Tag Archives: Links

Links: The lure of hatred, particle physics, bookstores, academic failures, and satisfaction

June 18, 2016 By in Links Tags: , Leave a comment

* “The Nazi-Era Papers My ‘Mexican’ Mother Kept: She preserved her German ID card, with its ‘J’ stamp, as a warning about the danger in societies driven by nativism and anger.” The most essential link in this list.

* “Is Particle Physics About to Crack Wide Open?”

* Can On-Demand Printing Bolster Bookstores?

* “NYC Planners Propose Long Overdue Subway Line Just for the Boroughs.”

* “Is Libertarian Gary Johnson a factor in Clinton-Trump matchup?“, an underrated story.

* “Job-Seeking Ph.D. Holders Look to Life Outside School: New doctorate holders are grappling with dwindling employment prospects within the academy.” This should not surprise readers of this blog. This is me: “Ph.D.s still earn a significant premium over others in the labor market and their overall rate of unemployment remains low, though a growing number are taking jobs that don’t use their education.”

* “University lets rape accuser bring experienced lawyer, won’t let accused bring one,” in what is not likely to be the last of these sorts of bizarre cases.

* An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It, which should also be well-known to readers here. Yet when I tell students not to go law school, many of them look at me funny.

* “Sex, Income and Happiness.” This is congruent with my 2009 post on Stumbling on Happiness and my 2014 post on “The inequality that matters.”

Links: Massive projects, counterfactuals, Henry Miller, dating mores, the end of reflection, and more!

June 12, 2016 By in Links Tags: , , , 1 Comment

* New York’s Incredible Subway. Seattle is actively building subways. Denver is also building light rail (with surprising speed). It’s almost like other metros are learning from New York’s successes and Los Angeles’s mistakes.

* “If the atomic bomb had not been used,” one of the most fascinating pieces you’ll read if you’re familiar with the topic; call this a revision to revisionist history.

* “Henry Miller’s fail.” I tried and failed to read Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn when I was a teenager, and once or twice since, but they do nothing for or to me.

* International Energy Agency: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining.

* “The Economist Who Just Won a Nobel Prize Thinks Owning a Home Is a Terrible Investment: If everyone you know is telling you to buy a house, you should read Robert Shiller’s work.” The more I learn about the economics and opportunity costs of owning real estate the more puzzled I am by the American cultural fascination with ensuring high levels of employment in the property exchange industry.

* “The Venmo Request: A New Wrinkle in Modern Dating.”

* “Why even driving through suburbia is soul crushing”

* Texas is the new California, but its status won’t last: “The cost of maintaining an equally endless amount of horizontal infrastructure will inevitably outstrip tax revenue over the next generation.” I’m not sure, and the argument is less analytic than it should be, but still.

* “The End of Reflection“?

* How they got their guns,” a chilling yet fascinating piece.

* Tom Wolfe’s excellent, prescient Paris Review interview.

Links: Paper, criticism, Volts, engineering, wealth, revealed preferences, and more!

May 27, 2016 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “How Paper Shaped Civilization.”

* “Beware critics with theories,” a point made too infrequently among nattering academics. I remember staring into the medium distance in grad school seminars, listening to professors pontificate about how nothing is outside language, and wanting to throw water bottles at them to demonstrate that yes, in fact, some things are outside language.

* “How the 2016 Chevy Volt added 18 miles of EV range” and got better all around. The Volt is a consistently underrated car. On Hacker News someone asked, “Why don’t more folks respect this car?” That’s an excellent question, and I find most answers unconvincing. My guess is more psychological or sociological: GM has none of the sex appeal / marketing that Tesla or even BMW has. For that reason the Volt is easily overlooked or disrespected; in addition, it’s an important car but doesn’t have the pizzazz of an all-electric car. Still, it’s available today, relatively cheaply, and that should count for a lot. People don’t realize what an incredible engineering achievement it is.

* We’re 10 to 30 times richer than we were 200 years ago (points rarely made). Saliently to this blog, we also have many more good books to read, with more being written every year!

* Adam Gopnik on “The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump,” which is similar to my essay “People can believe in madness for surprisingly long periods of time.”

* Unsurprisingly, even “environmentalists” will sell their land or mineral rights to oil companies. The phrase “revealed preferences” comes to mind.

* “Behind the Making of Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience,” more interesting than it sounds. See my thoughts here.

* Pay Attention To Libertarian Gary Johnson; He’s Pulling 10 Percent vs. Trump And Clinton.

* “The Perils of Writing a Mildly Provocative Email at Yale,” which is another chapter in campus madness.

* Skeptical of the content, but I read it as funny: “Gay Until Labor Day: Stretching Female Sexuality in the Hamptons.”

* “Is everything wrestling?” Especially in politics?

Links: The madness of social justice warrior culture, batteries, bikes, being cheap, and more!

May 21, 2016 By in Links Tags: , , 1 Comment

* “Safe from ‘safe spaces:’ On the rare good sense of a college administrator” has an innocuous title but is a magnificent piece. Only the necessity of writing it is distressing.

* How Battery-Powered Rides Could Transform Your Commute.

