Tag Archives: Links

Links: Bookstores, cars, the online economy, sexual economics, humanities, and more!

December 20, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , 2 Comments

* Waterstone’s, the U.K.’s biggest bookstore, is thriving. What could Barnes & Noble learn from it? A lot, evidently.

* “You can have millions of views on YouTube and still be broke.” People often have misconceptions about my finances. 99% of my income comes from consulting or teaching, and even within that split 80% or more comes from consulting. The so-called “new economy” is still, frequently, a brutal place to actually make actual money.

* “Millennials Don’t Care About Owning Cars, And Car Makers Can’t Figure Out Why: Driving numbers are down for younger people and the auto industry hasn’t found a way to respond. It’s because they don’t understand why millennials could possibly not want to drive.” This describes me but not, interestingly, my siblings.

* “Drunk with Power: What was Prohibition really about?” See also my post on Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.

* I’m not a mathematician yet this report on the ABC Conjecture and a workshop on it fascinates.

* “Why won’t guys grow up? Sexual economics.”

* “Rise of the humanities: Professors worry about the ‘crisis in the humanities’. But more people than ever, especially women, are studying them.” Except Mandler should look in the graphs that are part of Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas, which show the number of humanities majors as being essentially flat. He does note, “[R]elative to business, both the sciences and the humanities have fallen behind since 1971, and the sciences much further.” But the humanities haven’t grown, and they haven’t grown intellectually. The job market for humanities PhDs is terrible, and there have been no real “public” humanists since Harold Bloom. Today the public intellectuals are almost all Edge.org-type social scientists and scientists. Think Steven Pinker.

* Something I hadn’t considered:

So, you know, our moral intuitions and indeed our laws today are that you shouldn’t discriminate against someone because of their race, because of their gender, their sexual preference or other issues. But for odd reasons, it’s perfectly OK to discriminate against someone because they were born somewhere else. You can, in fact, put up walls and machine guns and prevent someone from moving simply for the reason that they were born somewhere else.

Links: Paglia and feminists, screenshots from developers, it’s not the length but how you use it, and more

December 15, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

* “Donald Trump Really Doesn’t Want Me to Tell You This, But …“, the last piece I hope to post about this odious man.

* “Today’s feminists are so out of touch with how most women live, they might as well be on another planet,” by Julia Hartley-Brewer.

* Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015.

* “Books are becoming longer.” I wonder if this is true of self-published, ebook-first writers.

* The homeownership rate has plunged more than people realize.

* Camille Paglia Takes on Taylor Swift, Hollywood’s #GirlSquad Culture.

* A distressingly plausible account of why contemporary humanities academia is so bad.

* “ Urban jungle: wooden high-rises change city skylines as builders ditch concrete: Mass timber projects in Portland and New York City offer eco-friendly dwellings, but can ‘plywood on steroids’ actually catch on in the industry?”

* Afghanistan: ‘A Shocking Indictment’. It’s worse than you think.

* Still more Camille Paglia: “I am continually shocked and dismayed by the nearly Victorian notions promulgated by today’s feminists about the fragility of women and their naïve helplessness in asserting control over their own dating lives.” Among other many interesting things.

* “Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens;” I’d like to see physically smaller, better-made books. My novels are specifically sized the way they are to make for easier reading.

* Why are there so many mattress stores?

* On Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo.

Links: Crime and punishment, the fiction we read, power and access, genius, Outlier, and more

December 9, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , Leave a comment

* “Mom Who Overslept While Son Walked to School Could Get 10 Years in Prison.” More modern madness enabled by extreme wealth.

* “When Popular Fiction Isn’t Popular: Genre, Literary, and the Myths of Popularity,” or, “Which kinds of book actually sell?”

* How “New Nuclear” Power Could Save the Planet—If Regulators Would Allow It. And, in addition, How Solar Power Could Slay the Fossil Fuel Empire by 2030. Exciting times.

* “Access Denied: The media, after access:” an essay more interesting than the title implies, and it could be read profitably in tandem with Arts & Entertainments by Christopher Beha.

* “Ink & Inclination: Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995,” an excellent review though it does not make me want to read the work under review. I’ve not read much Murdoch. Where should I start?

* A Chance Encounter, Reddit Marketing, and Forever Pants: One Startup’s Story. I have a pair. They’re great!

* Blank Space: What Kind of Genius Is Max Martin?

* Why people are angry about rising college costs.

* Why Chris Blattman worries that experimental social science is headed in the wrong direction.

* Is There a Future for the Professions? The writer must be around Philip Roth’s age, because I never recognized the veneration of “the professions” found in many of Roth’s books. Today, “developer” matters, and most other fields just don’t. The phrase “barriers to entry” never appears. Neither does “student loans.”

* After Paris and Beirut, It’s Time to Rein in Saudi Arabia, a point made too infrequently.

* When nothing is cool: On why so much academic criticism is completely, wildly bogus and trend-driven.

* A 26-year-old MIT graduate is turning heads over his theory that income inequality is actually about housing.

Links: The new atomic age, universities, pens, The Joy of Drinking, and more!

December 3, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , 1 Comment

* “The new atomic age we need,” a particularly useful piece given the venue.

* “Four tough things universities should do to rein in costs.” Or, alternately, “Four tough things columnists should do before writing about universities.” Can both be right? And at what margins? I tend to buy the first link more than the second.

