* “How Americans edit sex out of my writing” is consistent with me in “The death of literary culture.” Vibrant and realistic writing isn’t likely to be found in books by mainstream / legacy American publishers any more: it’s likely to be found online, or nowhere. If you’d like more, albeit on another genre, here is a writer on the way “Formalists will define a poem by its technical elements, such as rhyme, meter, cadence and metaphor, while free-verse poststructuralists might discuss poetic elements of authenticity, voice and self-expression,” and today the latter have won: “When I later became part of the “poetry world,” however, I realized that no one cared about my ideas. Rather, audiences wanted my traumas punctuated by millennial irony and a kind of wink-wink cleverness.” Some formalists are still out there, but they’re hard to find.

* “Failing Introductory Economics: A Davidson professor bemoans the state of his classroom.” Note the comments about performance across time, although I wonder if Davidson is a school that’s suffering in the COVID era.

* “Ten years of YIMBYism have accomplished a lot.” Good. You’ve seen me touch on these topics.

* “How Trustworthy Are Supplements?” “Pretty trustworthy, actually” appears to be the answer, which isn’t what I would’ve guessed.

* “The Weakness of Xi Jinping: How Hubris and Paranoia Threaten China’s Future.”

* New COVID-19 boosters are highly effective and useful.

* “Shein and the Tech Cold War.” Note the dangers of TikTok included in there, too.

* “Unblocking Abundance.” Material that will feel familiar to regular readers, but here is another version of that which should be obvious.

* Math is the great secret.

* “Academic Administrators Are Strangling Our Universities.” Not the best-argued thing I’ve ever read, but has some perspective.

* Are non-drone combat aircraft now worthless?

* What Paul Graham has learned from users.

* “The Ideological Refusal to Acknowledge Evolved Sex Differences.”

* “Factory Jobs Are Booming Like It’s the 1970s.”

* “And yet the wokies continue to represent students as oppressed truth-tellers and advocates, rather than as entitled consumers who expect to be handed everything in exchange for their crushing loan debt.” For more, see “NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading.” Although it’s possible that he was, or is, a bad teacher—but, if so, why did, and do, schools tolerate poor instruction over long periods of time? Speaking of length, long-time readers may recall me writing about how nothing incentivizes professors to grade honestly (as with many things I write, “what is true” and “what might be true in an ideal world” differ. You may read here a recent, improbable proposal for reforming universities.

* Interview with Alec Stapp on progress and progress studies.

* “To save downtowns, we need to embrace windowless bedrooms.” Among other things. Segregation of urban uses, apart from heavy industrial uses, was and is mostly a mistake.

* “The green war on clean energy.” Notice: “But what if nuclear research and plant construction had continued to advance at the pace seen in the 1970s? One Australian researcher concluded: ‘Had the early rates continued, nuclear power could now be around 10% of its current cost.’” And: “Yet it was environmentalists who led the campaign to halt the rollout of the cleanest, and greenest, of all power sources.” Innumeracy makes fools of most of us. Similarly: an article on the need for infrastructure permitting reform. Ignore the given title, which is dumb and clickbait, because the article itself is good. I also recently wrote “Permitting is the big barrier to wind energy right now.”

* On the publishing industry’s brokenness, although I think the truer answer is that the publishing industry, like many glamor industries, has relied on trust funds, rich families, and generalized glamor for decades. A veneer of woke doesn’t change the underlying market dynamics, which is that publishing needs the children of the rich to take low salaries in order to function. Get this: “Though some publishers have raised entry-level salaries to around $45,000 per year…” Per year, in New York City. And “The median salary for those in management in our 2021 survey was $130,000.” $130,000, after a decade plus in the industry, in New York City? Median rent in Manhattan is now above $4,000.

* “Inside the crypto black markets of Argentina.”

* “New malaria vaccine is world-changing, say scientists.”

* “What Schools Are Teaching Your Kids About ‘Gender’.” Maybe.

* “How Reagan Almost Crushed Wokeness.” “Almost” is doing a lot of work in that title, but the review of how civil rights law evolved is useful.

* “Climate Tipping Points May Be Triggered Even If Warming Peaks at 1.5C.”

* The male monkey dance.

* “The Weakness of Xi Jinping.” Ideas rarely, but more commonly now, heard.

* How Mathematics Changed Me. Can be read in tandem with “How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math: the building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition.”

* On the new Ian McEwan book.

* “Methane hunters: what explains the surge in the potent greenhouse gas? Levels of the gas are growing at a record rate and natural sources like wetlands are the cause, but scientists don’t know how to curb it.” This is, unfortunately and dangerously, consistent with the Clathrate gun hypothesis.

* Me on how “Permitting is the big barrier to wind energy right now (beyond batteries and fundamental research).” Given what’s happening in Europe, and in parts of the U.S., it would be good to start seriously preparing for problems now. Actually, it’d have been better to start ten or twenty years ago, but now is better than tomorrow; Elon can tweet, seriously, “Order a Tesla Powerwall battery for blackout protection!”, and his advice is good.

* Taking UFOs / Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP:) seriously, as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. “UAP” is the latest Russell Conjugation of “UFO,” since UFO has become too low status, and thus we need an acronym for the same thing with less status baggage.

* “AI Revolution – Transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs).” Don’t be dissuaded by the title: it’s good, thorough, and visionary, particularly at the end.

* “Shruti Rajagopalan talks to Daniel Gross and Tyler about Identifying and Predicting Talent.” Better probably as audio than text, but good as both, and I notice that a podcast I listen to and whose transcript I read get “processed” differently in each medium. I’m not sure what to do with that, but it’s noticeable.

* The rise of liberal hawks, which is deeper and more interesting than it sounds.

