* “The Silence Doctors Are Keeping About Millennials’ Death.” Germane to me for obvious reasons; our culture denies both death and grief and seems not able to incorporate either, particularly when death is premature. My own end feels so close, particularly because my days, such as they are, are filled with pain and exhaustion.

* “How can we get the world to talk about factory farming?” We probably can’t, until we can replace conventional meat with lab-grown meat. Then we’ll spend a lot of time about how bad people were to animals in the old days. Also, “A Hundred Years of Mocking Vegetarians: For a rare lifestyle choice, vegetarianism tends to drive people pretty bonkers.” Vegetarians are basically morally correct, and that makes the rest of us uncomfortable, so we lash out.

* “Immunotherapy Is Transforming Cancer Treatment and Oncology.”

* “Human history in the very long run.” I’m sad that I only get to see half the slice of human history I ought to see.

* Neal Stephenson’s writing process.

* “What working in a New York City restaurant was like circa 2000” (NY’er, $). Early Bourdain, before TV made him into something different.

* “Vibecamp & Porcfest: An Ethnography of The Internet’s Edge.” Offensive at times.

* Russia is losing a lot, hard, in Ukraine. Plus, “Leaks reveal how Russia’s foreign intelligence agency runs disinformation campaigns in the West.”

* How to Build High-Speed Rail in America.

* On James Joyce.

* London needs 20 million+ people.

* “Immutep Reports Positive Results in First Line Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma Patients with Negative PD-L1 Expression.” These results are amazing: PD-L1 expression of greater than 1 is advised and perhaps necessary for Keytruda to have some chance of working. Mine was 5 in one test and 20 in another, and I failed Keytruda (or rather it failed me). These are really the kinds of results that, for a fatal diagnosis like head and neck cancer. “Efti” is the name of the drug.

* Tesla continues to become a partisan brand, which is likely to hurt it in the both the short and long term.

* More on why Rome missed an Industrial Revolution.

* “Writing the first draft of financial history with Byrne Hobart.” Hobart and patio11 together!

* Restricting housing supply is a bad idea.

* “Puzzles about oncology and clinical trials.” Me from 2023, still sadly relevant.

* “Pentagon ‘alarmingly slow’ at fielding new weapons.” China seems not to suffer this problem. Perhaps, given what’s happening with Taiwan, we should pay more attention. In other “China moves fast” news: “China State Shipbuilding Corporation is the world’s largest shipbuilder. It builds vessels for the People’s Liberation Army Navy and increasingly sophisticated dual-use commercial ships.” And the U.S. response so far is to shrug, it seems.

* “Not Everyone Needs to Go to Therapy: There be too much ‘mental-health’ awareness.” It turns out that if you tell people they’re robust, they’ll often turn out to be robust. If you tell people they’re fragile enough, they’ll start to believe that.

* A “blitz primary” seems like a good idea, compared to alternatives.

* “Are You a Jerk, or a Liar? On talking past each other.” On the gap between truth-seeking versus community-building communication styles. Ideally one figures out what kind of conversation one is in. Probably there are some sex differences in default style, and when I was younger I thought truth-seeking and information-exchanging were the purposes of communication. It took too much life experience to demonstrate that those beliefs were wrong.

“Are You a Jerk, or a Liar?” goes well with “The quality of your life is the quality of the people you get to know: Illuminating the David Brooks way.”

* In praise of potatoes (and an archive link).

* China is harassing Filipino vessels but not Vietnamese vessels—why that might be.

* The national debt is going unsustainably up, and that’s only now making it into the discourse.

* “California has surrendered its streets to assholes.” In general government needs to balance majority rule with minority rights, and when “minority ‘rights'” impede the ability of a city or society to function at all, that’s a problem.

* Metascience reforms at the NIH.

* “Drone Adoption Favors Quantity Over Quality In Warfare: Development of drones both large and small has outpaced institutional adoption across militaries. Battlefield successes will pressure an update to a deadlier kind of warfare.” The U.S., Europe, and Japan should ban DJI and build a drone industry. Better late than never.

* Lessons from a 37-year old.

* “China’s superrich are eyeing the exit.”

