* “Enigma Variations: Notes toward a theory of Nell Zink.” I like The Wallcreeper and have no idea what to do with it or say about it.

* Two years spamming spammers back, completely hilarious.

* “Sticker shock in Los Angeles Housing:” or, why you should’ve live in California. Granted I am writing this from NYC, which faces similar NIMBY and cost challenges.

* “Without tenure, professors become terrified sheep.” I think it more accurate to say, “Without market power, professors become terrified sheep.” Tenure distorts the academic market, making it hard for professors to get even one job, which in turn makes them terrified of losing it. See more from me on tenure’s discontents here.

* “The evolution of monogamy in response to partner scarcity,” interesting throughout.

* “Coding is not ‘fun’, it’s technically and ethically complex.” Is that incompatible with fun?

* “Tana French’s Intimate Crime Fiction: In her Dublin Murder Squad series, the search for the killer becomes entangled in a search for self.” I love the first paragraph in particular.

* “Dose of Reality: The Effect of State Marijuana Legalizations.” Short answer: Good all around. Other drugs ought to be next.

* Presidential candidate Gary Johnson: “Take a Deep Breath, Voters. There Is a Third Way.”

* “Why an Exotic Dancer Is (Financially) Just Like Your Hairdresser,” or, how strippers get paid (likely SFW).

* 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.

* “Why China won’t own next-generation manufacturing.” Maybe.

* “The Devil and John Holmes: John Holmes was a porn star. Eddie Nash was a drug lord. Their association ended in one of the most brutal mass murders in the history of Los Angeles.” If this were a novel I’d call it unrealistic.

* “‘America Is a Dream Country:’ What does it mean to spend years as a Syrian refugee and then land in a brand new life in Erie, Pennsylvania?” A point often missed in abstract political debates.

* “Europe’s ageing population is set to wreak havoc with the economy,” an underappreciated point.

* “Why Electric Cars Will Be Here Sooner Than You Think.”

* A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt, on the madness infecting college campuses (and other topics).

* Are PhD students irrational?

* The demise of the textbook mafia, one hopes.

* “Pay Gap Between Public-School Teachers and Similar Workers Is Wider Than Ever.”

* “Donald Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin underscores an unsettling truth about the two leaders: Trump and Putin are two of a kind: xenophobic, bigoted demagogues with dual histories of corruption, aggression, and celebration of white supremacy repackaged as patriotic nationalism.”

* Also: “None Dare Call It a Conspiracy: Who was behind the Moscow apartment bombings that accelerated Vladimir Putin’s rise to power?” It would appear that Putin himself and those associated with him are behind the bombings. Note that the link is not to fiction.

* “The Old, American Horror Behind ‘Stranger Things.'” Where there is horror there is Lovecraft.

* “Making bicycles in Detroit is an uphill climb.” My bike came from REI and was made in China.

* “It’s the first new U.S. nuclear reactor in decades. And climate change has made that a very big deal.” Nuclear power is still, oddly, underestimated; note that New England and Germany, both places with lots of superficial climate change worry, are now emitting more carbon dioxide than they used to—because they are phasing out nuclear plants and failing to replace them. In good news, “America’s First Offshore Wind Farm May Power Up a New Industry,” but pay attention to the orders of magnitude involved: “By global standards, the Block Island Wind Farm is a tiny project, just five turbines capable of powering about 17,000 homes.” That’s about 3% of the energy production of the new nuclear reactor.

* “The Legendary Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF.”

* “Cycling Matches the Pace and Pitches of Tech.” Probably a bogus trend story, but I like riding so I hope not.

* “‘I’ve done really bad things’: The undercover cop who abandoned the war on drugs: Neil Woods used to risk his life to catch drug dealers. But as gangs responded with escalating violence and intimidation – some even poisoning users who talked to the police – he started to see legalisation as the only solution.”

* “An atheist of a certain kind,” not the usual on this topic.

* “Why Tokyo is the land of rising home construction but not prices:”

Here is a startling fact: in 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).

A social bonus, too: “In Tokyo there are no boring conversations about house prices because they have not changed much. Whether to buy or rent is not a life-changing decision.” I would love to never have those boring conversations ever again, yet they seem everywhere around me.

* “Gary Johnson Has a Plan: On the road with the Libertarian candidate who thinks he can upend this year’s election.”

* “Challenges of Getting a Product Made in the U.S.A.”

* “What Happened After I Wrote That Cargo Shorts Story,” hilarious throughout; I used to wear cargo pants and shorts all the time, but eventually I realized the obvious: People judge you based on what you wear, and that deserves attention too.

* “The people who are truly harmed when cities say no to new housing.”

* NSA attacked Pro-Democracy Campaigner, demonstrating (yet again) the ills of secret proceedings and near-unlimited power.

* The race for a Zika vaccine.

* “The case for making New York and San Francisco much, much bigger.”

* Toni Bentley, fervently and brilliantly, on the latest Gay Talese book, Thy Neighbor’s Wife.

* “Sexism in publishing: ‘My novel wasn’t the problem, it was me, Catherine:’ Author reveals that submitting her manuscript to agents under a male pseudonym brought more than eight times the number of responses.” Most writing on this topic is garbage; this one, by nature of its control group, is not.

* “My Airbnb Nightmare Reality.”

* “The story of Melania Trump’s nude photos shows an unexpected maturity in American life, and the predictably depressing hypocrisy within it, too,” from Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker.

* “Against Edenism” by Peter Thiel.

* “Apple will finally be releasing new laptops, after ridiculously long delays.

* “US fertility rate falls to lowest on record” as Americans fail to reproduce themselves, driving the need for more imports (remember this data when you hear some kinds of political rhetoric). And: “More Old Than Young: A Demographic Shock Sweeps the Globe.”

* “The Next Generation of Wireless — “5G” — Is All Hype: The connectivity we crave — cheap, fast, ubiquitous — won’t happen without more fiber in the ground.”

* L.A. isn’t a suburb. It needs to stop being planned like one.

* “What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?” More interesting than maybe it sounds.