* “Germany To Give €1 Billion Electric Car Subsidy.” Shit.

* The Cheap Ticket Into the ‘Elite’ Class”

* “Why U.S. Infrastructure Costs So Much,” which are “are among the world’s highest.”

* “Employers Struggle to Find Workers Who Can Pass a Drug Test.” Perhaps the solution is overly radical, but employers could judge employees by their work, rather than their recreational hobbies? I’ve never been drug tested on the job.

* “Get Out of Jail, Now Pay Up: Your Fines Are Waiting: Eliminating monetary penalties that accompany conviction may help ex-convicts get on their feet.” Sample: “The story of my research—the story that must be told—is that our 21st century criminal justice system stains people’s lives forever.”

* “The American economy’s big problem: we don’t have enough companies like Tesla.” There are returns to workers and consumers when small companies become large ones; one problem Europe has is that going from startup to huge is very hard. Europe has lots of tiny companies and a bunch of behemoths, but very few that go from the one to the other.

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* “Forty Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today,” which helps explain why NYC, like LA, Seattle, and many other places are so expensive today: It’s illegal to build the housing that people want to live in.

* “Nail-Biting Livestreams of New York City Bike Commutes: Intrepid cyclists are taking to the streets with GoPros to show the uninitiated an all-too-real slice of their experience.” I just bought a GoPro for this purpose! Though I didn’t realize that I’d need to buy a battery and MicroSD card for it too, so I don’t yet have it set up. This is my most recent bike post.

The GoPro is much smaller than I imagined, and the pictures include a small Rhodia notebook for scale.

Links: Literacy, novels, where jeans come from, the campus war on free speech, and more!

May 14, 2016 By in Links Tags: , , Leave a comment

* Why suburbia sucks.

* “Are we sex-literate? Why we should all be writing more about pleasure.” Maybe.

* “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru: How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age,” a must-read for readers and writers, and much better than the title may imply. But see also this piece, on the many takedowns of the original piece; my interest is primarily literary, though.

* “How the Jeans Capital of the World Moved from Texas to China.” It is possible to buy jeans made in the U.S., Canada, or Japan, but they tend to be very expensive (e.g. Naked and Famous).

* “Camille Paglia: The Modern Campus Has Declared War on Free Speech.”

* Why Used Electric Car Batteries Could Be Crucial To A Clean Energy Future.

* Like so much else, you will not read “Too little too late: Sheryl Sandberg apologizes for Lean In” on Facebook. Sample: “When I wrote that post I got so many emails that requested confidentiality that said no one can say anything bad about her because Facebook controls the majority of traffic to media sites.”

* “Exploring the Elizabeth line, one of the world’s largest construction projects:” Crossrail is being in London.

* “The miserable French workplace,” which reminds me of Tyler Cowen’s observation that, if you think economics is a bad major, just try to talk to someone who doesn’t know any economics.

* “After LAUSD iPad program failure, Apple’s help spurs ‘success’ in other schools.”

Links: Fiction and love and Bookslut, fusion power, weirdness as a personality trait, and more!

May 7, 2016 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “How fiction ruined love: Have representations of romance from ‘Madame Bovary’ to ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ ruined the real thing?” The piece is by Alain de Botton and is better than the title suggests.

* “‘I Just Don’t Find American Literature Interesting’: Lit-Blog Pioneer Jessa Crispin Closes Bookslut, Does Not Bite Tongue.” I like Bookslut.

* “Ted Cruz for Human President;” notice: “Ted Cruz is only one being and not several.”

* “Did This Couple Design the World’s Best Sex Toy?“, which is about more than its most salient, headline-forward point.

* The billionaire-backed plans to harness fusion; more good news.

* Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?” More interesting than it sounds:

A 2011 study found that a single dose of psilocybin could permanently increase the personality dimension of Openness To Experience. I’m emphasizing that because personality is otherwise pretty stable after adulthood; nothing should be able to do this. But magic mushrooms apparently have this effect, and not subtly either; participants who had a mystical experience on psilocybin had Openness increase up to half a standard deviation compared to placebo, and the change was stable sixteen months later. This is really scary. I mean, I like Openness To Experience, but something that can produce large, permanent personality changes is so far beyond anything else we have in psychiatry that it’s kind of terrifying.

* Amtrak turns 45 today. Here’s why American passenger trains are so bad.

* Can SpaceX really land on Mars? Absolutely, says an engineer who would know.

* “There’s One Show That Could Fill All the Holes in Your TV Viewing: Penny Dreadful.” A show that oddly seems to get no press.

* “Economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on American Airlines flight.”

Links: The color of money, social justice nonsense, the shape of the city, and more!

April 29, 2016 By in Links Tags: , 1 Comment

* “When Bitcoin Grows Up,” which also covers what money is, what it might be, and the future of money.

* Parents Are Bankrupting Themselves to Look Adequate; or, more Theory of the Leisure Class. Or Max Weber. The drive to compete is hard to understate.

* “What the ‘Freedom’ of a Car Means to Me in a City Where Everyone Drives: Compared to the subway I was used to, driving in Seattle was freeing—but it was also lonely.”

