* “Why William Deresiewicz Left Academia (Since You’re Wondering).” He was pushed out, as he says; the whole essay is highly quotable, but I’ll note that Deresiewicz “went [to grad school], in other words, because I wanted to read books: because I loved books; because I lived my deepest life in books; because art, particularly literary art, meant everything to me.” But he found there that “Loving books is not why people are supposed to become English professors, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Loving books is scoffed at (or would be, if anybody ever copped to it).” This may seem curious, but the way the humanities professoriate has evolved is curious. Deresiewicz says that “what disgusted me the most was not the intellectual corruption. It was the careerism.” The overall essay is consistent with my own writing in “What you should know BEFORE you start grad school / PhD programs in English Literature: The economic, financial, and opportunity costs.”
* The midwit trap, which doesn’t do the essay justice; it concerns the way simple solutions often outperform complex ones, and the challenges of understanding both problem and solution spaces, among other things.
* “Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read,” using phonics and direct instruction, which are old, effective, and yet disdained by many people in the education-industrial complex. That we’ve not seen stronger efforts to reform the education of educators seems odd to me.
* Argument that China “can’t” afford to invade Taiwan, which is interesting, apart from the fact that many countries that couldn’t “afford” to invade their neighbors nonetheless did so anyway. Russia can’t afford to invade Ukraine and yet has done so.
* Good and humane essay on Philip Larkin, though with a bad title, and I admire this line: “The greatest writers will always be those who have suffered dully all the wrongs of man, and yet remain alive to a greater wisdom and beauty beyond what they could afford themselves.”
* “Sensitivity Readers Are the New Literary Gatekeepers.” Which can’t be helping fiction sales: we used to make fun of the Soviets for insisting on doctrinaire art. Now, big publishers insist on it, which is particularly odd given the vitality of gatekeeper-free Internet writing.
* A Canceled Cancellation at the University of Michigan: “The University of Michigan Medical School just took a bold stand for academic freedom.” I’ve noted many negative examples but think it useful to also cite some positive ones.
* The NYT finally figures it out: “Why It’s So Hard to Find an Affordable Apartment in New York: There simply aren’t enough places to live, a crisis decades in the making and one that poses a threat to the city’s continuing recovery.” They could’ve learned about supply and demand a few decades ago, but “late” is better than “never.” Perhaps anti-market bias led to the paper’s long-running habit of blaming anything and everything else.
* Someone on Twitter wrote something like: “Boomers spent decades prohibiting the construction of anything except single-family houses lament that they now can’t find anything but single-family houses as they try to downsize now.” Parochial zoning hurts us all, eventually.
* “The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs.” It appears that the purpose of the race is primarily to find patentable drugs, because those are the only ones worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars on to get them through the FDA maze.
* Argument that Google’s search results are now bad, which resonates with me: just now, I was trying to figure out whether there are still consistent problems with MacOS Monterey and Spotlight, and most of the results were blogspam.
* “Is It Worse to Ban a Book, or Never Publish It?” Which links notably to “The Many Faces of Literary Censorship: Censoriousness on the left increasingly joins moral panic on the right.” But, that said, I think the simple issue is that publishing books is being pushed aside by social media, a secular process that doesn’t seem to be slowing.
There is one last possibility: that part of what we’re seeing is measurement error. If actors are getting older and the music we listen to is getting older, it may be because TikTok stars, Twitch streamers, and Roblox creators aren’t being counted among entertainers, even if they have a similar-sized audience. One thing that drags down the average age of Fortune 500 executives is when tech startups with young founders go public, but many of those startups don’t have the revenue to qualify for the Fortune 500, even if their market cap puts them in the S&P.
Some fields are rife with change and activity, while others are bureaucratic and sclerotic. I’m struck by how, for example, Robert Maynard Hutchins became the president of the University of Chicago at age 29 (don’t worry, this didn’t happen recently). Today, startups and tech seem to be the only places that judge on merit first and age later, if at all.
* “I stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or the product?” “The product,” mostly, although a lot of scientific and technical news is interesting. It’s possible to construct a mostly useful and interesting information universe, but it’s hard, and RSS feeds help. The most interesting stuff is rarely in the big publications, except Bloomberg and one or two others.
