* How awesome would a built-from-scratch city in the Bay Area be? Intensely walkable and bikeable and designed to feel like Paris or the West Village. Sign me up!

* “Is Ukrainian Victory Closer Than You Might Think?” Argues that Ukraine only has to get close enough for its weapons to reach east-west Russian rail and road supply lines for Ukraine to squeeze out Russian troops to the west.

* 2012 as a major turning point in the world. It’s like 1973.

* Antonio García Martínez (AGM) visits Israel and covers the Israeli protests. Much I disagree with but very interesting.

* On Buck Mason t-shirts, some of which are made in the U.S. I looked at them; for that price, I’d rather do something like Wool and Prince, since those have the advantage of smell resistance. Both companies should make slim-cut shirts.

* “How to ease the seemingly endless pain of prolonged grief.” Hard to read at times and yet highly relevant to present circumstances. :(

* Dating Roundup: This Is Why You’re Still Single. Step one is trying. The people who fail overwhelmingly don’t try. The default path may now be bad, but the path for people who try, and who develop resilience, may be very good.

* The fall of the college wage premium. Matches my anecdotal experiences and observations regarding the marginal college student.

* “Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks grow.”

* “You’ve got a friend in me:” an emergency room story.

* “Our climate change debates are out of date.” On the growth of solar, wind, and batteries, and their tremendous fall in price. But, at the same time: “Earth had hottest three-month period on record, with unprecedented sea surface temperatures and much extreme weather.”

* China’s defeated youth.

* “Without Belief in a God, But Never Without Belief in a Devil: On The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.” Are you a True Believer?

* “How to discipline kids effectively.” On incentives and behaviorism, among other things. Skinner gets a shoutout.

* “In 1970, Alvin Toffler Predicted the Rise of Future Shock—But the Exact Opposite Happened.” A culture-focused great stagnation essay.

* “Asphalt Wasteland: Maybe parking really does explain the world.”

* “Moderna reveals Claudin18.2 ambitions via cancer vaccine, solid tumor CAR-T combo plans.” Does the tongue count as part of the digestive system? There’s no mention of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma here, alas.

* “The two kinds of progressives: Moralists vs. pragmatists.” I’m wildly on the pragmatist side: “As Democrats have become more upscale, they. . .have become less interested in forming big tent electoral coalitions to maximize the odds of welfare state expansion and more interested in ideological purity and uncompromising moral stands. Because the uncompromising moral stand is more appealing if you are not personally counting on Medicaid expansion to make a concrete difference in your life.” I also have the old-fashioned view that politics is about solving collective problems rather than personal expression.

* Becoming a magician.

* “Why Britain doesn’t build.”

* Colorado works to ameliorate its housing crisis by moving housing decisions to the state level and increasing the freedom of landowners to build.

* “Celebrating Marginal Revolution’s 20th Anniversary.” An amazing and tremendous achievement.

* “Steel industry makes ‘pivotal’ shift towards lower-carbon production.” The shift is towards electric arc furnaces and away from blast furnaces.

* The NIMBY tax on Britain and America. (Financial Times, $; Archive Today link). “Supersized costs and bloated durations are not unrelated.” And:

The result of this vicious circle of objections, delays and in some cases outright cancellations of large parts of the projects as the costs mount is that both countries — but especially Britain — are suffering from massive under-delivery on transport infrastructure, causing a huge drag on productivity.

* Life is so terrible and beautiful at the same time.

* “The Age 30 Crisis and Seasons of a Man’s Life.” Linked more to the first link than may be apparent at first glance.

* “America’s Long, Tortured Journey to Build EV Batteries.” (Bloomberg, $).

* “Conservatism as an Oppositional Culture?”

* “To speed scientific progress, do away with funding delays.”

* “Brits are less productive because it is too hard to build stuff.” Being able to build things is good, and not being able to is bad. Similarly—both guys are even named Sam!—”Why is Britain poor, especially compared to France?” Answer: a vetocracy even worse than the one that exists in much of the U.S. In the meantime, Finland has substantially ameliorated its homelessness challenges by building a lot of housing. It’s frustrating to watch easily solvable problems, with current and even quite old technologies, go unsolved. In fields like computer science, the easy problems get solved, because of, among other things, the lack of veto points.

* “$7,200 for Every Student: Arizona’s Ultimate Experiment in School Choice.” It’s possible many public school personnel have overplayed their hands.

* Making mechanical keyboards in China. I’m fond—overly fond, to the point of wasteful pointlessness—of mechanical keyboards, and am now using a Kinesis Advantage keyboard as modded by Upgrade Keyboards. If you’re susceptible to keyboard gear-acquisition syndrome (GAS), don’t visit Upgrade Keyboards.

