* From the New Yorker, “Making Sense of Modern Pornography: While the Internet has made porn ubiquitous, it has also thrown the industry into severe decline.” The article is not as good as it could be but it is worth reading.

* “How Bolivia became a drug war success story—after ousting Uncle Sam.”

* “Whatever We Dig Up, We’ll End Up Buried,” a fascinating piece whose title does not do it justice.

* American against itself: does the future belong to authoritarians, left and right?

* “A Librarian Left $4 Million to His University. It Spent $1 Million on a Football Scoreboard.” Relative to the total budgets of universities this is not so bad, and remember that fancy dorms are not the reason tuition is skyrocketing, but the symbolism of this is vital.

* “Trumpism Is the Symptom of a Gravely Ill Constitution: No matter what happens in November, the sickness may be terminal.” In other words, we may be reaching the limits of non-parliamentary political systems, though there is no good way to get from where we are now to where we might like to be.

* Someone followed one of my Amazon links and then proceeded to buy an ebook version of Booty Camp Dating Service (no link here, sorry, but I did find the product page description amusing).

* On the role of blogs in the science reputation crisis.

* Old book, new look: why the classics are flying off the shelves. Maybe. Dubiously.

* “Want to hold police accountable? The evidence is clear: film them. Always.” Otherwise, cops can basically do anything, up to and including murder.

* “A beginner’s guide to socialist economics” (and why capitalism kicks its ass).

* “The Game at 10: Reflections From a Recovering Pickup.” See also me on The Truth, Strauss’s latest book.

* “The efficient plots hypothesis,” on how writers should deal with plot, among many other topics.

* How Megan Abbott Spends Her Sundays; you may remember her from this essay about her novel Dare Me.

* “Novels in Third Places: The Case for More Classrooms in Our Literature.”

* “The Brilliant MI6 Spy Who Perfected the Art of the ‘Honey Trap:’ During WWII, Betty Pack used seduction to acquire enemy naval codes.” She also worked to free Spanish fascists. By the way, John le Carré has a new biography out.

* “‘An aggressive proposal that touched a lot of nerves’: Why Gov. Brown’s plan to stem the housing crisis failed.” And why California is going to continue to be ludicrously expensive for a long time to come.

* “How Did G.M. Create Tesla’s Dream Car First?” An incredible, unexpected story.

* It’s time to talk about Byron again; a much more hilarious and fascinating piece than you may be expecting.

* Building bigger roads actually makes traffic worse.

* “Can U.S. Cities Compensate for Curbing Sprawl by Growing Denser?” So far, no; we are choosing sprawl instead.

* “Jay Z: ‘The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail.’” Seems obvious, but when notable people say it it becomes news again.

* “Divine Indigestion: The endlessly fabulized American self,” on American novels, among other things.

* “With the iPhone 7, Apple Changed the Camera Industry Forever.” I still have an use an Olympus EM-10 II camera, which is horribly named but delightful to use.

* “To Launch a Nuclear Strike, Clinton or Trump Would Follow These Steps,” an utterly terrifying article: “About five minutes may elapse from the president’s decision until intercontinental ballistic missiles blast out of their silos, and about fifteen minutes until submarine missiles shoot out of their tubes.” Nonetheless I like to think that Americans would not follow launch orders unless they were sure that someone else had launched first or was about to do so.

* Why I don’t do more writer interviews.

* “Alan Moore: By the Book,” as hilarious and marvelous as you imagine it to be.

* Is This the Tipping Point For Electric Cars? Charging stations are proliferating.

* Despite SpaceX setback, future of private space exploration is bright.

* “If drivers expect to be prosecuted for committing offences [against cyclists] they suddenly stop committing them,” a totally unsurprising yet still important point.

* “I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas,” which is actually about the crazy logistical hurdles facing small businesses.

* “How the careless errors of credit reporting agencies are ruining people’s lives.”

* “My dirty little secret: I’ve been writing erotic novels to fund my PhD: Don’t breathe a word, my mentor advised me. They were right – I’ve had some odd reactions from the few colleagues I’ve told.”

* “We Are Reading Less Literature,” maybe. But: “The Internet Has Not Killed the Printed Book. Most People Still Prefer Them.” I wish printed books used better-quality paper.

* “The Art of Advice-Giving;” I’m somewhat baffled by the popularity of advice columns, since most of the people with problems seem to have obvious solutions to those problems. They’re like drop-dead dumb crime novels. Dan Savage is an exception, though.

* The literary fiction of investor letters. “Philosophy” may be a more appropriate genre.

* “Nicholson Baker, Substitute Teacher,” about what I think I’d feel if I taught K – 12. I also work for a lot of superintendents and school administrators in a grant writing capacity, and the experience has not given me great optimism about the quality of American education. It is striking how often promises to teach reading and writing effectively are themselves poorly written and argued.

* “The Campus Left and the Alt-Right Are Natural Allies: It’s unlikely that either movement has the cultural power or breadth of appeal to take down liberalism on its own. But taken together, they make a fearsome foe.” Too few people are standing up for freedom of thought and inquiry.

* “Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun;” important and underappreciated news.

* “People in Los Angeles are getting rid of their cars.” I’m not sure I believe it.

* Even the New York Times editorial board has figured out that police unions impede justice and let bad cops proliferate. A rare victory for reason over politics.

* “Tesla envy grips Germany’s giants: But Porsche, Audi, BMW and Mercedes are ready to respond.” Good news.

* “A Return to Print? Not Exactly.” Or, don’t necessarily trust the headlines.

* “The New New Malthusians: The fear of too little gives way to the fear of too much.” It is possible that we’re on an S-curve ultimately headed to zero, but the history of catastrophic predictions has so far not been correct.

* “Architecture for the Internet: A look inside a carrier hotel in Manhattan — a building where different ISPs and network companies check in with one another.” See also Neal Stephenson’s insane, magisterial “Mother Earth Mother Board.”

* “‘Hot’ Sex & Young Girls” by Zoë Heller, a review that ought to be even harsher than it is: “History has taught us to be wary of middle-aged people complaining about the mores of the young. The parents of every era tend to be appalled by the sexual manners of their children (regardless of how hectic and disorderly their own sex lives once were, or still are)” and “neither [book] entirely avoids the exaggerations, the simplifications, the whiff of manufactured crisis that we have come to associate with this genre.” I suppose “the kids aren’t all right” is a genre that always has sold and probably always will sell.

* “Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia;” academics, virtually all of whom favor unions in other industries, do not like them in their own. Schadenfreude.

* “OpenBSD 6.0: why and how,” about the operating system.

* “French PM suggests naked breasts represent France better than a headscarf;” I laughed.

* “Architecture for the Internet: A look inside a carrier hotel in Manhattan — a building where different ISPs and network companies check in with one another.”

* “Economists Profit by Giving Things Away:” In short, economists publish their work freely online and that work isn’t hidden behind pay gates. So that means anyone can get ahold of it, which isn’t true in many other fields. This gives economists outsized influence. I find the publishing practices of academics in English lit bizarre in this respect.