* “Don’t Blame Politics for the Crisis at American Colleges: Campus life has been increasingly riled by controversies over perceived offenses. An administrative culture is partly responsible.” Still, one has to ask: is there a crisis? If so, what is it, and for whom is it a crisis?

* All aboard: the Second Avenue Subway is here. See also: Why does infrastructure cost so damn much in the U.S.?

* In keeping with the above: “Considerations on cost disease.” A much more vital essay than its title, maybe, suggests.

* A useful reminder: “Ordinary Americans Carried Out Inhumane Acts For Trump.”

* I Helped Create the Milo Trolling Playbook. You Should Stop Playing Right Into It. From Ryan Holiday of Trust Me, I’m Lying fame. We are easily manipulated, myself likely included.

* To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics.

* “Garry Kasparov, a top Putin critic, on how to oppose Trump: ‘making him look like a loser is crucial.'”

* Stan Smith knows you think he’s just a sneaker, a very weird and fascinating story.

* “Love is like cocaine.”

* Why great critics make disastrous judgments.

* “Top Hat Raises $22.5 Million to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill.” Good.

* “How this feminist found herself sympathising with the men’s rights movement.”

* At least one smart, well-informed person, Radley Balko, thinks “In Gorsuch, Trump gave Democrats a gift. They should take it.” I don’t know enough to have an opinion but generally like Balko’s skepticism towards the consolidation of government power over individuals and also like his book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. Most of the discussion I’ve seen so far has been unenlightening.

* Scott Alexander on Eichmann in Jerusalem; I find the sections on bureaucratic and societal resistance most interesting. When I was younger I thought the “what” and “why” about a thing were the most interesting parts, but now I see that the “how” is at least as important.

* “Pants For the Cost of A Postage Stamp: A Conversation with Jacob Yazejian, Used Clothing Exporter.” This is an example of the “how” question being explained.

* “How Immigration Uncertainty Threatens America’s Tech Dominance.” Well-known to people in the field and not known at all among voters.

* America needs to abandon its reverence for bachelor’s degrees.

* “Why Hollywood as We Know It Is Already Over,” although I have been reading similar-ish articles for ~10 years.

* “The psychology of why 94 deaths from terrorism are scarier than 301,797 deaths from guns.”

* Things you don’t expect to read in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “‘I Have Multiple Loves:’ Carrie Jenkins makes the philosophical case for polyamory.”

* Evan McMullins is trying to save democracy.

* “Shallow Graves: The novels of Paul Auster,” from 2009 and one of the most hilarious reviews I’ve ever read; somehow I missed it at the time.

* “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.” It’s a good article and has been making the rounds online; if I were super-rich I’d be doing the same thing, for reasons listed in “Trump fears and the nuclear apocalypse.” Again, look at history: The craziness of World Wars I and II are (almost) impossible to believe, if you really study them. Entire countries marched in virtual lockstop into existential horror. People follow the crowd and do what they’re told, even if the crowd walks off a cliff and the leader tells them to walk off a cliff. The probability of extremely bad things happening is low, but it’s higher than it was on Nov. 7.

* A shockingly good explanation of why the Hobbit movies were so terrible.

* We will miss antibiotics when they’re gone.

* Where the Second Avenue Subway Went Wrong.

* On Building the Skyline, a history of New York’s skyscrapers. Also, A single city in China built more skyscrapers last year than the US and Australia combined. Pretty sad.

* Tom Wolfe’s new book is terrible. I started it and gave up maybe a quarter of the way through.

* The Many, the Humble, the Ubuntu Linux Users. About using Linux from the perspective of a writer rather than a programmer. There are also now very good laptops that come with Linux pre-installed, like this Dell XPS 13″.

* The System Has Failed and a Con Artist Has Won.

* “Blue Lies Matter: How Video Finally Proved That Cops Lie.”

* Yes, there have been aliens.

* The next [debt or financial] crisis?

* “What the Death of the T.P.P. Means for America.” The short answer is, “Very little that is good.”

* On Forged Through Fire: War, Peace, and the Democratic Bargain

* “How ‘time-saving’ technology destroys our productivity: The endless tasks it can be used to create leave us working longer and longer hours.” Maybe the most important link in this batch. In my own work, I’ve seen this phenomenon and wrote about it in “How computers have made grant writing worse.”

* “Considering the Novel in the Age of Obama,” much better than the title implies but also a good exploration of why most people neither read nor care about “literary” fiction.

* We need a contract for co-parenting, not just for marriage, a point I expect to keep becoming more important over time.

* Roivant, an important pharmaceutical startup that’s trying to cut the time necessary to develop new drugs.

* “America, America,” scary, important.

* That Time I Turned a Routine Traffic Ticket into the Constitutional Trial of the Century.”

* Do dating apps fuel a rise in casual sex? Funny story, weak data, the kids today are out of control, just like they’ve always been.

* 2016 was the hottest year on record, surpassing the previous record holder (2015) and the one before that (2014).

* The Real Reason Your City Has No Money.

* “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” wildly unconvincing and specious; it’s bizarre to read Thiel’s criticisms of others that apply primarily to himself. He wrote Zero to One.

* Thinking about the process of being an artist and a writer: Lessons from David Galenson’s Old Masters and Young Geniuses.