* “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.” On the Pirahã people and language; I downloaded the book, although I’m not convinced I’ll live long enough to read it.

* On the history and maybe future of nuclear power.

* “Traffic engineers build roads that invite crashes because they rely on outdated research and faulty data.”

* “Why haven’t biologists cured cancer?”

* “How we should update our views on immigration.” On Marginal Revolution, not the usual, and I’m struck by how few people can think over decades or centuries about this issue. In the United States, almost all of us are in some sense the descendants of immigrants.

* “Why America’s Berries Have Never Tasted So Good: Driscoll’s had to figure out how to breed, produce and sell its most flavorful strawberries and raspberries. Now the strategy is starting to bear fruit” (wsj, $). Good news is underrated and seemingly hardly ever goes viral. I think that even though I’m very sick and for me individually pessimism is warranted.

* “A Revolution in Biology: How developmental biology might contain the secrets to life, intelligence, and immortality.” On Michael Levin’s ideas regarding how “the bioelectric network of the organism” may be as important as its genes. Not something I’d even heard of.

* An effort to clone 2011-era OKCupid. Not personally useful to me, but everyone complains about online photo-based swipe dating while hardly anyone does anything about it. This is an attempt at doing something.

* “What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?” I’d argue the northeast, too. And this is essential: “Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction?” When Bess I lived in New York City, taxes were absurd, and yet no one said: “Well, the taxes are high but the public schools are great.” Instead, the money just seemed to…disappear. The vast majority of the subway was constructed before 1929.

* “Why California Is Swinging Right on Crime.” This article blames viral videos of brazen criminality. I think crime is like inflation and any number of other things: when it’s low, people forget it exists.

* Viagra improves brain blood flow and could help to prevent dementia.

* “Harold Bloom in Silicon Valley.” The future of Bloom and the canon isn’t in academia, so if it is somewhere, that’s presumably good?

* “The Growing Scientific Case for Using Ozempic and other GLP-1s to Treat Opioid, Alcohol, and Nicotine Addiction.” Given how poorly existing opioid and alcohol treatments work, GLP-1s are one of these “would be hard to be worse than the status quo” efforts.

* “The Overlooked (But Real) Possibility of a Big Democratic Win.” “Overlooked?” More likely just a low probability, maybe nice if it happens but not something to be counted on.

* “OpenAI Expands Healthcare Push With Color Health’s Cancer Copilot: Color Health has developed an AI assistant using OpenAI’s GPT-4o model to help doctors screen and treat cancer patients.” (wsj, $; archive). Sounds useful. Healthcare is still a bespoke, artisanal process, which means it’s both expensive and prone to error. Tools to help doctors are much needed.

In addition, here is Color’s blog post on the tool.

* “Even Doctors Like Me Are Falling Into This Medical Bill Trap.” The trap is:

The radiology charge from NorthShore University HealthSystem for the ankle and wrist X-rays was $1,168, a price that seemed way out of range for something that usually costs around $100 for each X-ray. When I examined the bill more closely, I saw that the radiology portion came not from the urgent care center but from a hospital, so we were billed for hospital-based X-rays. When I inquired about the bill, I was told that the center was hospital-affiliated and as such, is allowed to charge hospital prices.

It turns out that I’d stumbled into a lucrative corner of the health care market called hospital outpatient departments, or HOPDs.

Why do $100 X-rays cost $1,000+ at hospitals?

* Deterring a Taiwan invasion. China’s CCP can choose not to invade, and by not invading it can create conditions for scarcely imaginable human flourishing in the coming decades.

* “What if I told you there was a way to make cheap, carbon-neutral, pipeline-grade natural gas from just sunlight and air?.” On Terraform Industries. Which is trying to create human flourishing.

* The rise of the abundance faction.

* Argument against Lambda School, which is now called BloomTech.

* “U.S. Senate passes bill to support advanced nuclear energy deployment.” A step—though just one step—in the right direction.

* “Israel’s War of Regime Change Is Repeating America’s Mistakes.”

