* Conversation with Ted Gioia; I share the Steven Pinker view, however.

* Things about Phoebe Waller-Bridge. There is not too much of the usual PC stuff, though a little bit appears.

* Age of Invention: Rise of the Mathematicians.

* “Here’s the weird thing about a post-Christian Christendom.” That’s WEIRD as in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. We’re quite different than most people have been, ever, and we’re not properly appreciating it, or how differently we’ve been acculturated.

* “How the Insufferably Woke Help Trump: Democrats are insulting and condescending to the swing-state voters they need the most.” More of the obvious, yet here we are.

* Christianity has some aspects that are good that we don’t give it credit for. And, if you take the Christianity out of the American political right, you might be left with something closer to authoritarianism and ethno-nationalism, both of which are much worse than Christianity. By the way, I didn’t see this development coming either, and almost no one did.

* “Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.” Also seems obvious, though it’s nice to hear a high-status person say it.

* Apple engages in planned obsolescence. Apple also just released a 16″ Macbook Pro, for those of you in the market for such things, and it has a functional keyboard again.

* “Welcome to Culture War 2.0: The Great Realignment.” It’s ill news when too few people are willing to stand up to rationality, free inquiry, and intellectual diversity.

* “Scientists Didn’t Think Climate Change Would Happen So Fast. Now we’re facing consequences once viewed as fringe scenarios.” And the collective response is still to shrug and ignore.

* “Sometimes, Straussians hide truths in plain sight. When they do, they’re concealed in unpopular characters, such as devils, beggars, and buffoons. Pseudonymous Twitter accounts are the new Straussian philosophers, but with one important twist. Instead of sharing their names and hiding the truth, today’s Straussians hide their names, but share the truth.”

* “Government Must Have Reasonable Suspicion of Digital Contraband Before Searching Electronic Devices at the U.S. Border.”

* How California Became America’s Housing Market Nightmare.

* Diamonds keep getting cheaper.

* “He Never Intended To Become A Political Dissident, But Then He Started Beating Up Tai Chi Masters.” On China and many other topics.

* Patricia Lockwood on John Updike, which is much better than I thought it’d be (like Updike she does great sentences), and the title, “Malfunctioning Sex Robot: Updike Redux” is funny too. But there’s still too much air-of-superiority-don’t-we-all-agree-about-everything.

* We’re on the cusp of radical change in agriculture? Maybe.

* Where a lot of PC ideas come from.

* Xu Xiaodong Never Intended To Become A Chinese Political Dissident, But Then He Started Beating Up Tai Chi Masters. Much funnier than you might think. All the Cold War novels of dark repression comedy are becoming or have become relevant again.

* Death By 1,000 Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong. I do a lot of work for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and hang out with a lot of doctors. Just about all doctors and healthcare people hate FQHCs. EHRs also seem to have the same problem as a lot of enterprise and education software: people who choose the software are not primary users of the software and thus judge it differently than primary users.

* How do we move the needle on progress? Many of the themes will be familiar to regular readers.

* The end of sex? Not something commonly seen and also something some of you aren’t going to like.

* The China Cultural Clash. Better than the other pieces on this issue.

* “Sea ‘Boiling’ with Methane Discovered in Siberia.” Expect a lot more of this as global warming accelerates. Also, Fracking boom tied to methane spike in Earth’s atmosphere. We are not working hard enough on nuclear energy.

* How not to be alone.

* Nasa works hard to get probes to land on Mars.

* Pricing niche products: Why sell a mechanical keyboard kit for $1,668?

* “The Deadly Boredom of ‘A Meaningless Life’.”

* “The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What?” I’d add a lot of “purportedly” to this title and article. There is also oddly little discussion of how the humanities have damned themselves, or ourselves, through the pursuit of advocacy and absurdity rather than truth or knowledge. This comic does more to explain the situation than many books.

* “Donald Trump and norms: Resistance needs substance.” Lots of context here, context that is lost in the typical discussion—especially on Twitter.

* “Through the Looking Glass at Concordia University,” which bolsters the first link: “Universities are in a state of crisis, but this crisis did not emerge overnight. It required an hospitable environment to take root. Some journalists and professors have dismissed the phenomenon as a form of moral panic, invented by right-wing provocateurs.”