* Echopraxia is great and you should read it.

* Profile of Ian McEwan, though I think he’s not willing to admit what seems to be true.

* Consistent with the McEwan profile above: “How Woke Put Paid to Publishing.”

* “The distinctiveness of human aggression,” by interesting man Rob K. Henderson.

* Joyce Carol Oates interview with Philip Roth.

* “The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism: William MacAskill’s movement set out to help the global poor.” Are most of us practicing ineffective altruism, if we’re practicing altruism at all?  I’d say that high U.S. housing and transit costs reduce the amounts of money normal or normal-ish people might be able to donate, or to send internationally. We’re beggaring ourselves through housing scarcity and that’s bad, along a variety of axes.

* “Guru Overload: Moving on from the figureheads of the latest culture war drama.” On the failures of what was sometimes called “The Intellectual Dark Web.”

* “Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?” One hopes.

* “Skills Plateau Because Of Decay And Interference?” Does this argue for breadth in skill development and acquisition, over pure “depth?” I’ve wondered about this topic and now see I’m not the only one who has.

* “How Social Justice Became a New Religion: Our society is becoming less religious. Or is it?” I’m not sure the “How” question is answered, let alone the “why” question, but it is of interest.

* Related to the above: “The progressive puritans will fail: They are preaching to a choir in an empty church.” An argument in favor of fun, which has fallen out of official favor.

* “The Suicide of the American Historical Association?”

* Reasons Ted Gioia is publishing his next book on Substack.

* Cracker Barrel leaders realize the utility of ignoring Twitter mobs.

* “Suketu Mehta: ‘As goes India, so goes democracy’.” And a take on democracy falling in India.

* “‘Rings Of Power’ Showrunners Clarify That Any Resemblance To The Works Of Tolkien Is Purely Coincidental.”

* Similarities between programming and writing.

* “Why William Deresiewicz Left Academia (Since You’re Wondering).” He was pushed out, as he says; the whole essay is highly quotable, but I’ll note that Deresiewicz “went [to grad school], in other words, because I wanted to read books: because I loved books; because I lived my deepest life in books; because art, particularly literary art, meant everything to me.” But he found there that “Loving books is not why people are supposed to become English professors, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Loving books is scoffed at (or would be, if anybody ever copped to it).” This may seem curious, but the way the humanities professoriate has evolved is curious. Deresiewicz says that “what disgusted me the most was not the intellectual corruption. It was the careerism.” The overall essay is consistent with my own writing in “What you should know BEFORE you start grad school / PhD programs in English Literature: The economic, financial, and opportunity costs.”

* The midwit trap, which doesn’t do the essay justice; it concerns the way simple solutions often outperform complex ones, and the challenges of understanding both problem and solution spaces, among other things.

* “Nonprofit boards of directors usually exist to be controlled by the organization’s executive director“—something most people don’t realize but more people should.

* “Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read,” using phonics and direct instruction, which are old, effective, and yet disdained by many people in the education-industrial complex. That we’ve not seen stronger efforts to reform the education of educators seems odd to me.

* Tight versus loose cultures.

* “Why Are American Teenagers So Sad and Anxious?”

* Argument for re-building higher education.

* “You can’t afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected.” Not exactly my view, but of interest.

* On Philip K. Dick. I think Dick understood best that many if not most people don’t want to be free.

* On the many facets of Danielle Steel.

* A cyclical theory of subcultures.

* Argument that China “can’t” afford to invade Taiwan, which is interesting, apart from the fact that many countries that couldn’t “afford” to invade their neighbors nonetheless did so anyway. Russia can’t afford to invade Ukraine and yet has done so.

* “Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic.”

* “Escape from the Ivory Tower,” which concerns the inhumanity of many humanities professors and departments. Perhaps one could links it to an article on why it is not effectively possible to write academic satires any more. You may have thought the Sokal Text affair was unfortunate, but compare it to this!

* “MeToo killed Game of Thrones; Nobody wants a sexless prequel.” Maybe: I guess we’ll see, but I think the dreary, incoherent final two seasons were the bigger problem.

* Book about the homogeneity of writing and sensibility from MFA programs.

* Good and humane essay on Philip Larkin, though with a bad title, and I admire this line: “The greatest writers will always be those who have suffered dully all the wrongs of man, and yet remain alive to a greater wisdom and beauty beyond what they could afford themselves.”

* “Hispanic Voters Are Normie Voters.” Sanity is good.

* Colleges engage in extensive price discrimination.

* “Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory.”

* “Vantem Global Builds Modular Homes Out of Energy-Efficient Panels.” They look good, and housing construction has been stubbornly resistant to efficiency improvements.

* “The U.S. made a breakthrough battery discovery — then gave the technology to China.” Maybe we shouldn’t do that.

* “Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior.” It’s in Cell and thus SFW.

* “Sensitivity Readers Are the New Literary Gatekeepers.” Which can’t be helping fiction sales: we used to make fun of the Soviets for insisting on doctrinaire art. Now, big publishers insist on it, which is particularly odd given the vitality of gatekeeper-free Internet writing.

* Has Technological Progress Stalled?

* A Canceled Cancellation at the University of Michigan: “The University of Michigan Medical School just took a bold stand for academic freedom.” I’ve noted many negative examples but think it useful to also cite some positive ones.

* A plan to tax the very large endowments of some universities.

* The national housing shortage is likely in the four to twenty million range.

* “Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals.” The first paragraphs are consistent with previous actions and yet still horrifying.

* “‘The Literary Mafia’ Review: People of the Book.” Jews, books, and ideas.

* An essay against Puritanism, though that’s not the title the author uses. It’s a rant.