* “Everyone Has a Tom Pritchard Story. Only I Have His Bike.” Unexpectedly hilarious.

* How to read aloud. If you’ve not, try reading aloud to your partner/lover. Make it a habit.

* “Love Hurts,” on the new culture of fragility and dubious safetyism.

* “How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole: Instead of optimizing work, technology has created a nonstop barrage of notifications and interactions. Six months into a pandemic, it’s worse than ever.” Fits my experiences, but I also think few people actively push against this. See Cal Newport’s books for more on it.

* “America’s Exceptional Housing Crisis: How the Rest of the World Tamed Runaway Home Prices.” Short answer: the rest of the world built a lot more housing. America hasn’t.

* Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie on various things; the former’s work has always seemed more interesting than the latter’s. Note: “AMIS: I certainly feel part of a generation that saw a fairly radical change in the way novels are written and in the way novels are read. You can no longer expect the reader to surmise, to infer, to second-guess. As an adaptation, writers will cease to imply, to hint, to tease. Now they have to declare.”

Amis also says, “the novel has had to speed itself up—in answer to an accelerated reality. Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift—long, static, and digressive—spent several months as a bestseller in the 1970s. That audience has more or less disappeared.” I’ve started Humboldt’s Gift a few times and never finished: I’d call it rambling and aimless. A novel need not be overly aimed, in my view, but it felt like a lot of nothing.

* On the movie Stay Woke, and more significantly on the difference between destructive and constructive reformist energy. It’ll be interesting to see what the 2020 and 2022 elections are like. So far, even in very left-wing California, “Police reforms face defeat as California Democrats block George Floyd-inspired bills.” Who do city and state legislators, where most policing policy happens, most worry about? Not protesters, it seems.

* “ How the US Start-Up Industry is Faltering.” One of these important, easily-missed pieces. The really important news is often not in the headlines.

* “Facebook to Curb Internal Debate Over Sensitive Issues Amid Staff Discord: Mark Zuckerberg says employees shouldn’t have to confront social issues in their day-to-day work unless they want to.” Companies appear to be re-learning the “leave politics and religion at home” rule that used to be reasonably common, and may become reasonably common again. Similarly, Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, has announced that the company is focusing on its mission.

* “They Don’t Need No Education: Elementary schools deliberately fail to teach knowledge, hurting their most vulnerable students.” I have a theory: to get tenure, most professors need to publish “novel” research. In many fields—like education—there are not many truly novel and useful ideas available. So how does one get tenure? By inventing new paradigms, even if they are maybe not so accurate and not much of an improvement, and then publishing and attempting to propagate them. “New math” seems to be worse than teaching multiplication, division, algebra, and so on. But lots of professors still need tenure, so with a little self-delusion and p-hacking they can come up with something new. And people have to keep re-discovering the value of simply memorizing a lot of stuff.

* “The new intolerance: On the rise of an authoritarian ideology ‘hostile to the rule of reason.’”

* “The housing market is building snowflakes: How an industry of endless one-offs is holding our society back.” Are these characters the solution? I have no idea, but they do identify an important problem.

* “How Can We Pay for Creativity in the Digital Age?” Not a great title, but the overall question about how artists pay the rent and for food is useful.

* “Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low,” and many other topics.

* “What Is China’s Strategy in the Senkaku Islands?” Distressing but also important.

* The weirdness of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell; Clarke has a new book coming out and in honor of the new one I’m re-reading the previous one, which is still that good.

* “This Republican Party Is Not Worth Saving.” By a former Republican and current conservative.

* Going postal, an extremely clever rant about how bad social media is. Overall, though, social media mostly tells us about how bad we are: use the block and mute buttons adequately on Twitter, follow the more cerebral, and knowledge- and data-driven people, and it can be pretty good. But you also have to restrain your worst impulses—something I don’t always do successfully. It’s possible social media has negative amplification effects.