* “Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it.”

* “Why commuting by public transport makes most people happier,” at least when the subways work.

* “A feminist makes a documentary about Men’s Rights Activists,” not the sort of thing one typically reads.

* He’s One of Brazil’s Greatest Writers. Why Isn’t Machado de Assis More Widely Read?

* “The Tunnel That Could Break New York.” I offer this for its own sake but also because it’s a sign of bad news in civic government; the U.S. better maintenance and more infrastructure, but it simultaneously needs to get costs under control and in line with other developed world countries. If costs are reasonable, voters will get on board. If not, they often won’t. The U.S. may also be suffering from the curse of “good enough.”

* Book culture in New York City.

* “Why capitalism won’t survive without socialism” is a bad title for a good interview with Eric Weinstein; he speaks of institutions with “embedded growth hypotheses” in them, and how those institutions have become dysfunctional over time:

Let’s say, for example, that I have a growing law firm in which there are five associates at any given time supporting every partner, and those associates hope to become partners so that they can hire five associates in turn. That formula of hierarchical labor works well while the law firm is growing, but as soon as the law firm hits steady state, each partner can really only have one associate, who must wait many years before becoming partner for that partner to retire. That economic model doesn’t work, because the long hours and decreased pay that one is willing to accept at an entry-level position is predicated on taking over a higher-lever position in short order. That’s repeated with professors and their graduate students. It’s often repeated in military hierarchies.

Academia suffers similarly.

* “Is Vertical Farming the Future of Your Salad?”

* “On Toxic Femininity;” not at all my favorite phrase, but it’s revealing how little one hears it used.

* The Entire History of Steel.

* “Scientists assessed the options for growing nuclear power. They are grim.” Very bad news.

* The very rarely discussed dark side of Airbnb.

* The great Apple keyboard coverup. Good news: the new Apple laptop keyboards are likely resistant to the problems that have plagued models from the last two years. Bad news: models from the last two years are still prone to failure.

* American cities are drowning in car storage.

* “To Recruit Students, Colleges Turn to Corporate-Marketing Playbook.” Profs in humanities departments are probably aghast and impotent.

* Hoity lawyer prefers sexting to lawyering, although that is not the headline; still, I wonder what this tells us about the law and lawyers.

* “How Hospital Administrators Hide the Umbrella.”

* “If you haven’t read @devonzuegel’s post on North American vs Japanese zoning it will help you understand why Tokyo can be dense, highly populated, and cheap, and the US never seems to manage that.”

* How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First.

* “Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard.” I had a 12″ Macbook and returned it: the trackpad is absurdly large and, at that time, the keyboard problems were rumored more than proven.

* “Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power.”

* “The myth of revealed preference for suburbs.” Makes sense: if it’s illegal to build the housing people want to live in, they’ll have to live somewhere else.

* “A secret network of women is working outside the law and the medical establishment to provide safe, cheap home abortions.” Probably not that secret if it’s being written about publicly and widely linked online, no?

* “1896: Immigration and The Atlantic;” when it comes to immigration, the dates and specific examples change, but the basic arguments don’t.

* “California Will Be Fourth State to Sue Navient Over Student Loans.” My first impulse is to say, “Good,” but more reflections makes me hesitate; the student loan business exists because of us and fuels the growing costs of college, which in turn fuels the student loan business. We’ve set up this perfidious flywheel and have decided not to dismantle it. Strangely, too, no one or almost no one has tried to set up an academically rigorous, low-cost college. Virtually all colleges except community colleges are following or attempting to follow the Harvard model (tenure, academic “prestige” through “research,” etc.). Maybe it’s time to do something different?

* Andrew Sullivan on why we should say yes to drugs. Not just the usual.

* Grow the puzzle around you, by Jessica Livingston of Founders at Work.

* Review of the Purism 13″ laptop. Given some of Apple’s recent foibles, as noted above, alternatives to the MacBook Pro are important.

* “Can Andy Byford Save the Subways?” Many beautiful details in this story.

* “Medicare will require hospitals to post prices online.” This is really good and important news.

