* A Weird MIT Dorm Dies, and a Crisis Blooms at Colleges; in keeping with The Coddling of the American Mind.

* “Horror is a dark and piercing reflection of our anxious times.” I was originally going to skip this, but it’s excellent and much better than the title implies. Highly recommended.

* The Printed Word in Peril: The age of Homo virtualis is upon us. Is this a requiem for a Gutenberg mind?

* Books are getting longer, and they probably shouldn’t be getting longer. Perhaps we have not yet learned that it’s not necessarily, the size, it’s how you use it?

* Should we have a “dumb investment” agreement through the SEC? Democracy and transparency are good, aren’t they?

* “‘We’re moving to higher ground’: America’s era of climate mass migration is here.” Shouldn’t this have already happened a while ago?

* Inside the eight desperate weeks that saved SpaceX from ruin.

* How San Francisco demolished the California dream via its own housing laws.

* 24-Year-Old Ritesh Agarwal Built a $5 Billion Hotel Startup in Five Years. Cool.

* Zinc-air battery is supposedly ready for commercial deployment and also supposedly offers lower cost than lithium-ion batteries.

* “‘This guy doesn’t know anything’: the inside story of Trump’s shambolic transition team.” Much more detailed and interesting than the usual, and it also remind me of my rare political-ish post, Trump fears and the nuclear apocalypse. So far we’ve been lucky: no potential pandemics, terrorist attacks, or new wars. As I wrote then: “Maybe nothing catastrophically bad will happen. I hope so and think that will be true. But to pretend he is a ‘normal’ politician (or to vote for him) is to be willfully blind to history and to the man himself.”

* Wim Ouboter, the Man Behind the Scooter Revolution.

* “Russian Elon Musk’ raped and tortured to death in custody, say experts.” I wonder why smart and competent-seeming people who can get out of Russia stay in Russia. For most of the last 200 years, if not longer, the smartest thing anyone in Russia could do was (and today is) get out of Russia. Staying seems to have limited upside compared to these very significant downsides.

* Are people finally figuring out that business school is pretty bogus?

* Car crashes killed 37,133 people in the US in 2017. Remember this when you hear about minor acts of terrorism and other news-worthy but not-that-dangerous news.

* Iron Ox, a new autonomous farm, wants to produce food without human workers.

* “That’s clearly a form of punishment, however informal or extrajudicial. But the punishment seems far from swift, certain or fair, based on decades-old accusations without contemporaneous corroboration, aired solely due to political contingencies, urged on by a left avid to convict him of something.” I have not said much about the saga, which leaves almost all of its partisans looking and sounding worse than before, and this is one of the few intelligent pieces I’ve read on it. Virtue signaling and mood affiliation are strong in most commentary about this.

* “French bookshops revolt after prize selects novel self-published on Amazon: Booksellers refuse to ‘jump into the wolf’s mouth’ and order Marco Koskas’ Renaudot-longlisted novel online.” Pretty funny for the usual reasons.

* Tyler Cowen’s *Emergent Ventures*, a new project to help foment enlightenment. Highly recommended. I don’t have a good emergent venture, though I’d love to do something education-related. Do you have such a venture? Do you know someone who might?

* A premature attempt at the 21st Century canon.

* “The Current Sex Panic Harks Back to the Era of Coddling Women,” but you may already know that.

* ‘For me, this is paradise’: life in the Spanish city that banned cars.

* How a Professor Was Punished for an Act of Citizenship. You are probably tired of reading these outrageous stories about universities behaving badly (I am), yet they appear so often that I link to some of them. See also, “The Coddling of the American Mind ‘Is Speeding Up.’”

* Canadian marijuana stock soars to $12 billion. The headline is too celebrity-gossip for me, but the content is of interest as a sign of social change.

* “Why Is the Home Building Industry Stuck in the 1940s? Embrace pre-fabricated, adaptable homes!”

* RIP the celebrity profile.

* On Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan.

* Very good podcast with Austin Allred of Lambda School, on education and many other topics. I still think that the perfidious combination of accreditation bodies and the federal student loan system will shunt Lambda School and others to the sidelines, but I hope to see the alternatives grow.

* One small change to New York’s intersections is saving pedestrians’ lives.

* George Mason University’s econ department culture; we all ought to move closer to that, I think.

* “These studies offer a realistic view of postdoc life—and guidance for making career decisions that work for you.” This is really depressing: “Most postdocs earned between $39,000 and $55,000, with 5% reporting earnings below $39,000 and 10% above $55,000.” That’s basically saying, “Don’t go to grad school in science, either, because you won’t make any money, even after five to ten years of additional school.”

* America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare.

* Putting a dollar value on one of oil’s biggest subsidies: military protection. An underrated point.

* Data from online dating. Bad headline. The seven bullet points at the end are the most interesting (and un-PC) parts.