* “Electric Vehicles (EVs) Could Last Nearly Forever.” Buying or leasing a legacy internal combustion engine (ICE) car now or going forward is nuts because its value is going to drop to near-zero within a few years. Granted there are a lot of obvious things that people don’t see coming.

* Making sense of honor culture.

* “Huawei exec concerned over China’s inability to obtain 3.5nm chips, bemoans lack of advanced chipmaking tools.” Maybe.

* “Policy ideas for 10 lifesaving technologies.” And then it has a sequel: “FDA, ARPA-H, & CDC – policy ideas part 2.” The author, Jacob Trefethen, has less antipathy towards the FDA than I do—a low bar—but he identifies some of its problems.

* Argument for the right to self-termination; I prefer my title to the one offered. I agree with the general thrust of the article—which will not surprise anyone who read “Will things get better? Suicide and the possibility of waiting to find out,” but I also admit to hesitation around the specifics of implementation. Hardly anyone thinks it’s wise for Joe to walk into a clinic, say he wants to be euthanized, and for the procedure to be done half an hour later. Yet I sense opponents of self-termination arguing for barriers that will effective block its use altogether. Having been tortured by my own biology before, albeit over a somewhat short term, I don’t think it’s fair or wise to insist that people who are being tortured by their biologies remain corporeal. The right individual self-determination remains important.

* “Spaced repetition for teaching two-year olds how to read.” How cool!

* “Nietzsche’s Guide to Greatness | The Genealogy of Morality Explained.” Interesting, though longer than I’d like it to be, and I think Nietzsche is simply wrong in a lot of his causal arguments, and that he’s fond of false binaries.

* “What Will Become of American Civilization? Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city.” About Phoenix and yet doesn’t capture the flavor of the Phoenix I see; you can also find people who are poor and have problems in any big city. Notably, too, “desalination” is only mentioned twice, and Packer doesn’t emphasize that agriculture consumes about 80% of Arizona’s water. Bess and I would all else equal prefer to live in California, but California won’t build anywhere near enough housing, so, like millions of other Arizonans, here we are. That would make for a much shorter article, however. Places like Arizona, Texas, Georgia, and Florida are growing so fast in part because places like California, Oregon, Washington, New York, and Massachusetts make living there illegal via zoning.

* Argument that the Republican party is doomed, due to how “Increasing age and education polarization means that Republicans are rapidly losing the capacity to run public institutions at all levels other than electoral, and this trend cannot realistically reverse within a generation.” A dying animal can still be dangerous, though.

* “Elon Musk exposes himself through Apple/OpenAI temper tantrum.” Not the exact framing I’d choose but Musk is suffering from Twitter brain worms and that’s bad.

* “Three holes in the U.S.’ economic strategy against China.”

* “Why Young Women Are Becoming More Liberal Than Young Men: The Gender-Equality Paradox.” Maybe.

* “The Optimists Ended up in Auschwitz.”

* “The Ford Foundation has spent decades tearing the country apart, tax-free.” Maybe indefinite foundations are not such a smart move?

* “GM had $6 billion to spend on next-gen EVs, chose stock buybacks.” In case you want to know why Tesla is still important.

* What things look like from Israel. It’s Ezra Klein and so not among the dumber takes that predominate.

* “How an American Dream of Housing Became a Reality in Sweden.”

* “Market-rate housing will make your city cheaper.” Obvious, but one sees many, even generally smart people, blaming everything under the sun apart from supply restrictions. Overall, “Americans Are Mad About All the Wrong Costs”—we should be wrong about housing costs, because housing costs are the biggest part of most people’s budgets. Yet we’re getting what we’ve voted for, for decades: we oppose new housing anywhere near us, and then costs rise. I’ve read claims that voters are like children, unhappy when the things we collectively vote for come to pass and harm us in predictable ways.

* “Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul: Real learning has become impossible in universities. DIY programs offer a better way.” To me the hardest part is finding books worth reading deeply. Most classics I find unsatisfying.

* “You Can Thank Private Equity for That Enormous Doctor’s Bill” (wsj, $). Consolidation in healthcare is an underrated problem. Oligopolies are sprouting while regulators are asleep. Hospitals and insurance companies have great lobbyists.

