* More on carbon capture and storage: covers familiar ground, but these types of pieces keep popping up.

* Why have blog audiences declined? We can choose to be free: but mostly we choose Facebook.

* On America’s barren suburbs: “Cities are not massive subdivisions divided by multi-lane highways, where life only exists at the strip mall or in empty suburbia. There is actually a diverse urban culture, with nice walkable downtowns. And even if you live in the suburbs, there is something there. You may find train stations, subway stops. A square with stores and restaurants. Parks, playgrounds. Hiking areas etc.” They are “massive subdivisions divided by multi-lane highways” in the United States, sadly.

* “Jacques Barzun and Friend: What did a distinguished historian, and possibly a great man, see in an unkempt young would-be writer?”

* “China threat to invade Taiwan is ‘closer than most think’, says US admiral.”

* “It’s All Just Displacement,” on the problems and incentives facing the media.

* People love the idea of 20-minute neighbourhoods. So why isn’t it top of the agenda?

* “Chinese government officials and state media are increasingly incorporating woke talking points in their attacks on American values.”

* “U.S. rent has increased 175% faster than household income over past 20 years.” The need to build more housing is acute.

* “The psychedelic roots of Christianity.” Maybe.

* “The Era of the Wood Skyscraper Is Arriving.” Now the U.S. just to make it legal to build them.

* “How U.S. media lost the trust of the public.” “How could it not?” might be the more interesting question.

* “The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks.” I’ve never been able to get into the Culture novels, but maybe I should try again.

* “Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene:” Detailed, hilarious, amazing.

* “Beware of Books! A new moralism is gripping the literary world, treating grownups like children.” I’m surprised more writers don’t decide to market themselves as “the writer they don’t want you to read.” It’s also possible that the most interesting material is being self-published, leaving the big publishers with conformism.

* “Hackers, Mason Jars, and the Psychedelic Science of DIY Shrooms.”

* The Dr. Seuss thing is really about bad and over long copyright, which is probably a better framing than the usual. t

* Moore’s Law for everything, by Sam Altman, a very useful and interesting piece, but, as often happens, I’m struck by the fact that we can’t really get to some of the low-hanging fruit today, like dramatically liberalizing zoning laws. We could have a much less expensive world right now, but we don’t, for purely legal and political reasons. Let me also lay out a slightly pessimistic case: AI continues to do cool things at the margins, yet, like nuclear fusion power plants, it’s always a few years away from transformative effects. We keep getting it almost working right, but not quite getting there, and so the true transformative potential is much further out than appears right now. I’d like Sam’s vision to be the correct one.

* Why Some of the Worst Attacks on Social Science Have Come From Liberals, from 2015 but anticipates the last six years.

* “‘We’re going to lose fast’: U.S. Air Force held a war game that started with a Chinese biological attack.” Notice: “[T]he Pentagon was largely distracted fighting counterterrorism and counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two decades.” Let’s hope the saber rattling remains saber rattling. But, also, “European countries send warships to South China Sea in Beijing pushback.” So who knows? Let’s not find out.

* Bryan Caplan on social desirability bias (SDB) and other matters.

* “Oregon Is Blazing a Psychedelic Trail: A very promising mental health experiment is taking shape in the West.”

* “Measuring Teaching Quality Higher Education.”

* Scenius, or Communal Genius.

* “The Substack controversy’s bigger story.” Also, in separate Substack news: “Writers who can command a paying audience have heretofore been significantly underpaid. That points to the real reason why the media has reason to fear Substack: it’s not that Substack will compete with existing publications for their best writers, but rather that Substack makes it easy for the best writers to discover their actual market value.”

* Symbolic Gestures Won’t Advance Social Equity: What wealthy colleges could do if they actually cared about helping the poor. In general, the amount of verbiage that is virtue signaling, versus the amount of concrete action, should be noted.

* Apple works with China—but not the FBI.

* “A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word ‘Class.’” An interesting idea but most vitally an interesting diagnosis.

