* “American education’s new dark age” is the official title, but the real question is closer to “What is college for?” If colleges aren’t specifically training reading and writing skills, those skills atrophy, or are never developed in the first place.

* On The Two-Income Trap, a book that sounds excellent on fundamentals—but has it had much impact on policy?

* “As a political biography, it’s odd, yes. But as partisan pornography, it’s undeniably fantastic.” Ignore the title, don’t read the book being reviewed here, and savor instead the review itself, which is art.

* “How American Culture Ate the World: A review of A Righteous Smokescreen” is way too long and blathery; the short answer is that Europe blew itself up not just once, in 1914 – 18, but again, during World War II, thus dooming its early lead. Everyone speaks or attempts to speak English as a consequence of those wars and their political fallout, including the foolish adoption of Communism. While Europe blew itself apart, murdering and expelling millions of its citizens, China and Russia adopted dysfunctional Communist political-economic systems. When everyone else is screwing up, it’s sufficient to not screw up too badly, and the United States was the least-crazy, most-functional country. We see Russia, right now, actively driving out whatever smart, capable, and imaginative people may be left in the country. For just about the entirety of Russia’s existence, the smartest thing most people could do was leave. It still is.

* “The Death of Authority in the American Classroom.” Pretty much. Beer & circus for all.

* Homelessness is a housing problem. The people who say otherwise usually don’t think about how a person got to be living on the street and screaming at strangers; that person’s problems are usually exacerbated by high housing costs and precarious housing.

* Granting funding is broken—something we all know—and this writer has an extremely impractical, non-scaleable way to fix it.

* Description of why “5G” is not just marketing hype, though its promise may take many years to be fulfilled.

* “Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?” Dan Luu is writing one of the most interesting blogs right now, and you should subscribe to his RSS feed.

* Russia is dying out: on the country’s demographic crisis. It’s hard to imagine the Ukraine invasion as doing anything but making this existing problem far worse.

* The many faces of literary censorship.

* Disney’s Institutional Capture.

* Brandon Sanderson on changes in the publishing industry, among other topics. He also finds that half of his sales are in audiobook format.

* “The Campaign to Shut Down Crucial Documentary Tool youtube-dl Continues – And So Does the Fight to Save It.” I use YouTube-dl routinely, with the “-x” option to grab audio-only.

* “Love Is Love: Workplace Edition.” With a caveat like “Self-referential warning: If this post is true, then it is not safe for work (NSFW). Otherwise, you have nothing to worry about,” how could you not be intrigued?

* Putin and the dictator trap. Information and information quality matter.

* Will China’s growth slow—and will the country never catch the U.S. in per-capita terms? Maybe. If a person predicts enough things, some of them will turn out to be true, and the others will be quietly forgotten.

* “How Intel Financialized and Lost Leadership in Semiconductor Fabrication.” Like Boeing did before them. There is a good essay on the value of in-house expertise that is congruent with this. I did see an Internet commenter observe that Intel lost leadership in semiconductors simply because they tried a bunch of stuff to continue die shrinks and none of them worked, while TSMC mastered extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, and the “financialization” aspects is secondary at best. I don’t know which view is right.

* “Why Are Scholars Such Snitches? The university bureaucracy has been hijacked for political grudge matches and personal vendettas.” Consistent with my anecdotal observations. Matt Yglesias is optimistic about higher education, while noting that the number of 18 year olds is dropping, and that likely explains much of higher ed’s challenge. I’m struck by the difference between what Internet autodidacts think about education versus what providing education to actual, normal 18 year olds feels like. * Sam Altman thinks US college education is nearer to collapse than it appears. Maybe; I’d be curious to see numbers and dates attached to that comment.

* “It’s 70 degrees warmer in Antarctica. Scientists are flabbergasted.” World response: indifference. There are only about 13,000 ClimeWorks subscribers. What should that tell us? In addition, consider “Climate politics for the real world,” which reflects the sort of things I’ve been saying. At the same time surveys and the media claim concern about the climate, everyone is (or rather “was”) buying trucks and SUVs. What should we infer from that?

* Why America can’t build quickly any more.