* Why millennials think they adore socialism. Strangely, he never mentions the U.S.’s surprisingly socialistic land-use policy regime, which drives up the cost of housing and inflicts severe shortages on the non-owner population. Actually, “socialistic” might be less true than something like “crony” or “insider” capitalism; whatever you want to call it, though, the high cost of housing is like a vice around the necks of the young.

* “Loyalty Oaths Compared: An Orwellian Exercise.”

* An online-only charter school in Oklahoma sees huge enrollment growth.

* Arts & Letters Daily feels like a throwback to an earlier time, but it’s still a delight and has an RSS feed (via which I read it). I’ve been asked where all these links come from: some from emails, some from friends, some from link aggregators, and some from AL Daily.

* “How Algorithms Are Changing What We Read Online: The AI of the internet determines what’s relevant. One day, it decided my work wasn’t.” I’ve never heard of this guy and yet his work sounds like just the sort of thing I’d like to read: I’m not interested in most of the standard political and pop culture stuff being endlessly re-written. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have a link list of his recent works anywhere, at least that I can find. His website appears to be pretty generic, and its RSS feed seems to have last been updated in 2015. How are we supposed to find his work and follow him? I’m the kind of person who’d link to his kind of work all the time, but he’s not easily surfaced.

* How Fantasy Triumphed Over Reality in American Politics: probably the best essay on this topic I’ve read in recent memory.

* “[Academic life] used to be more interesting.” The sense of relative freedom and autonomy—from bureaucrats, from bureaucracy, from political correctness, from snitch culture—seems notable here.

* The history of book burning.

* Lessons of the Pinker Affair: The Problem with the Academy is False Beliefs, Not Intolerance?

* Ocean acidification risks deep-sea reef collapse.

* “How Climate Migration Will Reshape America.”

* “China Secretly Built A Vast New Infrastructure To Imprison Muslims: China rounded up so many Muslims in Xinjiang that there wasn’t enough space to hold them. Then the government started building.” If you’ve wondered what you might have done in the 1930s, you may now have an implicit answer.

* How to win an election: on issue salience, among other things. It’s based on this David Shor interview; he’s the guy who was fired for tweeting that, from what we can tell, empirically,

* The books we don’t understand, by Tim Parks, and much better than the title suggests.

* “The tyranny of chairs.” One partial answer is the sit-stand desk.

* Bezos and the Bell system: regulating “big tech” intelligently.

* “The Case for Adding 672 Million More Americans.” Most notably, “think of how much healthier our politics would be if there were really a debate about how to accomplish great things rather than a food fight over semi-imagined offenses to “real Americans” that serves as a mask for an endless procession of tax cuts for the rich.”

* “How SUVs conquered the world – at the expense of its climate.” A bit obvious but here it is. Relatedly, “Climate change may wreck economy unless we act soon, federal report warns: Fires and floods are expensive and disruptive and we’re not ready, report finds.” It’s almost as if we’ve been ignoring four decades of warnings.

* “Maigret’s room,” an excellent essay.

* Fire in the Sky, on UFOs, epistemology, belief, experts, and other topics.

* “Extreme heat is here, and it’s deadly.”

* “Can Italy Defeat Its Most Powerful Crime Syndicate?” The degree to which the Italian state and society is still enthralled to organized crime is depressing.

* UFOs and epistemology. But the “Where are they?” question remains: nothing we’ve come up with so far has shown us any evidence of non-natural phenomena in the universe, and we don’t seem to have found any alien radio signals.

* Elena Ferrante’s master class in deceit? Good essay with a weak title.

* The demise of the second-hand bookshop.

* How China’s fishing fleet is depleting the world’s oceans.

* “That time we almost built 8 gigawatt-class floating nuclear power plants.” In other words, we’ve had lots of opportunities to ameliorate climate change, but we’ve consistently turned our backs on the solutions. Also, “Nuclear Reactor Development History.” Detailed, impressive.

* How Nespresso’s coffee revolution got ground down.

* “How you attach to people may explain a lot about your inner life.”