* There’s “No proof music lessons make children any smarter.”

* “The Novel as Math Problem: As a formal exercise, Paul Auster’s 4321 is impeccable. As a story, it’s curiously cold.” I’ll pass.

* Why Most Economists Are So Worried About Trump.

* An excellent, important point: “Every movement…has a smart version and a stupid version, I try to (almost) always consider the smart version. The stupid version is always wrong for just about anything.” I have sometimes been guilty of attacking the stupid version.

* “Housing supply is [finally, almost] catching up to demand.”

* “Elena’s career exemplifies two cultures in women’s writing that are not supposed to mix: the unimpeachably high, where abstract desires are worked out in texts accessible only to educated elites, and the thrillingly low—writing that, driven by big, vulgar passions, grips the popular imagination but is not to be taken seriously.”

* “Make America Mate Again,” very much an underrated issue that has not made it much into the general culture.

* “The Friendship That Created Behavioral Economics,” on Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project.

* “Anatomy of a Hoax: How the physicist Alan Sokal hoodwinked a group of humanists and why, 20 years later, it still matters.” I’m not sure it does still matter, but it is entertaining!

* “U.S. Says Putin Ordered Broad Campaign of Influence to Help Trump Win Election.” In short, Americans fell for it.

* “How Japan has almost eradicated gun crime.” The secret is unsurprising.

* Rake’s Progress: A Look at the Well-Traveled Casanova.

* “Donald Trump isn’t Hitler, Mussolini, or even Putin. He’s Trump; but that, in itself, presents a real danger.”

* “Dell’s latest XPS 13 DE still delivers Linux in a svelte package.”

* “He Fixes the Spines of Books, Without an Understudy: Donald Vass has been mending books in the Seattle area for 26 years, but his craft is a fading one.”

* “The Soviet Union Is Gone, But It’s Still Collapsing: And 5 other unlearned lessons from leading experts about modern Russia and the death of an empire.” Better than the title makes it sound.

* “Buffalo Becomes First City to Bid Minimum Parking Goodbye,” good news.

* “Why is it so hard for writers to talk about how much money they make?” Probably because for most the answer is “not much.”

* “Writing software is hard,” an important point often not understood by those outside the industry.

* Divorce lawyers explain that divorces are much more similar than different, and yes, they all know that “your ex is an asshole,” just like everyone else’s ex.

* Why some problem cops don’t lose their badges.

* How Vienna produced ideas that shaped the West.

* The Twin Prime Hero: Rags, riches, and fame in mathematics.

* Robin Hanson’s idea trade engagement. I feel bad that I can’t think of good ideas he should blog!

* How Watership Down was written.

* “When city retirement pays better than the job: One in four El Monte residents lives in poverty. Yet taxpayers pay a steep price to fund bonus pensions and other perks for city workers.” I try not to post outrage reads, yet sometimes I can’t resist.

* The red Solo cup is a marvel of modern engineering.

* Women Who Count: 3 Smart STEM Romances.

* On The Fever by Megan Abbott.

* “Quinoa is the new Big Mac: Can Eatsa succeed in delicious and inexpensive plant-based fast food?”

* The inventor of the red Solo cup has died. Real tragedy.

* “Student Accused of Rape By ‘Mattress Girl’ Sues Columbia U., Publishes Dozens of Damning Texts.” See a related discussion in this post.

* “The personal is political” (note: the personal is not necessarily political and if someone tells you it is, tell them to get stuffed).

* Low Definition in Higher Education: When college students are told what to think and what not to say, who suffers in the end?

* Ebikes: I Sing the Ride Electric.

* “When did Literary Feuds Become So Boring? Duels between writers were once epic. Now they’re just petty.”

* “The long political history of sneakers;” the article sounds dumb but is actually good.

* Trump’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

* “Why People Vote for Counterproductive Policies.” And: “‘What the Russians Did Was Utterly Unprecedented.’” Voter irrationality has always been an interesting topic but it’s become more interesting and salient since 2010, with a special rise this year.

* Open societies are facing major crises. I don’t think Soros’s answer is the right one or that most people even know who or what they might mean by “elites,” but the problems are clear and not going away.

* “The widowhood effect: What it’s like to lose a spouse in your 30s.” Brutal, moving, and you may cry. Consider yourself warned.

* Tim Cook alleges that great desktop Macs are in the works. I’ll believe it when I see them.

* To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power.

* “How Silicon Valley Nails Silicon Valley,” unexpectedly hilarious.

* Campus Identity Politics Is Dooming Liberal Causes, according to Mark Lilla, who you may remember from The Shipwrecked Mind.

* “How Amazon’s problems with cheap knockoffs got real.” I’ve become much more sensitized to this issue and less likely to buy non-books from Amazon for precisely this reason.

* “World War III, by mistake.” See also “Trump fears and the nuclear apocalypse.”

* “If anyone is alive in 100 years to write a history of the 2016 U.S. election they will not believe how dumb it was.”

* “Automakers Prepare for an America That’s Over the Whole Car Thing.” The bizarre thing to me is that Americans ever loved cars in the first place. See also “Cars and generational shift” and “Owning vs sharing: Don’t get caught in the ugly middle.”