* “The Coming Apart Case for Less Entitlements.”

* Arts & Entertainments by Christopher Beha. A fun book, and a light one (deceptively light, maybe) of the sort I wish there were more of.

* “To most people, reading and writing are boring and unimportant.” It starts:

Robin Hanson says: “… folks, late in life, almost never write essays, or books, on ‘what I’ve learned about life.’ It would only take a few pages, and would seem to offer great value to others early in their lives. Why the silence?”

Interestingly, or not, I’ve been working on essays and posts along these lines.

* Paul Graham interviewed by Tyler Cowen on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent. Excellent.

* On the Marble Cliffs. Which is also a history of Germany. And a history of Europe. And some other things.

* “China hacked Japan’s sensitive defense networks, officials say.”

* “I thought I wanted to be a professor. Then, I served on a hiring committee.”

* How the car came to L.A., and destroyed it.

* The frontiers of tunnel boring. We should have more subway tunnels and tragically don’t.

* “America’s Top Environmental Groups Have Lost the Plot on Climate Change.” “But as the pace of electrification picks up, new clean energy projects are facing opposition from what seems like an unlikely source: large environmental organizations.” The extent to which environmental groups have achieved the opposite of their stated, intended effects is amazing; their opposition to nuclear power, for example, meant we spent decades relying on coal and then gas.

* Too much comfort is itself bad.

* “How does credit card debt collection actually work?”

* How Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) block medical breakthroughs. Congruent and consistent with my complaints about the FDA slowing medical discovery and dissemination, which I’m now paying for with my life.

* Ezra Klein on the importance of building, and building fast, to the American project and to individual well-being.

* On the Framework 16′ modular laptop. An impressive device and with great Linux support.

* “China notes, July ’23: on technological momentum.” By Dan Wang and, so, characteristically good.

* “How Much Do Intellectuals Matter?” In this case, be deceived, maybe even pleasantly, by the title.

* NEPA really is a problem for clean energy.

* If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need to Prioritize Dignity. In this article, “dignity” and “safety” are basically synonyms.

* Michael Nielsen’s impressively developed “quick” thoughts on research.

* “America’s Fiscal Time Bomb Ticks Even Louder.” And the collective response is: “LOL, whatever.” Kind of like global warming.

* “How the Recession Doomers Got the U.S. Economy So Wrong.”

* The Voyeur’s Motel by Gay Talese. Which we perhaps all live in today?

* “Slow, Costly Clinical Trials Drag Down Biomedical Breakthroughs.” This is particularly relevant to me right now because the breakthroughs I need to survive are on the horizon but not here yet.

* On the absurd cancer drug shortage, and the fragile supply chains enabling it.

* How Woke Led to Cultural Decadence. Maybe. But trends bring counter-trends too, right?

* Heat pumps are important.

* What It Will Take to Deter China in the Taiwan Strait.

* Is a Revolution in Cancer Treatment Within Reach? First 80% of the article is great, and the last 20% is terrible.

* “Castration, gang-rape, forced nudity: How Russia’s soldiers terrorise Ukraine with sexual violence.” The level of ignorance and folly that comes from the “Why are we support Ukraine?” crowd is borderline unbelievable, but then one remembers that they’re suffering from partisanship brain.

* Interview with China specialist Dan Wang.

* The Princess Bride at 50. The book is more than a little curious, and an artifact of its time.

* Suddenly, it looks like we’re in a golden age for medicine.

* The year I tried to teach myself math.

* “From the Hoover Dam to the Second Avenue subway, America builds slower.” And that is bad. Speed is good.

* “US public debt is projected to reach 181% of American economic activity in 30 years.” As with climate change, no one, or at least not the median voter, seems to care about this, which I find strange.

* California strip malls were upzoned last Saturday. A small step in the right direction.

* 2023 geothermal update. Generally good news.

* Unfuckable Hate Nerds: Yes, young men are losers. They deserve sympathy, not contempt.” A topic not much considered in this way.

* Geeks, mops and sociopaths: the death of subcultures.

* “Tony Soprano and the Jungian Death Mother.”

* “The Hypocrisy of Mandatory Diversity Statements: Demanding that everyone embrace the same values will inevitably narrow the pool of applicants who work and get hired in higher education.”

* “The mystery of microbes that live inside tumours.”

* “Earth hit an unofficial record high temperature this week – and stayed there.” Have you subscribed to ClimeWorks yet, or another carbon-removal company like Project Vesta? If not, maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s past time.

* Dan Ariely is bad, it seems.

* How much transparency in government is good? Maybe less than is commonly assumed, right now.

* How to blow up a timeline.

* “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply.” I saw people on Twitter observing that making higher-ed an avowedly partisan project may then generate typical partisan splits about its value.