Arbitrary Lines is a very good book, and one whose subject shouldn’t discourage you; as the author admits: “At surface level, zoning is an impossibly boring topic, even by the terms of public policy debate.” The boredom is part of the point, though: because it’s boring, most people don’t get fired up about change. The tedium is protective to the status quo, and the tedium means that “seemingly innocuous zoning rules” have come to control “virtually every facet of American life.” As a result, we’re “systematically moving from high productivity cities to low-productivity cities, in no small part because these are the only places where zoning allows housing to be built.” I’m a tiny part of this massive migration: I moved from New York City to Arizona because New York builds less new housing per capita than almost any other major city, outside of California. The per-square-foot cost of my place in Arizona, in an area that is what passes for urban, is under half that of New York. I’d have liked to stay in New York but not at the literal cost of staying there.
Gray points to the ’70s as a turning point—something I wondered about too: “As a result of the further tightening of zoning restrictions beginning in the 1970s, median housing prices have dramatically outpaced median incomes in many parts of the country over the past half century.” Solutions like “move to the farthest exurbs” don’t work well because they increase car commuting and traffic congestion, with commuting being awful for quality-of-life. In many cities, there is effectively no more exurban fringe: New York and L.A. are out of space within practice reach of their centers. Nominal “environmentalists” who attempt to seal their neighborhoods from new housing units are particularly comedic: they say they’re worried about the environment, while supporting housing policies that are terrible for the environment and foment car commuting. All of us are hypocritical to some extent, but this is well beyond normal, everyday hypocrisy.
Gray goes through zoning’s history: starting in the 1910s and moving onwards. He notes that “Cities such as Providence, Cleveland, and Los Angles grew by a startling 50 percent or more between 1890 and 1920. This in turn triggered a boom in apartment construction, as demand for housing ballooned.” “Ballooned” is a funny word here, given that one can imagine the housing stock as cartoon balloons being inflated. But it’s also useful to conceive of what a dynamic society looks like: a dynamic allows the freedom for landowners to build new housing, without a huge number of veto players stopping them. Outside of the relatively unregulated tech industry—which is where the frontier has moved—we’re a complacent society, not a dynamic one, and housing is one of the places this is clearest (though drug development and the stranglehold imposed by the FDA is another).
In much discourse today, the “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) contingent argues that things are changing “too fast,” whatever that may mean. NIMBYs who claim to be redressing historical racial grievances seem to miss that they’re willing to rapidly adopt new moral or social ideas, while being unwilling to countenance changes in the physical environment that really matter and might embody those moral or social ideas. They’re saying one thing, but not connecting those statements to each other. Much early zoning was about exclusion—Berkeley, California “introduced the first single-family zoning district in the United States,” and Gray reports that “Charles Henry Cheney, a key framer of Berkeley’s 1916 zoning ordinance” worried that “undesirable industries” would bring in “negroes and Orientals.” Today, Berkeley’s rhetoric favors racial harmony and integration, while Berkeley’s median housing price is $1.7 million. Almost no one seems to see the gap between the stated goals. The rationale for modern zoning is different from the original rationale, but the outcome is similar.
Gray worked, and maybe works, in urban planning, so he has stories about its absurdities. There’s a 30,000 foot view of how things work, and there’s an on-the-ground-view, and he’s done both. I appreciate the combination: having worked for decades in grant writing, I see things about the world of nonprofits and public agencies that most people don’t. Like zoning, few are interested in how many nonprofits and public agencies are funded and truly operate. The knowledge is out there, mostly ignored, except by the wonks who can find one another online.
The middle sections of Arbitrary Lines, about how restricting housing supply raises prices, will be familiar to regular readers, or to anyone familiar with basic economics (which excludes a large number of people who think other factors are somehow at play—though we see the supply-restriction story in the data). I’m tempted to quote extensively, but this is a solid “man does not bite dog” story: what one would expect to happen, has happened, helping to lower aggregate wealth and make life harder for millions of people. Gray also has a picture of yard signs, one saying “All are welcome” and another “opposing zoning liberalization in Austin.” There are fun study citations, like that “the typical resident of Vermont—renowned for its commitment to environmentalist causes—consumes three and a half times as much gasoline per year as the typical resident of New York City.” Most people follow their feelings, not data, and so we get the results we get. Still, the affordability crisis has gotten bad enough that we’re starting to see policy responses, and books like Arbitrary Lines should help inform the kinds of staffers who write and encourage legislation.