* Radical open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions. Good.

* Understanding postmodern conservatism, a more interesting piece than you’d think from the title.

* “Why are America’s elite universities censoring themselves on China?” Why do we expect them to? Why do buy into the concept of “elite” in this domain?

* “Study: Cities with more transit use could cut road deaths by 40%.” We’re literally willing to die to drive.

* “How Real News Can Be Worse Than Fake News: Too much information can lead to a cynical population that expects little from its leaders.”

* Clayton Christensen: Half of American colleges will be bankrupt in 10 to 15 years. Given cost increases, that would probably be a net improvement.

* “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” A… not expected op-ed.

* But Rich People Live Here, So We Can’t Be Going Broke!

* Uber Was Right: The scooter backlash vindicates Travis Kalanick’s early tactics.

* Electric scooters are getting more and more popular. It’s time for big cities to embrace them.

* On Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook; in The New Yorker and not just the usual.

* The Chekhov Sentence That Contains Almost All of Life. The new Shteyngart novel sounds unbelievably terrible, but the essay is good.

* Fitted tees, scruff, and understated watches: the secrets of a Silicon Valley stylist. Hilarious.

* The Major Urban Revolution of Minor Transportation Means.

* “I doubt me an it be commercial.” On publishing, writing, and many other topics of interest.

* Fundamentals in fiction and the question of obligations.

* How the Dutch created a casual biking culture. My favorite story in a while.

* The self-defeat of academia. “Own goal” works here too.

* Conversation between Tyler Cowen and Clair Lehmann of Quillette. Appropriately, the link immediately above is to a Quillette essay.

* America’s student debt machine.

* Reflections from Kunming, an unglobalized part of the world.

* “My Affair With the Intellectual Dark Web,” a bad title for a surprisingly humane and interesting piece.

* Why It Can Happen Here: We’re very close to becoming another Poland or Hungary. And almost no one seems worried.

* Teens cutting back on social media? A big “maybe” here.

* What Follows the End of History? Identity Politics.

* “Talk to Your Kids About Porn: Many teens will be exposed to it anyway—often unintentionally—and they need the guidance of their parents to process what they’ve seen.” In the Atlantic. Not a cultural shift I expect to see, but I guess you never know.

* Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence: study. If true, this is another argument in favor of electric cars, fast.

* “In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable?” Link. One possible answer: the market is actually consuming and producing a lot of signaling. Maybe less signaling than profit, but still a lot, except no one wants to admit as much. And signaling is not measurable.

* Livin’ Thing: An Oral History of ‘Boogie Nights.’

* Bending to the law of supply and demand, some colleges are dropping their prices.

* Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History: The political scientist argues that the desire of identity groups for recognition is a key threat to liberalism.

* “His $109K Heart Attack Bill Is Now Down To $332 After NPR Told His Story.” Maybe we should be working harder towards price transparency in healthcare?

* Loneliness is pervasive and rising, particularly among the young. Get off your phones.

* Social media mobs. Sounds unpleasant!

* Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly.

* How the politics of envy (or ‘income inequality’) work in the broadest sense.”

* Reading fiction helps your career, but reading poetry helps more?

* Joe Rogan interviews Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk; usually Rogan is not to my taste, but The same forces Palahniuk describes in publishing are also at work in academia. If you’re wondering why so much of contemporary academia is so boring and sterile, that’s part of it.

* Imagine a world without mandatory college diplomas. Related: “The Student Debt Problem Is Worse Than We Imagined.” Schools have no skin in the game; should we be surprised?

* “Marine scientist predicts ‘a planetary catastrophe.’”

* Memories of V. S. Naipaul.

* “Venezuela’s great socialist experiment has brought a country to its knees.” The current vogue for socialism in some quarters, where people ought to know better, is strange.

* “Never Cook at Home: Trust me, I know it’s a drag.” A completely charming article and of course wrong. You should read it!

* Real art is bound to cause offense. I hope so!

* “America Has Fallen Out of Love With the Sedan.” You know all those articles about how bad global warming is getting? This is an article that basically says, “Americans don’t care.”

* “The Nuclear Power Plant of the Future May Be Floating Near Russia.”

* “The Humanities Face a Crisis—of Confidence.” Not the best article on this subject, but it’s okay.

* ‘We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things.’

* “The Shakespeare Requirement” Is a Sad-Professor Satire That Burns with Moral Anger. I have read too many academic novels to be interested in them anymore, but this one is probably fine.

* Early Work by Andrew Martin Mixes Lust With the Directionless of Youth.

* “GlobalFoundries Stops All 7nm Chip Development.” Non-technical people are likely to skip right past this one, but it has profound implications for the future: GlobalFoundries is one of the largest chip makers in the world, and if it can’t do 7 nanometer, it’s possible that the others can’t, or can’t effectively, either. For the last ~50 years, integrated circuit design has been a huge bright spot in the economic and technological picture—and underappreciated by most people.

* Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jordan Peterson. Much better than you think based on the title.

* People Are Bad at Being Productive in a Limited Time.

* Baylor University used “mole” to aid communications department during sexual assault crisis? This story is crazy enough to be unbelievable in fiction. I read it and think, “Maybe universities should go back to focusing on teaching and research?”

* How ICE went rogue: Inside America’s unfolding immigration crisis. A horrible story that will require national reckoning.

* Climate Report: Not Good. Maybe we should do something about it?

* Beyond fiction: Scott Aaronson’s arrest.

* “The Toll of America’s Obesity.”

* Electric scooters will work in NYC. This is obvious, but it’s also amazing to see the small-c conservative NYT editorial board figure it out. Also, “The Real E-Scooters Story Is Much More Boring Than Media Coverage Suggests.”

* “The Origin Story of Marie Kondo’s Decluttering Empire.” I would guess Kondo is overrated by her adherents and underrated by most people.

* Rich Absentee Landlords Make a Killing from California’s Prop 13. This is congruent with a Grant Writing Confidential post I wrote, “L.A. digs a hole more slowly than economics fills it back in: The Proposition HHH Facilities Program RFP,” which will be of general interest to many of you.

* “How Bill Browder Became Russia’s Most Wanted Man,” an insane story reminiscent of John le Carré but published in The New Yorker.

* “Yes, Another Science Blog: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you. This relationship is hurting me.” From 2014 but characteristic of the genre.

* Shockingly, a sociology professor and gender studies person is embroiled in controversy. Who would have thought? I know it’s depressing to see all these pieces about why it’s a wise idea to stay out of academia, but people keep going into the meat grinder.

* “The Modern Automobile Must Die: If we want to solve climate change, there’s no other option.” More of the obvious, but here it is.

* Identity politics weaken democracy and we should do a lot less of them. Focus on ideas, not the speaker’s demographics.

* “Can We Talk About Toxic Femininity?” Not my view, but it’s telling how little we hear this phrase.

* Massachusetts gives workers new protections against noncompete clauses. Good. Every state should.

* “What Does Knee Surgery Cost? Few Know, and That’s a Problem.” We need price transparency now.

* “Companies dropping college degree as hiring requirement.” Good news if true, but this could easily be a bogus trend story.

* “Cherry MX History: A German Company With American Roots.” Cherry makes the keyswitches in many, if not most, high-quality keyboards today. I still get emails about my Model M / Unicomp Customizer review, as well as my Kinesis Advantage review. Some have asked why I stopped writing keyboard reviews, and the answer is simple: there are many, many good keyboards out there today. To me, the differences among them are often marginal. When I wrote those pieces, fewer good keyboards were readily available. I’ve tried a couple new ones (e.g. the Ergodox-EZ, which is nice but a little too much like a science fair project for my taste), but the Kinesis works and it’s hard to envision one much better than it. With many tools, it’s best to find “good enough” and then stop. I found “good enough.”

* Renting is not “throwing money away.”

* China Is Trying to Wipe Taiwan Off the Map, and There’s Not Much Anyone Can Do About It.

* The erotics of mentorship. Things that are politically incorrect but interesting.

* The Democratic Party Picked an Odd Time to Have an Identity Crisis. Agreed.

* “Home Values Grew Most in Markets with Strictest Land Use Regulations.” Supply and demand continue to explain housing costs.

* The Education Department to require colleges to publish data on graduates’ debt and earnings by major. Good, and long overdue, like that library book the college requires you to pay for prior to receiving your diploma.

* “In upstate New York, an ecstasy-inspired psychedelic temple rises.” Have you read the new Michael Pollan book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence? It’s great.

* Anti-Vaccine Activists Have Taken Vaccine Science Hostage. Outrageous and true.

* Unions’ Fees Take a Hit After Decision From Supreme Court. Good news all around.

* Does Television Kill Your Sex Life? Microeconometric Evidence from 80 Countries. “Under our most conservative estimate, we find that television ownership is associated with approximately a 6% reduction in the likelihood of having had sex in the past week, consistent with a small degree of substitutability between television viewing and sexual activity.”

* The world is losing the war against climate change. Perhaps we ought to do something about that?

* Book publishing is actually a thriving business? Consider the source, though.

* Can American cities make room for the electric moped?” Sure hope so.

* Hollywood Doesn’t Make Movies Like ‘The Fugitive’ Anymore.

* “The New Housing Crisis: Shut Out of the Market.” We’re building less housing per capita than any other previous generation in the last hundred years. That’s why housing is eating the economy.

