investment opportunity in history.” Optimistic, but not necessarily wrong.

* “How Putin hijacked Austria’s spy service — and is now gunning for its government.” It seems insane to me that Austrians don’t mind this, and that Hungarians don’t seem to mind Orban’s love of the Kremlin, or that parts of the American right are interested in taking orders from Moscow.

* How Matt Yglesias went from left to center-left.

* “‘He couldn’t wait to join’: thousands of young Russians die in Ukraine war.” Putin is destroying Russia and Ukraine, which one say see more explicitly in “Not Enough Russians: Russia’s population has been in decline for years, and the war in Ukraine has made matters worse.” For decades if not centuries, the smartest thing Russians could do was get out of Russia. That’s still true today.

* Why the State Department’s intelligence agency—the INR—may be the best in DC.

* “America’s Military Is Not Prepared for War — or Peace.”

* School choice has been wildly successful in Florida.