* 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?

* Grant writers and SAMHSA’s “Resiliency in Communities After Stress and Trauma” (ReCAST).

* “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.

* Book review of Louie Simmons’ Iron Samurai. Not at all like most of the books discussed around here.

* “David Fincher’s Impossible Eye,” on obsession and excellence.

* It would be useful for liberal states to showcase excellence, in order for national liberals to follow their example. Instead, attempts to move towards single-payer basically failed in Massachusetts and Vermont; those attempts have proven far too expensive in California; more people are leaving California and New York than moving to them, due to self-inflicted high housing costs; and obscene infrastructure costs prevent the development or expansion of real transit systems. Where are the local examples?

* Jimmy Wales on Systems and Incentives, a conversation with Tyler.

* Hilariously imperious essay on Agatha Christie.

* Are Americans reluctant to express themselves honestly? What is social media callout culture doing to the discourse?

* The return of Slate Star Codex, with some unflattering and possibly true things about the New York Times along the way.

* “Slouching Toward Post-Journalism: The New York Times and other elite media outlets have openly embraced advocacy over reporting.” By Martin Gurri.

* “Facebook Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them.” Get a blog. Get on the open web. No one does, though, and what should we infer from that?

* The Devilish Life and Art of Lucian Freud, in Full Detail, an admirable review that’s neither overly skeptical nor fawning.

* “The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone:” on efforts to build places that are good for humans to live.

* “Is This Law Professor Really a Homicidal Threat? The punitive overreactions of university administrators grow ever more demented.”

* “In China’s New Age Communes, Burned-Out Millennials Go Back to Nature.” Probably not a good sign for Chinese society, as the same tendencies are probably not good signs for American societies.

* Why iPhone is today’s Kodak Brownie Camera. A networked Brownie.

* “As birth rates fall, animals prowl in our abandoned ‘ghost villages.’” Urbanization is environmentalism; San Francisco is full of faux environmentalist, who prevent the building of urban housing and thus force people to the periphery of the city, or to the hot Sunbelt cities. In other words, consider the third link in this list, too, because these links are linked.

* The Roleplaying Coup, on the way online life endorses and encourages the construction of fantasy worlds.

* “Party Like It’s 1925 On Public Domain Day (Gatsby And Dalloway Are In).” Copyright should really be limited to 50-year terms. Still, it’s nice to know that schools will collectively save millions of dollars a year buying The Great Gatsby.

* What happened in the insurrectionist riot.

* “The great bicycle boom of 2020.” The bikes are there; now the city infrastructure is needed.

* “The Undoing of China’s Economic Miracle:” maybe. How much does the prioritization of politics over competition matter?

* Time for consequences, for Trump—and his enablers. Better late than never, I guess, if there are real consequences. In 2016 I wrote “Vote for Clinton or Johnson for president” based on the many obvious reasons—and based on the history of the 1920s and -30s. Many of us who know something about that era have probably asked ourselves, “What would we have done, if we’d been alive then?” We don’t have a perfect answer and can’t, but the last four years have provided a partial answer. Did you enable? Were you silent? Did you resist, such as you can?

* “How American Individualism Fuels Family Estrangement.” Not sure the purported cause is correct.

* “The military has a hate group problem. But it doesn’t know how bad it’s gotten: The rise of extremism in the ranks is seen as a ‘crisis issue’ but the military’s efforts to weed out radicals are ‘haphazard’ at best.” Uh-oh.

* “The paradox of information abundance:” some are better informed than ever, while others consume junk, in the same way that great nutrition is easier than ever, but so is terrible nutrition.

* “Why aren’t we wearing better masks?” A vital question. Real n95s and kn95s are available here, but how is an average person supposed to know that? The site looks little different than many knockoff sites.

* “‘Our souls are dead’: how I survived a Chinese ‘re-education’ camp for Uighurs: After 10 years living in France, I returned to China to sign some papers and I was locked up. For the next two years, I was systematically dehumanised, humiliated and brainwashed.” It is still notable to me that this topic isn’t a primary focus on social media.