* “Silicon Valley and Wall Street Elites Pour Money Into Psychedelic Research: Donors raise $30 million for psychedelic nonprofit to complete clinical trials around drug-assisted psychotherapy for trauma.”

* “The Party of No Content.” We live in weird political times.

* “The Broken Algorithm That Poisoned American Transportation.” The awful ways we plan and execute cities explains why we get anomie, boredom, strip malls, and subdivisions. As if that weren’t enough, “Why Every City Feels the Same Now:” I too feel the aesthetic oppressions wrought by zoning laws: one could say that cities have been zoned into being low content and parking-centric.

* “Swiss explore renewal of ‘secret deal’ with China.” Wow.

* “A meta-analysis of procedures to change implicit measures” finds that implicit-bias training doesn’t appear to do what it’s supposed to do. Having been through a few rounds of it, I wonder if its foregrounding racial issues is counterproductive, although the meta-analysis doesn’t seem to find evidence for that thesis.

* JB Straubel, One of the Brains Behind Tesla, May Have a New Way to Make Electric Cars Cheaper Through Battery Recycling. Could be behind a paywall but very interesting; I’ve done some grant-writing work adjacent to this field.

* The gist of Cynical Theories: Arnold Kling on the new book by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay. Of interest for those of you who are online too much or interested in universities, and especially for the group at the intersection of those two.

* “The Secrets of Elite College Admissions: In the final ‘shaping’ of an incoming class, academic standards give way to other, more ambiguous factors.”

* The Teenage Tinkerer Behind an E-Bike Revolution, regarding the ebike company RadPower. I have my eye on their $1,000 electric single-speed.

* PD James on mystery novels.

* “This is Not The American Cultural Revolution.” A useful corrective to this analogy. It’s also useful to think about how much of this occurs online and with deference to pre-existing structures: “They are doing the only thing Americans in this century know how to do: creating a ruckus in hope that they can get the management to take their side (and enlarge its own powers in the process).”

* “The China Hawks Got It Mostly Right.” “So far,” I’d add.

* “How literature can mirror our complicated desires: There’s inequality in real-life relationships. Art shouldn’t hide that.” I wish Merkin had finished the novel she’s referencing: I’d read it. It also seems that many people driving the social media discourse should think more deeply about the human condition, rather than serving up endless stories about wicked villains and innocent damsels: there are relatively few of each wandering around.

* “Adam Tooze on the World After COVID-19.”

* “What I Learned From the Worst Novelist in the English Language.” Entertaining but also poignant.

* “Sweatpants Forever: How the Fashion Industry Collapsed.” Losing the worst and most absurd parts of it doesn’t seem so bad.

* Another piece on the higher education “bubble.”

* “TSA considers new system for flyers without ID.” The number of people who actually care about freedom is small.

* “‘I didn’t think I’d survive’: women tell of hidden sexual abuse by Phoenix police.”

* Mercy and “cancel culture.” See also the link above about literature and our complicated desires.

* Feds say Yale discriminates against Asian, white applicants.

* “The Fiction of Winners & Losers,” by Tim Parks.

* Conversations and Ideas.

* China has squandered its first great opportunity to be a global leader and cement alliances. Unfortunately, the hostile U.S. posture means we’re ill-equipped to capitalize; we don’t even have TPP in place, which we should have had years ago.

* “Elon Musk, Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss.” Amusing but not especially informative.

* “Colleges Are Deeply Unequal Workplaces: As universities plan to reopen, they continue to overlook the concerns of campus staff.” Almost too obvious to post, but it’s observing given the amount of noise one hears from academics on the subject of “inequality.”

* “Riding an E-Bike Changed My Perspective on How We Get Around.” If you’ve never tried riding one, you should.

* “The Battle to Invent the Automatic Rice Cooker.” The Zojirushi “neurofuzzy” rice cookers are amazing.

* Publish & Perish, on the negative equilibrium academia has, in many respects, inadvertently settled into.