* “Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities.” Note that it’s also possible for lots of bad trends, like postmodernist nonsense, to endure for some period of time, but to eventually weaken the structure sufficiently for it to collapse. A system can endure a lot of strain before it gives way. People began calling the 2009 housing crisis as early as 2003 and 2004. People have been calling the crisis in the humanities for longer, but it may now finally be on us, in measurable ways.

* Why Was the 20th Century Not a Chinese Century?: An Outtake from “Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century.” Probably my favorite essay from this batch.

* Meet Brad Sewell, Campaign Furniture Founder and CEO. Overall, Campaign seems like an underrated company, though this interview is not very good. See also my essay, “Does Ikea enable mobility?”

* Four or five times I ignored links to “The Big Business of Being Gwyneth Paltrow,” figuring the target is too easy and the essay would be stupid (I’ve read plenty of vapid profiles)—but I was wrong and the article is hilarious. Like “Frank Sinatra has a cold,” this may be a pinnacle example of the genre. The writer, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, deserves accolades for this. Looks like she hasn’t done any books. She should.

* “The childless, aging future.” Pretty depressing, seen like that. Another example of lost connections, perhaps.

* “The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature.” Interesting science journalism, but also: “Whether or how Furey’s work connects to string theory remains to be puzzled out. So does her future. She’s looking for a faculty job now, but failing that, there’s always the ski slopes or the accordion.” Perhaps it is not such a good idea to go to grad school. Or perhaps experts know something that didn’t make it to the article.

* Epistocracy: a political theorist’s case for letting only the informed vote.

* “How did the end of the world become old news?” Sample: “Last week, wildfires broke out in the Arctic Circle, where temperatures reached almost 90 degrees; they are still roiling northern Sweden, 21 of them.”

* “Erotic Exploration in Immigrant, Montana.” Not quite a novel I want to read but likely a novel some of you want to read.

* “The most relaxing vacation you can take is going nowhere at all.” Reading is underrated, hectic vacations overrated.

* “TSA is tracking regular travelers like terrorists in secret surveillance program.” Vile.

* “Why restaurants became so loud — and how to fight back.”

* Immigrant girl hides in auto shop after escaping from Florida detention facility; owner turns her in anyway. We might want to think about the kind of country we’re living in. I try not to post many outrage links, but sometimes it’s worth doing.

* SpaceX’s Secret Weapon Is Gwynne Shotwell.

* As California burns, many fear the future of extreme fire has arrived.

* Peter Thiel interview.

* Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.

* How to write a book without losing your mind. I think “losing your mind” is a feature, not a bug.

* “In Some US Cities, There Are Over Ten Times More Parking Spaces Than Households.” Should you be wondering why the rent is too damn high and the commuting times too damn long, this is part of the answer.

* “San Francisco’s zoning makes it illegal to build apartments in 73.5% of the city.” And that, friends, is another part of the reason the rent is too damn high.

* “‘Up or out’ institutional structures go sideways,” a piece similar to this previously linked piece that makes a similar observation.

* A story about leaving China, which is very different and more specific than “the usual,” while also offering some abstract lessons and ideas.

* “Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing.” It is bad that Apple has had a far better touchpad experience for at least five years and arguably much longer.

* “Michel Houellebecq Imagined Sexual Dystopia. Now It’s Arrived.” I disagree with the absoluteness of the headline but the story is of interest.

* “#HeToo? A Fight for Men’s Rights, in California Courts.” A surprising venue for this story as well.

* “On Semicolons and the Rules of Writing.” I like and will continue to use semicolons, likely until I can no longer write.

* “What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987?” Still unlikely but much more likely than I would’ve thought two years ago—or even one year ago.

* “The Age of Acceleration: An Interview with Martin Amis.”

* People Are Bad at Being Productive in a Limited Time.

* I Was the Mob Until the Mob Came for Me.

* “A Global Heat Wave Has Set the Arctic Circle on Fire.”

* “In Hollywood, ‘Anything Goes’ Becomes ‘You’re Fired.’” Ill news for creativity and creative freedom.

* “California teacher pension debt swamps school budgets.” This is unsustainable, to use an overused word that is nonetheless applicable here.

* The childless, aging future.

* “A Theory of Trump Kompromat,” not just the usual.

* “Crossing the divide: Do men really have it easier? These transgender guys found the truth was more complex.” The short answer is “no.”

* “Academia Is the Alternative Career Path: Why pretend otherwise?” Seems totally obvious to me.

* Universities withstood MOOCs but risk being outwitted by OPMs [online programme managers]. Good.

* “Parking Has Eaten American Cities,” another take on the first link. You’ll know people are really serious about improving everyone’s economic and financial lives when they come for parking.

* “Book Breaking and Book Mending: Most academic books aren’t written to be read—they’re written to be ‘broken.’ That should change.” The subtext of this article is, “Don’t get a PhD in the humanities. Even if you do, and even if you ‘publish,’ what you publish will be of little value and will likely go unread.”

* “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.