* “Petty Thieves Plague San Francisco. ‘These Last Two Years Have Been Insane.’” I’d have thought we’d already see a backlash, but not yet, apparently.

* Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity.

* “Confessions of a Pornhub moderator.” More funny than insightful.

* “Scientific Funding Is Broken. Can Silicon Valley Fix It?”

* If you dislike the behavior, consider changing the incentives. Note: “This is particularly distressing as a leftist; in 21st century America ‘the left’ has been utterly hollowed out by posturing children brandishing communist history they haven’t read and rapacious professional ‘organizers’ who sell books about poor Black people so that they can get rich enough that they never have to interact with poor Black people again.” Also from Freddie: “Sneer if You’d Like, But Engineered Solutions Are a Lot More Plausible Than Behavioral Change in 2022.” That’s what I perceive too, which is “the world as it is” rather than “the world as I’d like it to be.” Yes, it’d be nice if we quit buying massive quantities of vanity pickup trucks and SUVs, but all indicators in the last decade or more point in the opposite direction, which is why companies like ClimeWorks are so important. ClimeWorks has only 13,000 subscribers right now: what should that tell you about how serious most people who talk about climate change really are? We’re collectively reaching the stage where behavioral change solutions, like building out subways and nuclear power infrastructure, are in the past, and engineered solutions are what we’re left with. There seems to be too much “let’s imagine an ideal world” thinking and too little “with what we have, and who we have, how can we make important changes now?” thinking.

* “Time Is Running Out to Avert a Harrowing Future, Climate Panel Warns.” But hey, we don’t want to build out nuclear power infrastructure because of NIMBYs, and we’ve got pickup trucks that we need to drive to the grocery store and park. See the links immediately above as well.

* “As the Tanks Rolled into Ukraine, So Did Malware. Then Microsoft Entered the War.” Speed counts.

* The New Yorker on ketamine for depression. Nothing new there to anyone who has followed the progression of ketamine as a therapeutic, but the venue is notable.

* “8,000 Years Ago, 17 Women Reproduced for Every One Man: An analysis of modern DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture.” How should you update any of your mental models?

* Biology and human behavior is a better title than the one given, which is overly culture war.

* Elon, SpaceX, and Ukraine. Technology changes politics more than vice-versa.

* “Without freedom to transact, you have no other constitutional rights.” An idea whose time has come, maybe, as we see credit card companies wield their powers against their would-be users for ideological reasons.

* We should inflict brain drain on Russia. The Ukrainian crisis is partially a failure to get ahead of the situation and think long term: to build out nuclear power infrastructure in Europe, to offer paths to citizenship for people living under dictatorship, to get out from the path dependence of legacy car makers and into electric vehicles. Maybe in the future we should think in terms longer than the next election cycle. Maybe the NIMBYs, the naysayers, the “say no to everythings” should get less of a voice, and the silent majority a louder voice.

* “‘A deranged pyroscape’: how fires across the world have grown weirder.” Important, grim.

* New Yorker profile of Christopher Rufo, the guy leading the charge against neo-racism and “critical race theory” from Twitter, of all places. One obsessed man can change things, it seems; is he this generation’s Andrew Sullivan? I thought the profile would be a hit piece, but it seemed pretty fair, if critical.

* Bryan Caplan leaves Econlog to begin a new venture, albeit one without an RSS feed when I last checked.

* The myth of Chinese supremacy? It seems to ignore a lot.

* An interview about academic writing, in which the guy says: “I remember having an inferiority complex in grad school because I felt like no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make my prose unreadable and complicated and weird and forbidding” and “In the past five or six years, the sanctimoniousness has gotten even worse than it used to be.”

* On shitpost diplomacy: where you think the power is, and where it actually is, may differ.

* Misidentifying talent.

* Soybean oil really is that bad?

* Energy use in U.S. residential buildings.

* “How sensitivity readers corrupt literature.” If you are wondering why so many contemporary books seem incredibly boring, this should help explain. It’s amusing to wonder what a “sensitivity reader” would have thought when Christianity was the dominant religion, and when publishers often pushed back against the dominant culture.

* Why Covid-19 vaccines are a freaking miracle.”