* “Sex Tapes, Hush Money, and Hollywood’s Economy of Secrets.” Not on precisely the same subject, but “Nude selfies: are they now art?” also appeared, and is primarily interesting for the venue in which it’s published.

* Longfellow and the Decline of American Poetry.

* “The Upzoning Wave Finally Catches Up to California.” Great news that deserves greater attention.

* Well-done review of the new Philip Roth biography, which avoids lots of the typical boring stuff. I still think Roth has lots of excellent sentences but his novels are under-plotted and often dull for that reason. I used to like them better.

* “Howling in Unison: A new book detailing the psychic conflicts in the Soviet Writers’ Union is a cautionary tale as much as a remarkable history.”

* “Is This the End of French Intellectual Life? The country’s culture of argument has come under the sway of a more ideological, more identity-focused model imported from the United States.” Is the United States per se the problem, or is it something about the Internet itself?

* Have universities abandoned their commitment to free thought and the exchange of ideas? See also Academic Freedom Alliance, a nonprofit devoted to free thought and expression.

* “On Being Blacklisted.”

* “What Is Happening to the Republicans?” Detailed and not stupid.

* Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny.

* “As Mushrooms Grow in Popularity, a Radical Mycology Movement is Emerging: In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms explores fungi’s role in nutrition, food security, ecological healing, and medicinal sovereignty.”

* Google’s new certificate programs and the college degree.

* Israeli vaccination data shows the mRNA vaccines perform incredibly well. The end is in sight.

* “I Tracked Down The Girls Who Bullied Me As A Kid. Here’s What They Had To Say.” If I taught high school I’d assign this essay to students.

* “The Activists Who Embrace Nuclear Power,” in the New Yorker, and perhaps the canonical-but-accessible article on this subject for the skeptical. Michael Shellenberger is good on Twitter, too. This is perhaps indicative of modern culture and problems: “Nuclear power was associated with radiation, which, like pesticides, could threaten that web.” The phrase “associated with:” we’re thinking about metaphor, not about data.

* Description of parent pushing back against “critical race theory” (CRT) in their kid’s school.

* On how campus administrators push universities to act like corporations, among other things. Thefire.org has many interesting takes on culture and academia.

* “The cultural ‘myths’ that affect parenting:” not a great title and some flaws, but overall compatible with The Anthropology of Childhood.

* On the peculiarities of modern censorship culture, but also the history of censorship.

* “Story Time With Titania McGrath,” extremely amusing.

* The Guardian‘s middlebrow take on “sending nudes.”

* The Framework laptop: a truly modular and modern laptop, it would seem, although I’d think they should offer it pre-installed with Linux. Maybe their contract with Microsoft forbids that. Still, an admirable effort.

* “Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State.” And yet widespread condemnation of Disney and others remains curiously absent, almost as if parochial concerns suck up much of the cultural air in the U.S.

* “The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages:” “one hopes,” I would add, but I’m not sure the argument is true.

* Paul Graham’s life story, under the header “What I worked on.”

* “California State Legislator Introduces Bill to Decriminalize Psychedelics.”

* “How We Did It: Two new books flesh out the history of smut, from Etsy-like handicrafts to the sexy swamp of Tumblr.” On The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America and Ana Valens’ Tumblr Porn. How do they compare to Thy Neighbor’s Wife, one wonders? Or at least I did, but then I read the second one and it feels more like an extended Tumblr riff mixed with an undergrad term paper than a book.

* Cancel the New York Times, on the seeming narrowing of permissible opinion online. Maybe pseudonyms are the way to go online now, in which case I’m making a mistake right now.

* “France Sees an Existential Threat From American Campuses: Prominent politicians and intellectuals say social theories from the United States on race, gender and post-colonialism are undermining their society.” The growth of this from fringe campus nonsense to hitting real workplaces still surprises me, although I wonder also if we’re going to see workplace norms change too.