* “Penn State’s 98-Year-Old Outing Club Is No Longer Allowed to Go Outside,” which is congruent with Jean Twenge’s iGen along with everything you’ve read about absurdity in American colleges. In “What happened to the academic novel?” I posited that academia is now too absurd to be satirized. Johann Hari’s excellent book Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions has a chapter devoted to how exposure to nature is critical for human well-being—and now Penn State is apparently banning just that (at least in an organized form).

* “Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry.” It’s always nice to get unalloyed good news.

* “How Much Is a Word Worth? Declining pay for freelance writers hurts more than just the quality of the prose.” Many people have asked why I don’t freelance for magazines or do similar work in narrative nonfiction. This is why.

* “Promiscuous America: Smart, Secular, and Somewhat Less Happy.” But I don’t buy it: this relies on the General Social Survey. I don’t know if it’s conducted via phone or questionnaire response, but we do know that people lie, a lot, about this subject. See for example “Truth and consequences: using the bogus pipeline to examine sex differences in self-reported sexuality,” though there are many other studies in this vein. I’m also not sure what “happy” really means; some argue that it really means being free from anxiety.

* Democrats’ housing problem.

* Why failing to recycle electronics leaves gold mines untapped.

* “The myth of an ending: why even removing Trump from office won’t save American democracy.”

* “Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion.” I returned a 12″ MacBook because of the absurd size of its trackpad. Otherwise a great machine, but maybe I also avoided keyboard issues. It seems to me that 2015-era Macbook Pros are going to become (or have become) golden-era machines.

* “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.

* Wire: A modern, encrypted communication app. It’s alleged not to have Skype’s backdoors.

* The origin of QWERTY keyboards, which are widely misunderstood. I’m still using a Kinesis Advantage.

* “Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet.” This should really not be shocking or newsworthy in 2016. That it is, is shocking and newsworthy.

* “After Cash: All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses a Bank Account.” The drive towards cashless societies baffles me, since it further concentrates an enormous amount of power in the hands of unaccountable, indifferent, power-mad bureaucrats.

* “United Launch Alliance (ULA) executive admits company cannot compete with SpaceX on launch costs,” an amazing story.

* Tyler Cowen on * The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education. Note that Diego Gambetta, one of the co-authors, also wrote the excellent Codes of the Underworld, discussed by me at the link in 2010.

* “Prosecutor known for fighting prostitution charged with paying for sex hundreds of times;” the phrase “victimless crime” comes to mind.

* Good news (well, the bringing-killers-to-justice part is good, the death part is not): “A toddler got meningitis. His anti-vac parents gave him an herbal remedy. The toddler died. Now his parents are on trial.”

* How Valley of the Dolls went from a reject to a 30-million best-seller.

* “Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.” To call this system “insane” is an understatement. Even calling it a “system” might be overly kind.

* “Thinking too highly of higher ed;” if you read nothing else this month read this.

* Jeff offers perspective on the mattress industry and writers more generally.

* “Thinking too highly of higher ed,” by Peter Thiel, who also wrote Zero to One (which you, like everyone, should read).

* “The global secular savings stagnation glut,” the sort of link I rarely post here and yet:

What this discussion should make clear is that secular stagnation isn’t much of a puzzle. Rather, it is a dilemma. The ageing societies of the rich world want rapid income growth and low inflation and a decent return on safe investments and limited redistribution and low levels of immigration. Well you can’t have all of that. And what they have decided is that what they’re prepared to sacrifice is the rapid income growth. In aggregate that decision looks somewhat reasonable if not entirely right. But it is a choice with pretty significant distributional consequences. And the second era of secular stagnation will come to an end when political and demographic shifts allow the losers from this arrangement to say: enough.

* “If We Dig Out All Our Fossil Fuels, Here’s How Hot We Can Expect It to Get.”

* “Walter Scott, child support defendant murdered by cop, earned about $800/month.”

* “Nutritional Science Isn’t Very Scientific: The research behind dietary recommendations is a lot less certain than you think.” Just about the only obvious thing is “Don’t eat refined carbohydrates,” like sugar and white rice, and eat vegetables and nuts.

* “What If We Admitted to Children That Sex Is Primarily About Pleasure?”

* The Steady Rise of Bike Ridership in New York”

* “Is Capitalism Making Us Stupid?“, a brilliant article with a stupid title.