* Moderna co-founder and board chairman on the permission to leap, among many other topics of great interest. The first link in this batch concerns fantasy; the last, reality.

* Texas needs to ban non-competes: one of these little, seemingly inconsequential things that may have big impacts over time.

* “Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions: More than 140 humanities and social sciences programs at top schools have suspended admitting students for fall 2021.” Good.

* The NYT on novelist Walter Tevis.

* “25 Days That Changed the World: How Covid-19 Slipped China’s Grasp,” an important and well-reported article.

* “John Collison: ‘It is entirely plausible that you could set up Stripe in Dublin now:’ Stripe co-founder on how his billion-dollar company continues to evolve.”

* “An Economist’s Guide to Potty Training,” which is more entertaining than it sounds, and fundamentally about incentives. Incentives matter and they’re hard.

* Curious and sometimes offensive interview with Anna Khachiyan, of the Red Scare podcast.

* How Perfectionism Has Made the Pandemic Worse.

* “The End of the World as We Know It?,” due to population decline? Bryan Caplan’s book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is one take.

* The disruption of Intel, and many other points about the history and state of computing.

* “My two weeks with John le Carré: What I learned about writing, fame and grace when I showed him around Miami in 1991.” Extremely charming but also deep.

* “Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring:” see: “We need to challenge the conventional peer-reviewed research paper, by which I refer to a publication was reviewed by 2 to 5 peers before getting published. . . . Research used to be more more like ‘blogging’. You would write up your ideas and share them. People could read them and criticize them.” There are too many veto players, and an excess of veto players tends to ossify a field and create excessively tedious papers and books. Here is one simple, partial solution to some of these problems.

* Things Ryan Holiday has learned from a decade of podcasts, note: “An essential piece of advice I got from the author Steven Pressfield: There are professional habits and amateur ones. Which are you practicing? Is this a pro or an amateur move? Ask yourself that. Constantly.” One downside of school is that it almost always inculcates and encourages amateur habits—without telling students what’s going on. Separately, after quitting or finishing a podcast (the former being vastly more common than the latter), I try to keep a log of what I’ve listened to and what I noticed in it, or remember from it. Then I re-read the log occasionally, which only takes a few minutes; this helps move podcasts from a “listen and forget” activity to a “change your ideas” activity.

* The Substack Discourse and the Self-Referentiality of Everything. A bad title for a good essay, on what happens when the institutional academic and journalist discourse gets poisoned. See also me, “Have journalists and academics become modern-day clerics?”

* Elon Musk moves from California to Texas: Prop 13 and NIMBYism claim more victims. Elon also “decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America.”

* Oracle is also moving its headquarters to Texas. Texas’s real question is still whether it will ban non-competes, since that ban is California’s vital secret sauce.

* “Cambridge University votes to safeguard free speech.” Heartening news that one wishes could be described as “normal” not “heartening.”

* Jesse Singal’s book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills is coming out soon.

* “Nick Kristof and the Holy War on Pornhub: Having declared victory in its war on Backpage and sex work, the liberal-conservative coalition has pivoted to porn.”

* “Researchers identify a new personality construct that describes the tendency to see oneself as a victim.” This explains some of what’s happening online and in schools. See also Haidt and Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind.

* “China launches ‘gray-zone’ warfare to subdue Taiwan.” Simultaneously, Apple wants to sell us out to China: in that respect, maybe it has much in common with the rest of Hollywood.

* “Earnestness,” by Paul Graham.

* “She Stalked Her Daughter’s Killers Across Mexico, One by One.” An incredible story one hopes to see made into a book, given the number of vague points in this relatively short article.

* More on carbon capture and storage, most of it familiar. I’ve been annoying my friends who posture as environmentalists by asking if they have a Climeworks subscription.