* On Patricia Highsmith. I read the biography, which seems well done, and Highsmith seems to have led a life of sex, booze, and writing, probably in that order.

* “Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?” Not just the usual, and a statement of work as a paycheck versus work as changing the world.

* John McWhorter: “The Neoracists: A new religion is preached across America. It’s nonsense posing as wisdom.” Persuasion.community is also producing disproportionately good and interesting writing right now. Tablet Mag is also good but won’t let readers read articles unless Javascript is enabled, which is very annoying. NoScript is a great, and educational, extension.

* “Whatever the faults of overconfidence or contrarianism sometimes may be, it seems clear to me that spreading a society-wide message that the solution is to simply trust the existing outputs of society, whether those come in the form of academic institutions, media, governments or markets, is not the solution. All of these institutions can only work precisely because of the presence of individuals who think that they do not work, or who at least think that they can be wrong at least some of the time.” Things may be the way they are for reasons mostly good, but things can also be made better if enough people want them to be made better.

* “I helped build ByteDance’s censorship machine.” ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok.

* The admissions office versus standards?

* Effort. It’s usually underestimated and underappreciated. Relatedly, it’s far easier to “comment” or “critique” than it is to make things. I sometimes like to think of it as the distinction between consuming and producing; many people find the move from school to the real world challenging because that’s also a move from a consumption-based world to a production-based world.

* Detailed article about Apple in the Tim Cook era, with emphasis on Apple’s commitment to manufacturing in China. Apple doesn’t appear worried about China invading or attempting to invade Taiwan; it’s also notable that, as with Disney and China, there’s little public outcry or discussion. What should we draw from that, regarding many social/political controversies in the U.S.? What things should be prominent but aren’t? One comment on the great stagnation and the growth of bureaucracy in the U.S.:

“Jon Rubinstein, a senior vice president for hardware engineering during Jobs’s second tour at Apple, recalls almost having a heart attack in 2005 when he went with Gou to see a new factory in Shenzhen for the iPod Nano—a tiny device 80% smaller than Apple’s original MP3 player—only to find an empty field. Within months, though, a large structure and production line were in place. ‘In the U.S. you couldn’t even get the permits approved in that time frame,’ he says.”

In possibly related, and definitely good, news: “Samsung Foundry: New $17 Billion Fab in the USA by Late 2023.”

* On Clubhouse, the social media app focused on audio, but not a podcast app either.

* “The Mushrooms Will Survive Us,” on the popularity of mushroom cultivation as a hobby.

* Good interview with Zeynep Tüfekçi, who called the pandemic early and has done much on privacy, technology, and human interaction.

* Coinbase founder “Brian Armstrong on the Crypto Economy” and other topics, like the need to focus.

* “Extremely Online: The Novel.” A review I’m happy to have read for a novel I’m fine with not having read.

* “‘It’s Chaos’: Behind the Scenes of Donald McNeil’s New York Times Exit: Senior editors beamed in by video, staffers raged on Slack, and takes flowed on Twitter. Even with all the recent Times drama—Caliphate, Chillsgate—the McNeil mess, said one reporter, is ‘the most explosive scandal I’ve seen at the paper.'” It’s drama on the one hand, yes, but also emblematic of the times (the times of the Times, you might say) on the other.

* Thinking about how we perceive psychiatric conditions, with thoughts about evolution and such as well.

* “California Is Making Liberals Squirm:” the state is ruled almost entirely by democrats, but it’s not a state that anyone would call “well-governed.” Matt Yglesias had a similar essay in November, covering Massachusetts, another state that people are, on the net, leaving—for states that are both warmer and also politically redder.