What can be done? I approve of efforts to enforce change at the state level and hope they succeed, though I wonder if it’s going to take technological innovation to see substantial improvements. Self-driving cars will lower the cost of current zoning, because true self-driving cars would allow us to reallocate most of the vast amount of urban, developed space reserved for parking into something else. The car allowed the exclusionary suburbs of the post-war era to bloom, and the self-driving car may remove the mania for mandating the over-provision of parking spaces. The High Cost of Free Parking is a great, surprising book about a subject that seems as boring as zoning, and yet one that also affects almost every aspect of how we live—including our health.
If this essay seems like too much a summary of the book, that’s because the book is thorough and comprehensive, and apart from some anecdotes I have too little to add. “Zoning” may be invisible, but its results are visible all around us. We pay supernormal amounts to live in areas built before zoning strangled our ability to create functional cities. Human flourishing would increase if Gray’s ideas became widely adopted. Inertia and complacency stand in the way. We can live better, if we choose to.
* If you, like me, have wondered why legacy publishing seems to be dying, and why fiction seems to be so anemic right now, this article, if true, shows why. Everything about it, from its implicit (or maybe explicit?) racism to its smarmy, dismissive assertions, demonstrates what I wrote about in “The death of literary culture.”
Teixeira’s bill of complaints will be a familiar one for many who have followed the internal battles of the left over the past half-decade, or spent an afternoon on left-wing Twitter. Politically, as a strategist, he thinks the Democrats need to win culturally moderate voters if they’re going to ever create the kind of coalition that can get their policies enacted. And personally, as an employee, he’s none too fond of the institutional dynamics that he says are driven by younger staff but embraced by higher-ups afraid of a public blow-up.
* “Build a Charter School, Get Sued by the Teachers Union: Vertex Academies is set to open next month on the old Blessed Sacrament campus in the Bronx. Its founders, Ian Rowe and Joyanet Mangual, are confident they’ll beat back the legal challenge.” Maybe.
* “The Polarization Spiral: How the right’s monomania and the left’s Great Awokening feed each other.” It’s possible to not succumb to either. “I choose not to” is underrated.
* “Make Birth Free.” Things are different when your side wins, than when your side is merely delivering “criticism.”
* “The Outlier:” a surprisingly interesting review-essay on Jimmy Carter and his presidency; the most arresting part may be the counterfactual around the ’76 election:
Reading this book, I kept imagining the alternate history in which Reagan succeeds in his 1976 primary challenge to Gerald Ford, which he lost narrowly in real life. Since Reagan is a much more talented politician than Ford, and isn’t tainted by Ford’s association with Nixon, he almost certainly picks up a couple points of the vote and beats Carter. Then he ends up presiding over stagflation and takes the blame for the poor economy. He loses in 1980 to Ted Kennedy, who ushers in a decade of liberal dominance until his presidency implodes in scandal amidst the revelation of his many drunken affairs.
I’m reminded of the 2004 election: although Democrats considered losing it to be bad at the time—few partisans like losing elections—the lead-up to the 2008 election included near-economic collapse. And 2004-8 wasn’t a high mark of American foreign policy, either, with Iraq a fiasco and Afghanistan worse in some ways. Republicans got to eat all of that and lose in 2008. Oddly, to my eye, everyone seems to have forgotten about the 2002-2008 period, when Iraq and other aspects of foreign policy dominated much of political discourse. Yet that period is notable in “‘The Internationalists’ and making war illegal,” a recent essay I wrote.
* “Stunned by UFOs, ‘exasperated’ fighter pilots get little help from Pentagon.” I see two major possibilities: we’re either seeing evidence of aliens (defined broadly), or we’re seeing some kind of information battle playing out, perhaps through some kind of projection that shows up on radar and visually.
* Johann Hari’s experiment with smart drugs, and in particular modafinil (which is the common name for “Provigil”). Modafinil can be bought online from Indian sources.
* “Why go to space?” Yes, the pragmatic reasons are valid, but the fundamental reason is because it’s the final frontier. “Why defeat complacency?” might be another title.
* Actors are getting older. I theorize that there’s a fundamental break between the pre-social-media world and the post-social-media world; the latter can include video streaming, YouTube, and other things that may not in a strict sense be “social media.” The cultural world of the latter is eating the cultural world of the former in ways that we’re only beginning to appreciate. I don’t hear students talk about favorite actors any more; I hear them talk about favorite YouTubers. Also, a lot of famous pre-social-media cultural products aren’t actually very good: a few months ago, for example, I tried watching Interview With a Vampire: to put it lightly, it doesn’t hold up. We’re adjusting from a world of relative cultural scarcity to a world of total cultural abundance.
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