* “The Nomad:” an interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy, otherwise known as BHL. I can’t tell if the front matter is intended in jest, but it’s consistent with my essay “The Death of literary culture.”

* Most of the media is by and for the rich, a fact rarely foregrounded, perhaps because many persons in the media are in denial about this fact, and want to imagine themselves as other than they are.

* Inside the Institute for Progress. A great effort.

* Google search is dying? What will replace it? I’ve defaulted to DuckDuckGo for a while, but I’m also the sort of person who changes the default search engine, which is extremely unusual.

* The end of online anonymity?

* “Book Review: Sadly, Porn.” This is by Scott Alexander and thus thorough.

* The U.S. may not be ready for a peer-to-peer fight in Europe, contrary to what you’d assume. Note the source. Or, maybe we are.

* Is the 21st Century “the dark century” so far? “[M]ajorities are easily led by ambitious demagogues,” we find, and “What’s been called the Culture of Narcissism took hold, with the view that human beings should be unshackled from restraint.”

* “Diamonds Aren’t Forever (And Neither is Your Love).”

* Paul Graham on putting ideas into words.

* “Democrats’ college degree divide: More educated Democrats are more progressive across the board.” This seems important but also under-emphasized.

* “Pedestrian Deaths Spike in U.S. as Reckless Driving Surges.”

* “Why America Has So Few Doctors: As a matter of basic economics, fewer doctors means less care and more expensive services.” The needlessly, pointlessly arduous process of becoming a doctor makes me and others like me write essays telling people not to do it, and it encourages the growth of pseudo-doctoring in the form of nurses practitioners and physicians assistants. But the current system serves many of the people enmeshed in the current system effectively, and so it persists, even if no one would set it up this way if we were starting over.

* The worst megadrought in 1,200 years is exacerbated by climate change. This is bad, but, despite what you hear, it seems almost no one really cares.

* “Why the Nineties rocked.”

* Billy Collins on the art of poetry. He seems to be extremely charming and interesting in almost all that the does.

* On the political need to build the future, and focus on the future rather than the past. The real value comes not in taking more of the pie, but expanding its size.

* “The data are clear: The boys are not all right.” Surprising to see this in the Washington Post. What could be amiss in schools? That essay is from 2014, and have things improved, or declined, in this respect, since then?

* The dangers of high status, low wage jobs.

* “Has Fuccboi killed literature?” That “six figures” is enough to result in this level of petty sniping and envy is itself hilarious: what an average 24-year-old computer science makes—and the ones working for the Facebooks and Googles of the world make far more. The last paragraph of the essay is excellent and should in particular be read. It reminds me of the joke, sometimes attributed to Henry Kissinger, about academia: “The competition is so fierce because the stakes are so small.” I do appreciate the direct quotes from the book: I was tempted to order a copy until I came across them. My view is closer to that of “The death of literary culture,” and I see Fuccboi as a symptom more than a cause. In another universe it probably could have been interesting, in a way like Bret Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney was in the ’80s.

* “To make progress, we need to study it: The progress studies movement asks a big question — and warns against taking the future for granted.” Ezra Klein favors looking forward, not backwards. “Stasis” versus “progress” might be a vital feature of American ideologies that’s somehow not getting adequately foregrounded.

* “The American Empire Has Alzheimer’s.”

* “Context is that which is scarce.” As the world complexifies and attention spans seem to shorten, we’ll probably see context remain scarce. Opinions, though, are everywhere. The wrong points are often foregrounded, and even if those are in some sense “true,” they’re often not important.

* “Women’s Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas.” Unpalatable ideas that could be true and that only Substack seems to host.

* Is it even worth working on free and open source software anymore?

* “How China ghosted Hollywood.” Depressing but important: virtually every movie and TV show made today is made by people deathly afraid of offending the Chinese government. Notice: “A-listers will lecture the American public on any topic that comes to mind — recall Robert De Niro’s splenetic interventions during the Trump era — except China.”

* No, the woke revolution isn’t over. Sobering, detailed, and plausible.

* Is being online turning us all into cranks?