* “The Tools of Campus Activists Are Being Turned Against Them,” which makes sense and is compatible with my argument in “The race to the bottom of victimhood and ‘social justice’ culture.”

* Obvious, but: “National HPV vaccination program would provide big benefits.” I have a jones for the good news that gets overlooked.

* “Trains in space,” a more interesting piece than you’re imagining.

* Fantastic news: SpaceX undercut ULA rocket launch pricing by 40 percent: U.S. Air Force.

* “Unnatural Selection: What will it take to save the world’s reefs and forests?“

Links: Writing days, solar power, mattresses, university students infantilize themselves, and drugs

April 19, 2016 By in Links Tags: , , , Leave a comment

* “My writing day: Hilary Mantel.”

* How cheap does solar power need to get before it takes over the world?

* The Wirecutter tests the (many) online mattress companies and likes Leesa the best.

* How university students infantilise themselves.

* “So You’re Getting a Ph.D.: Welcome to the worst job market in America.” Which readers of this blog should already know.

* More than 1,000 world leaders say the obvious: the drug “war” has been a disaster. Daniel Okrent’s Last Call is good on this.

* “The alt-right is more than warmed-over white supremacy. It’s that, but way way weirder.” A much better and weirder piece than you’re expecting.

Gay Talese’s “The Voyeur’s Motel”

April 18, 2016 By in Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Gay Talese’s “The Voyeur’s Motel” is one of the most bizarre, compelling, shocking, vile, disgusting, and fascinating stories I’ve ever read. It’s somewhat but not ridiculously explicit (it was published in The New Yorker and consists solely of text), and, about 80% of the way through, the article takes an unexpected twist that deepens the moral questions that haunt the entire thing.

It starts this way:

I know a married man and father of two who bought a twenty-one-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur. With the assistance of his wife, he cut rectangular holes measuring six by fourteen inches in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Then he covered the openings with louvred aluminum screens that looked like ventilation grilles but were actually observation vents that allowed him, while he knelt in the attic, to see his guests in the rooms below. He watched them for decades, while keeping an exhaustive written record of what he saw and heard. Never once, during all those years, was he caught.

“WTF?” you may be thinking. That at least was what I was thinking and, even after finishing, still am thinking. “The Voyeur’s Motel” is so unusual that I’m not saving it for a usual links post. An eponymous book will be published in July; I pre-ordered, though doing so has a slightly complicit, slimy feel. Talese feels complicit and by extension so should we, the readers. Is moral contagion a thing? Usually I’d argue no.

Talese also wrote Thy Neighbor’s Wife.

Links: “The Girlfriend Experience,” Hilarious book reviews, “The Red Pill,” oil and climate change, and more!

April 17, 2016 By in Links Tags: , Leave a comment

* The Girlfriend Experience: A show based on Steven Soderbergh’s movie tries to tell a new kind of story about sex and female empowerment.” This is the best of the reviews / discussions about the show, which has generated a lot of smart-ish essays.

* “He Got Greedy,” a crazy story.

* “Review: ‘Maestra,’ a Novel of Sex, Murder and Shopping.” The review sounds more entertaining than the novel:

Advances in publishing industry marketing have allowed G. P. Putnam’s Sons to bring forth “Maestra,” a pornographic shopathon travelogue thriller that has billionaires, art world scheming and a sociopathic heroine who can unfasten belt buckles with her tongue. It should go without saying that this book is part of a trilogy, is headed for the movies and has created a stir in countries where it has already appeared. As one reader reasonably put it on Amazon.uk’s website: “This book’s pomposity is unbelievable and the sex is ludicrous. Will sell millions.” Right now its sales on that site are sinking, and it’s selling only decently. But point taken.

* Swallowing the Red Pill: The online community hosted on Reddit is where men go to air views about women,” an article with a bad frame but that can be interestingly read between the lines. See also “The appeal of ‘pickup’ or ‘game’ or ‘The Redpill’ is a failure of education and socialization” and “Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser.”

* “ Oil industry knew of ‘serious’ climate concerns more than 45 years ago.” Then again, we, the public, have known for decades, and have done nothing. But scapegoating is appealing.

* “The Absurd Primacy of the Automobile in American Life: Considering the constant fatalities, rampant pollution, and exorbitant costs of ownership, there is no better word to characterize the car’s dominance than insane.” The most important piece you won’t read today. I just got back from L.A. and L.A. feels insane: a supermassive city built for cars.

* “Glaciers and sex: On the academy’s latest folly,” concerning the bad writing infesting academia. I used to cite examples of awful academic writing, but somewhere along the way I realized that almost no one cares.

* “Why There’s Hope for the Middle Class (With Help From China).”

* “Love in the Time of Monogamy,” a review of the recent evolutionary biology literature.

* On John Colapinto’s novel Undone; I ordered a copy.

* “The Senate’s criminal justice reform repeats one of the worst mistakes of the war on drugs;” depressing: “The Senate’s bipartisan criminal justice reform bill, spearheaded by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), suggests at least some federal lawmakers have truly learned nothing from the failures of the war on drugs.”