* The NYT article on Slate Star Codex (SSC) came out and it’s terrible: here is an example of what more accurate quoting from Scott Alexander would look like, and here is a partial list of the ways the NYT attempts to mislead readers. I had some NYT complaints in 2015, and, while I still cite it frequently—I did in this links post—but don’t fully trust it. You can’t. SSC is also, to my mind, a strange choice for such a hit piece, because curious readers can go read SSC instantaneously and see that the author is being disingenuous, at best. There’s an implied threat in the NYT article: if you think for yourself, become popular, and don’t toe the line, you will become a target. The SSC comment on the article has ten times the integrity and thought than the article itself. How do we know what we know? We ought to be working harder to answer such questions.

* Another take about the above, this time on what “middlebrow” means.

* Are charter schools being punished for their successes? Too much mood affiliation in the given headline, but of interest nonetheless.

* “‘Their goal is to destroy everyone’: Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape,” from the BBC. A horrifying story.

* “A YouTuber Shoots to Literary Fame in France, Ruffling Feathers” is a terrible article because it manages to say nothing at all about the quality of the book in question. Its author seems terrified to take a stance, and so presents the scenario as one of interest groups, rather than of literary or artistic quality. How boring.

* “How to Talk to Millennials About Capitalism: Polls show that young people embrace socialism—but they also distrust government regulation and admire entrepreneurialism and small business.” Not a great title but an interesting article; for most people, “socialism” seems to be a mood or identity affiliation, not a policy preference or set of policy proposals.

* “The reshaped Mac experience,” and “reshaped for the worse” one might add. I’ve noticed some of these things, but they’re aren’t sufficiently irritating to make me leave altogether. Messages and iMessage are also key bits of infrastructure for me.

* “Jonathan Haidt Is Trying to Heal America’s Divisions.” Good, and a good article. We could and should spend more time slowing down, thinking, and recognizing common humanity—and less time on Facebook.

* “Students Punished for ‘Vulgar’ Social Media Posts Are Fighting Back.” Good. The administrative overreach should see a backlash.

* The relentless Jeff Bezos.

* “Luck, foresight and science: How an unheralded team developed a COVID-19 vaccine in record time.” A tremendously impressive story.

* “The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record.” An adaptation, essentially, of The Ends of the World (a great book worth reading). Few people incorporate the basic points made by such research analyses into their everyday lives: the gap between the “terrifying warning” and the sales of pickup trucks, for example, is vast, and perhaps widening.

* What is the value of restraint?

* “The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows.” Not the exact framing I’d prefer but a description of a real issue.

* A poisonous person, Patricia Highsmith was an enduring writer. Highsmith “abjured monogamy herself, believing it undermined her creativity.” That is a theory, I suppose.

* “China seized my sister. Biden must fight for her and all enslaved Uighurs.” A few of you have said that you’re tired of the China-related links, which is understandable, but, simultaneously, we have a massive genocidal regime that’s massively imprisoning, sterilizing, and sometimes murdering ethnic minorities within its own borders, while simultaneously threatening to invade democratic neighbors, and those things are really bad.

* “The Office of Free Speech: A Not-So-Modest Proposal for Academia.” Consistent with me in “Have journalists and academics become modern-day clerics?”

* “The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try. A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.”

* Know your amphetamines, from the new Slate Star Codex, now called Astral Codex Ten, because why not?

* “The New Censors: Journalists celebrate the destruction of freedoms on which their profession depends.” A strange development, to my eye, but maybe the gatekeepers don’t like no longer being gatekeepers.

* “The US failure to authorize the AstraZeneca vaccine in the midst of a pandemic when thousands are dying daily and a factory in Baltimore is warmed up and ready to run is a tragedy and dereliction of duty of epic proportions.”

* “The ‘induced demand’ case against YIMBYism is wrong.” Fairly obvious, but one keeps seeing the point reappear.

* “Why Facebook and Apple are going to war over privacy.” There is an element here of “two giant monsters clashing.”

* “Bryan Fogel on Why Netflix and Streamers Were Scared of Releasing ‘The Dissident.’” Hollywood loves stories about plucky dissidents overcoming powerful empires, but in reality Hollywood is chasing the money.

* Beating Back Cancel Culture: A Case Study from the Field of Artificial Intelligence.