* The U.S. has not pursued wise nuclear policy.

* Could a vaccine eliminate or dramatically reduce strep throat? One of these truly important things that gets subsumed beneath the typical, not-important headlines.

* “Deterring a Taiwan Invasion: There might still time to stave off WWIII.” Also: “Taiwan is the new Berlin.”

* “People Unlike Me: Political ideologies tend to suit the people who promote and believe them, and not suit others. This makes governance difficult.” A useful admission that policies good for one group (like drug liberalization) may be bad for others (like people with poor conscientiousness or impulsiveness issues).

* “Rejecting GMOs hinders human progress and keeps the poor hungry.” Obvious, and yet here we are.

* “More Crowding, Fewer Babies: The Effects of Housing Density on Fertility.” On especially the failure to build spacious multi-family.

* Arguments for parent control of education.

* Claim that “China Is Losing the Chip War: Xi Jinping picked a fight over semiconductor technology—one he can’t win.” I don’t know enough to evaluate this for truth.

* “Putin Is Running Out of Time to Achieve Breakthrough in Ukraine.” Good.

* “Do grant proposal texts matter for science funding decisions? A field experiment.” Maybe not that much.

* “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.

* “Are single-staircase buildings the new accessory dwelling units (ADUs)?” The basic goal is to figure out all the legal impediments to housing abundance and knock them all over.

* “I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked.” It’s notable that this story is actually important, and yet barely reported in the media.

* “No One Knows What Universities Are For: Bureaucratic bloat has siphoned power away from instructors and researchers.” A process that has been underway for decades and that is now largely complete.

* “Your friends are not a representative sample of public opinion: It’s not just Republicans who are at risk of epistemic closure.”

* “China Has Gotten the Trade War It Deserves.”

* “Parking Reform Legalized Most of the New Homes in Buffalo and Seattle.” It’s a good start. Along similar lines, “Let a thousand skyscrapers bloom.” Obvious, and yet still strangely contentious.

* “It’s 2024 and Drought is Optional.” We can solve a lot of problems with technology, if we choose to. The tragedy is choosing not to, and choosing stasis over abundance.

* “Reasons America is headed for a more conservative decade.”

* The Demographic Roots of American Power.

* Are self-driving cars the beginning of the end of private cars? One can only hope. I routinely take Waymo in Phoenix and it’s great.

* “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.

* “Children could die and go blind because of Greenpeace’s Golden Rice activism.” The legacy “environmental” organizations have now become antithetical not only to environmental improvements, but to human flourishing!

* This May Be Our Last Chance to Halt Bird Flu in Humans and We Are Blowing It.

* How to teach a two-year old to read.

* Are flying cars finally here? (NY’er, $, but also detailed and not just more of the same.)

* On the need to pay teachers for performance, not based on seniority. I expect that the spread of micro schools, vouchers, and charter schools to push schools towards pay-for-performance, rather than pay-for-not-performance.

* “Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing.” There can be an amazingly long time between bad decisions being made and the results of those bad decisions being widely seen, felt, and acknowledged.

* Zoning out American families. When you see articles about the falling birth rate, connect them to the articles about restrictions on housing construction. We raise the cost of housing and then are somehow surprised when people can’t afford kids. The boomers whose votes foreclosed the construction of new housing are now paying for that in part through no or few grandkids. Scarcity policies are ultimately self-defeating, but hardly anyone thinks this way.

* On actually reading the book, which most people don’t do. Most people don’t read for comprehension, either.

* “For most people, politics is about fitting in.” Notice how rarely people are motivated by ideas, or even consistency. Most people can’t recall what they argued or said they believed a few years ago.

* Weak argument that some college students are abandoning Ivy-League-type schools. Still, things are the same—business-as-usual—until they’re not. Similarly, see “Normal Kids Get F*cked: Elite universities went to war against fraternities and fun while indulging Hamas-admiring collectives, and the students have noticed.” Not the headline I’d have chosen, but the selective enforcement of rules and principles is notable. I have a half-written rant about how it’s impossible to write satires of academia, and it has been for years, but I’m not sure it’s worth finishing or posting, due to obviousness.

* “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.