* “Quinoa is the new Big Mac: Can Eatsa succeed in delicious and inexpensive plant-based fast food?”

* The inventor of the red Solo cup has died. Real tragedy.

* “Student Accused of Rape By ‘Mattress Girl’ Sues Columbia U., Publishes Dozens of Damning Texts.” See a related discussion in this post.

* “The personal is political” (note: the personal is not necessarily political and if someone tells you it is, tell them to get stuffed).

* Low Definition in Higher Education: When college students are told what to think and what not to say, who suffers in the end?

* Ebikes: I Sing the Ride Electric.

* “When did Literary Feuds Become So Boring? Duels between writers were once epic. Now they’re just petty.”

* “The long political history of sneakers;” the article sounds dumb but is actually good.

* Trump’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

* “Why People Vote for Counterproductive Policies.” And: “‘What the Russians Did Was Utterly Unprecedented.’” Voter irrationality has always been an interesting topic but it’s become more interesting and salient since 2010, with a special rise this year.

* Open societies are facing major crises. I don’t think Soros’s answer is the right one or that most people even know who or what they might mean by “elites,” but the problems are clear and not going away.

* “The widowhood effect: What it’s like to lose a spouse in your 30s.” Brutal, moving, and you may cry. Consider yourself warned.

* Tim Cook alleges that great desktop Macs are in the works. I’ll believe it when I see them.

* To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power.

* “How Silicon Valley Nails Silicon Valley,” unexpectedly hilarious.

* Campus Identity Politics Is Dooming Liberal Causes, according to Mark Lilla, who you may remember from The Shipwrecked Mind.

* “How Amazon’s problems with cheap knockoffs got real.” I’ve become much more sensitized to this issue and less likely to buy non-books from Amazon for precisely this reason.

* “World War III, by mistake.” See also “Trump fears and the nuclear apocalypse.”

* “If anyone is alive in 100 years to write a history of the 2016 U.S. election they will not believe how dumb it was.”

* “Automakers Prepare for an America That’s Over the Whole Car Thing.” The bizarre thing to me is that Americans ever loved cars in the first place. See also “Cars and generational shift” and “Owning vs sharing: Don’t get caught in the ugly middle.”

* “We’re about to see states’ rights used defensively against Trump,” a frequently misunderstood point.

* “Investors Get Ready for the Coming Electric Car Revolution.”

* “Russia and the Threat to Liberal Democracy: How Vladimir Putin is making the world safe for autocracy.” File under, “Headlines I never thought I’d see.”

* Peter Watts on Westworld. Here is me on Watts’ Blindsight.

* GM begins delivering the first Chevy Bolts. Good news and an important milestone.

* The Iago problem.

* Doug Lemov on reading, a podcast.

* “Why Obamacare enrollees voted for Trump,” a weird and fascinating piece of journalism as well as further confirmation of The Myth of the Rational Voter.

* “Why So Few Resisted Hitler,” which has striking applications today.

* Fear is a totally rational reaction to the Donald Trump presidency.

* “Los Angeles Drivers on the 405 Ask: Was $1.6 Billion Worth It?” The answer is “probably not,” and we can never build enough freeways because of induced demand. The only real way to improve transport is via subways.

* “Will the man running a sex party like a startup be able to leave anyone satisfied?” I would love a two-year moratorium on the word “disrupt” and ideally for the word “startup” to mean what it actually means.

* “The dying Russians,” from 2014, a tremendously sad piece. Yet it also has important geopolitical implications for the U.S.: Russia is a shrinking country almost entirely dependent on oil. As time goes on, the U.S.’s position gets better and Russia’s gets worse.

* The Input Club: Meet The Guys Looking To Disrupt The Keyboard Industry. See previous keyboard reviews.

* After 60 years, is nuclear fusion finally poised to deliver?

* “Making sense of modern pornography,” from the New Yorker and likely SFW.

* “Will Viruses Save Us From Superbugs? When antibiotics failed a severely ill patient, it was a pond virus that saved him.” Beautiful, inspiring, hopeful.

* “An Unsung Hero of the Nuclear Age: Maj. Harold Hering and the forbidden question that cost him his career.” Brilliant, scary, important, and tied to “Trump fears and the nuclear apocalypse.”