* A useful description of aspects of modern culture:

Schulman describes this episode in a book she wrote some years later, Conflict Is Not Abuse. The book’s central insight is that people experiencing the inevitable discomfort of human misunderstanding often overstate the harm that has been done to them — they describe themselves as victims rather than as participants in a shared situation. And overstating harm itself can cause harm, whether it leads to social shunning or physical violence.

Schulman argues that people rush to see themselves as victims for a variety of reasons: because they’re accustomed to being unopposed, because they’re accustomed to being oppressed, because it’s a quick escape from discomfort — from criticism, disagreement, confusion, and conflict. But when we avoid those uncomfortable feelings, we avoid the possibility of change. Instead, Schulman wants friends to hold each other accountable, ask questions, and intervene to help each other talk through disagreements — not treat “loyalty” as an excuse to bear grudges.

* “Women in Xinjiang shine a light on a campaign of abuse and control by Beijing.” What would you have done in the 1930s?

* The roots of wokeism, from Andrew Sullivan’s new system.

* “Make it now: the rise of the present tense in fiction.”

* Might buildings can 3-d print houses—even the roof.

* “LA’s PocketList gives renters better information, faster, about which apartments are available in cities.” Seems like a work of genius, if it works.

* Are there useful similarities between employment and romantic relationships?

* “The Greatest Privilege We Never Talk About: Beauty.” Except, of course, here at TSS, where you read essays like, “The inequality that matters II: Why does dating in Seattle get left out?”

* “I’ve Seen a Future Without Cars, and It’s Amazing: Why do American cities waste so much space on cars?” An excellent question, and one asked too infrequently.

* “Anne Applebaum: how my old friends paved the way for Trump and Brexit.” I have a soft spot for heretics.

* Is employment persistence like romantic relationship persistence? Why do norms about “rights” to a position differ in one situation versus the other? I don’t necessarily agree with the analogy but it makes me think.

* Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands: a hugely underrated topic.

* How to plan a space mission. Feats of epic engineering are under-covered and under-reported. If you run into stories about them, send me a link.

* Ross Douthat’s ten theses about “cancel culture.”

* “Lessons from the Awkward Life and Death of the Segway: The ‘personal transporter’ promised to change cities back in 2001. It didn’t. But its demise should be a warning for today’s urban mobility disrupters.” It was too expensive, the batteries were bad, and, worst of all, riders feel they look stupid on one. Today, very good electric bikes are, miraculously, under $1,000. Very good electric scooters are $500 – $700. City planning, however, continues to lag behind, and we continue to be caught in unfortunate path dependence.

* COVID was a preventible catastrophe in the United States. This article lays out the details, the precedents, and how a normal administration would react. It could be subtitled, “Your vote counts.” We all, in a sense, chose the bad federal reaction.

* “The lost art of having a chat: what happened when I stopped texting and started talking.”

* The TikTok War. Lots of thought in this one.

* “Does the white upper class feel exhausted and oppressed by meritocracy?” A great piece that looks, as few do, at the dark psychological shadow. Most of the media and social media are in denial about the shadow.

* On Cultures That Build. This blog, Scholars Stage, has been consistently interesting on a range of topics for a long time, and so it’s recommended for your RSS feed.

* Useful: “Ramit Sethi talks about how you can just not reply to stuff. It felt rude at first, but then I realized it was ruder to ignore the people I care about to respond to things I didn’t ask for in the first place. Selective ignoring is the key to productivity, I’m afraid.” Notice the word “selective.” If you ignore everything all the time, that’s probably bad. But if you’re “on top of things” you may not be advancing the more important projects.

* 10% less democracy might improve outcomes. Too little voting is bad but too much voting may also be bad.

* “The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age.” Maybe. It’s an intriguing analogy I don’t really buy. Also, what percentage of people go mostly for the social and development aspects, as opposed to the learning-things aspect?

* “Can an Unloved Child Learn to Love?” On the ghastly Romanian orphanages. In “Foster Family Agencies (FFAs) and why political rhetoric rarely focuses on child abuse,” I mention that orphanages could conceivably offer a better system than the current foster-care system, but their PR is terrible, due to articles just like this one.