* “The Karikó problem: Lessons for funding basic research.” Katalin Karikó should, for her own self-preservation, probably have quit the university-industrial science system, but she didn’t. How many people who could’ve had impacts as transformative as hers, have quit, which is the “smart” thing to do from an individual perspective? How many looked at the madness of academia and went into adtech at Facebook or Google instead? How many look at the real estate prices caused by zoning and realized they had to make a lot of money, not university levels of money?

* “A Song of Shapes and Words.” On the “wordcel” and “shape rotator” distinction. Humorous, mostly, and more interesting than most “personality” talk.

* “Natural gas appliances emit much more methane than realized.” Switching to convection stoves is likely important and useful.

* Mergers are bad and are creating anti-competitive, crony-capitalism markets. We should block more of them, particularly but not exclusively among hospitals and hospital systems. The Boeing 737-Max fiasco emerges in part from merger disasters.

* A New Industrialist roundup: on the work towards real-world progress in terms of atoms, not just bits. Things can and should be better.

* The Rule of Midwits: subtler and deeper than you might think.

* “Why Germany Behaves the Way It Does.” Maybe. Hypocrisy is the norm, but even by normal standards Germany’s behavior is

* The iPhone 13 camera, which has impressed me.

* Modern’s HIV vaccine begins human trials. The really, really important news, much more important than whatever Congress is doing this week.

* Pop music can’t escape the 80s?

* “Why is Ukraine such an economic failure?” Something I’ve also wondered about, though don’t expect complete answers here.

* “No, the Revolution Isn’t Over: None of the fundamental drivers of ‘Wokeness’ have relented.” Again, maybe? Scott Alexander thinks it might, too. But it’s also well embedded in law and institutions.

* “An ad plugin was stealing revenue for a year and I didn’t even notice.” An amazing story.

* How the U.S. can improve on its strengths, relative to authoritarian governments. Not everything argued is correct or contextually accurate, and the given title is inflammatory, but the ideas are sound and important.

* Progress is a policy choice. Also: the new industrialist roundup, on what might be changing discourse around building lots of stuff.

* On the University of Austin; “Despite the furor, Mr. Kanelos says that support for UATX has been ‘phenomenal.’ Over 4,000 professors from other institutions have asked to teach at the university, he says, and thousands of students have expressed interest.” It may be that the University of Austin offers an opportunity for preference falsification reversal: many professors are not hard woke and dislike the growth of university bureaucracy, but feel they must go along with both to keep their jobs.

* Thoughts on “Post Liberalism:” a remarkable essay, hard to except, but largely about what happens when we stop doing things for ourselves and start assuming others will do things for us.

* In defense of Michel Foucault: not my view but an interesting and plausible one. I think he’s sufficiently random-seeming, at least in English, that he can be made to seem to mean almost anything.

* “People don’t work as much as you think.” Consistent with my observations.

* “School Closures Were a Catastrophic Error. Progressives Still Haven’t Reckoned With It. Sometimes you need to own up to an error so it’s not repeated.” Of course, people don’t do things they “need” to do, or reckon with things they “need” to reckon with, all the time. The venue for this one is surprising.

* The beautiful story of mRNA vaccines.

* “The annihilation of Michel Houellebecq.” On his latest, and perhaps last, novel: it sounds skippable to me, something I’ve said I’ve nothing else in his body of work except The Possibility of an Island.

* “Know Your Amphetamines!” Though it doesn’t discuss modafinil, however.

* “The YIMBYs are starting to win a few: Slowly but surely, progressives are realizing that they need to build, build, build.” Better late than never, but this would’ve been a useful realization ten or twenty years ago.

* Intel’s woes, and whether it can get out of them. If one dates its woes to the era of turning down building iPhone chips, it’s nearing two decades of ineptness. If one merely restricts its woes to falling behind TSMC, its woes can be dated to a more recent, but still years ago, period.

* “The rise of the literary noble savage.” The more interesting literary essays are appearing un UnHerd, it would seem, which means you should subscribe.

* “Terry Teachout and the Last of the Conservative Critics.” As in temperament, more than politics. Genuinely conservative politics seem dead in the United States, right now.

* “High medical bill in the ER leaves family reeling.” That all costs still aren’t posted online, in advance, is a travesty.

* The death of intimacy?