* Lab-Grown Diamonds Come Into Their Own.

* Russia plants porn in dissidents’ computers. I will take this opportunity to recommend Three Felonies A Day (again). Theoretically, if someone—anyone—sends a nude photo of a person under age 18 to your phone, you are guilty of a felony. Something to think about in an age of ever-expanding government and police powers.

* “Eight miles of water: underground with Manhattan’s new aquatic lifeline,” an awesome infrastructure project that ought to get more attention.

* “Donald Trump, the First President of Our Post-Literate Age.” I’m reminded too of “Twilight of the Books,” from 2007 and now bizarrely, powerfully prescient.

* A charming guide to choosing books.

* “How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red.’”

* A conversation with Martin Amis, which is really excellent. See here for another.

* Umberto Eco on fascism, from 1995, an essay that I never thought would be relevant again but here we are.

* There’s a reason authoritarians usually begin by assailing the press.

* “What’s Wrong With Literary Studies? Some scholars think the field has become cynical and paranoid.” Finally! Good news.

* Everything mattered: lessons from 2016’s bizarre presidential election.

* “What Americans Against Trump Can Learn from the Failures of the Israeli Opposition.”

* “She phubbs me, she phubbs me not: Smartphones could be ruining your love life.” See also me, from 2012, “Facebook and cellphones might be really bad for relationships”

* “Maybe America is simply too big,” something I too have been wondering.

* Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump, the Businessman President.

* “Goodbye to Barack Obama’s world: It is the failing of liberal technocrats to think reason governs how people act.”

* Let’s colonize Titan.

* “Oil Industry Anticipates Day of Reckoning: Prospect of ‘peak demand’ prompts debate and long-term planning by global producers.” Good.

* “College Students Want to Kill Foreign Language Requirements.” It would seem that whatever utility it once served has gone away, and the arguments as to why it should remain are weak.

* Why academics are losing relevance in society – and how to stop it.

* “Trump’s lies have a purpose. They are an assault on democracy.“

* “The North Pole is an insane 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends.” Which may be the most important story on the planet right now—not the election, not Apple’s latest moves, not whether some celebrity is sunbathing topless. And: “An expert’s view on unusually warm Arctic temperatures.” In the 2030s we will not be able to say we weren’t warned.

* “The End of Identity Liberalism: Our fixation on diversity cost us this election — and more.” Unlikely to be true and simultaneously long overdue.

* Luigi Zingales: “The Right Way to Resist Trump.” Five years ago he wrote “Dodging the Trump Bullet: Americans—and Republicans—are lucky that the Donald has bowed out.” If I saw that earlier piece at all I probably laughed at it. I was wrong. Here is a conversation between Luigi and Tyler.

* “NIH Scientists Identify Potent Antibody That Neutralizes Nearly All HIV Strains.”

* “The New Intellectuals: Is the academic jobs crisis a boon to public culture?“, surprisingly good and captures many of my feelings about peer review. It’s amazing to me that more people don’t understand the opportunity cost of grad school and simply start by teaching high school instead, which is far more remunerative than attempting to become a humanities professor (for most people).

* “The President and the bomb.” If you aren’t scared you aren’t paying attention.

* How the thoughts and actions of J L Austin live on. Austen’s book How to Do Things with Words is one of the few good things that came out of grad school.

* “Blame the Banks for All Those Boring Chain Stores Ruining Your City.” Title sounds stupid but the content is not.

* The Need to Read.

* “How Two Trailblazing Psychologists Turned the World of Decision Science Upside Down,” a really marvelous piece and one that feels highly relevant right now.

* “Never, never, never normalize this:” “It’s become depressingly clear the last few days that even many American liberals don’t understand the magnitude of what’s happened.”

* The Most Effective Weapon on the Modern Battlefield is Concrete.

* “Why social media is terrible for multiethnic democracies,” another of these important stories that’ll go unread by the people who really need to read them.

* Millennials are leaving coastal cities, choosing central ones. In short, the rent is too damn high.

*
Why social media is terrible for multiethnic democracies, from Jonathan Haidt.

* To Mars, Not a Moment Too Soon.