* Boss of the beach, about NYC lifeguards and, more importantly, the dysfunctions of public-sector unions. Seems mostly hilarious in the first half—more hijinks than outright evil—but allowing people to drown is terrible.

* Another quit-lit piece from an academic, or former academic.

* “Much of today’s intelligentsia cannot think.” I’d say that much of it doesn’t even try and, perhaps more vitally, the dopamine hit of social media and the fast regurgitation of pre-digested but possibly wrong ideas is superficially attractive, like drinking pop and eating fast food. There have always been “intelligentsia” who repeat wrong slogans (look at the apologists for the Soviet Union, for example), but the incentives for them to form mobs is higher than it once was. Twitter is worse than blogs! The link below, “The silence is deafening,” also applies fruitfully to this one. It may be that the most intelligent part of the intelligentsia is not the loudest.

* “Cycling, Art, and Utopian Possibilities.”

* Apple and Facebook, an analysis from Ben Thompson at Stratechery; something about Facebook in particular renders most intelligent writers inane or blinkered, and Thompson is the big exception to that principle. I’m not a big Facebook user or fan but that seems a minority taste on my part.

* Oklo, developer of ‘micro’ nuclear reactor, aims to prove environmentalist doubters wrong. More vitally, they seem to be making real progress.

* “Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly.”

* Why does DARPA work? Much more interesting than the title may suggest.

* “Losing the Narrative: The Genre Fiction of the Professional Class.” Overstated, yes, but among the most interesting essays I’ve read in a long time, and I read a lot.

* “The silence is deafening,” on why many defaults in social media don’t work and often produce poor outcomes.

* Can you be still?.

* The starship food delivery app delivers food via autonomous robots. My guess is that this one isn’t quite ready for primetime but is getting better every year. Learned via The pandemic is bringing us closer to our robot takeout future. We’re not there yet, but we’re starting to see the shape of things to come.

* Shakespeare and Company’s clientele’s book lists. Many “high culture” writers read everything—high, low, in between—as you’d expect.

* Bruce Sterling: Farewell the beyond. He’s been writing his blog for 17 years and is finally—and sadly, in my view—giving it up.

* Studies on slack. High sophistication, lots of unexpected ideas.

* How battery costs fell six-fold in a decade.

* MacOS 10.15: Slow by design. Thankfully I haven’t “upgraded,” although MacOS 10.15 doesn’t seem to be an actual upgrade, to my eye.

* “Elon Musk Is the Hero America Deserves.” SpaceX is getting ready to send astronauts into space: focus on the substance, not the noise.

* Social Anxiety, #MeToo, and Disaster. Not just more of the usual; note: “Rather than counter-productively condemn others for their paranoia, my goal is to deescalate the tensions. ‘Safety first’ is a tempting but dangerous motto. Instead, let us all try to ‘Make risk reasonable again.’ Use moderate caution yourself- and kindly invite others to do the same. Listen to both Anxious and Angry. Side with neither.” Something about social media seems to encourage with-us-or-against-us, false-binary thinking. The culture of “safetyism” that seems to have taken root rarely seems to be questioned.

* “Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President: Why don’t the president’s supporters hold him to their own standard of masculinity?” Funny venue for this one, too.

* The future of college is online, and it’s cheaper? Maybe.

* Don’t believe the China hype. Maybe, again.

* Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a climate menace.

* Dropbox is a total mess. This matches my experience, and Dropbox’s steady bloat and creep has made me keep an eye out for a replacement.

Engineering in the dark: Why American street design is almost uniformly awful.

* Rachel Harmon on policing, a substantive interview and podcast. I’m surprised police unions weren’t mentioned, though, since that seems like an obvious era to reform. I’ve also not seen any localities or state legislatures dissolve any police unions (if I’m wrong on this, let me know). My guess is that legislators think the protests will pass and voters have short memories, but the police unions will continue to be pivotal in local and state elections for years to come. In other police news, the Atlantic finds, The Culture of Policing Is Broken.

* The coming chip wars.