* The Generic City: Boring landscapes impede on our biological need for intrigue. So why are so many buildings so hideous?

* University President: ‘This Is Not Day Care.’ A point that is useful and yet depressing that it is worth making.

* Why the ballpoint pen was such a big deal.

* What happens to countries that vote for socialists.

* SM on what’s happening among humanities peer-reviewed journals.

* In light of recent events: “A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths. ”

* The Joy of Drinking.

Links: Demography is destiny, how could you like that book?, open access, friendship, and more

November 28, 2015 By in Links Tags: , 2 Comments

* “As China’s Workforce Dwindles, the World Scrambles for Alternatives:” an underreported story.

* “How Could You Like That Book?” by Tim Parks:

No sooner have I articulated my amazement, my sense of betrayal almost, than I begin to feel insecure. Is it really possible that so many people I respect have got it wrong? Close friends as well. Am I an inveterate elitist? A puritan? Or resentful of other people’s success? Shouldn’t I perhaps relax and enjoy my reading a little more rather than approaching books with constant suspicion?

The world is full of people who admire books I don’t and vice-versa. When I tell students I found the first Hunger Games or Harry Potter books dull they’re astonished.

* “Open Access and the Power of Editorial Boards: Why Elsevier Plays Hardball with Deviant Linguists.” To me the most intersting thing is that equivalents of arXiv.org haven’t arise in the humanities. That may say more about the intellectual importance of the humanities than any other piece of data, information, or opinion.

* Why car dealers are reluctant to sell electric cars, a bit of ill news.

* Dream of New Kind of Credit Union Is Extinguished by Bureaucracy.

* “How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult.”

* “The Yale Problem Begins in High School,” by Jonathan Haidt of The Righteous Mind fame. Notice especially the links Haidt offers.

* “‘Self and Soul’: Mark Edmundson’s biting critique of modern complacency.”

* “Literature vs genre is a battle where both sides lose,” an over-discussed topic maybe, but also a true one. Some points, like this one, are ridiculous: “But literary authors aren’t self-publishing their books on Kindle. Quite the opposite. They have a swish sounding publisher.” See also last year’s “Tyler Cowen on Paul Krugman on Amazon on the buzz:”

I’m most amazed at the way the same class of writers who five years ago were aghast at the lack of support for literary fiction among publishers are now the ones decrying Amazon and supporting the same publishers who were until recently the cravenly commercial forces destroying “quality” literary fiction.

Links: Outlier pants, your microbiome, academia, words direct from Aleppo, MRSA, and more!

November 23, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

* “Burgers and fries have nearly killed our ancestral microbiome:” or how real food promotes good things in our guts, and vice-versa. Perhaps the most actionable piece you’ll read today. Plus: “Forget paleo, go mid-Victorian: it’s the healthiest diet you’ve never heard of.”

* “The Revenge of the Coddled: An Interview with Jonathan Haidt.”

* Are English departments better than what I, and possibly you, think? I hope so but I’m skeptical. Freddie also doesn’t have a TT job right now; we’ll see if he gets one and how his views might evolve over time. This is a good time to reiterate “What you should know BEFORE you start grad school / PhD programs in English Literature: The economic, financial, and opportunity costs.” Short version: Don’t do it.

* Aleppo-based VLC contributor speaks to the Paris attacks.

* “Saudi Arabia, an ISIS that has made it.” In political discussions I often point out that Saudi Arabia’s tone, values, and policies are diametrically opposed to the ones espoused by the American and European governments that often support Saudi Arabia.

* California’s DOT Admits [the obvious:] More Roads Mean More Traffic.

* A MRSA vaccine is in the works.

* Case Study: Outlier on Creating the 21st Century Jean. Has anyone worn these? I’m thinking about getting a pair.

* On Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare. Books about children rarely interest me (exception: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials), but Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior is for the right person amazing.

Links: Philip Pullman, PC, cars, women and dating, safe spaces, student loans, false rape accusations, SpaceX, and more!

November 15, 2015 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* Twenty years since The Golden Compass: an interview with Philip Pullman. Read it and if you haven’t read His Dark Materials go do that instead.

* “Our generation did not invent political correctness, but we can fight it“—if we choose to.

* Evanston, The Suburb That Tried To Kill the Car; evidently the urban planners there read and understood The High Cost of Free Parking.

* “Why women lose the dating game,” another piece with somewhat bogus framing but one that at least considers what things look like for men. The quoting of Dalrock is a good sign.

* “At Group Sex Parties, Strict Rules Make for Safe Spaces: Gatherings emphasize consent and respect for boundaries as much as exploration.” Probably SFW and most interesting for the mainstream venue in which the article appears.

* “What [If Anything] We’re Buying With $1 Trillion in Student Loans.” I propose that all further articles about higher education, cost, and access must use the phrase or at least concept “Diminishing marginal utility” or “Diminishing marginal returns.” As noted here and elsewhere, treating “college” as if it’s one big, identical thing is crazy.

* “‘Guilty until proven innocent’: life after a false rape accusation: A growing group of men are calling for changes in the law around sexual assault to protect those who are the victims of false accusations.”

* Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment: shout it from the rooftops. Most international political problems are really energy problems.

* A penny for your books, making a point I’ve long reiterated.

* “Police violence in Alabama:” note: “there’s no law that allows cops to beat or shock you because they don’t like your attitude.” Why do cops not realize this, or enact it if they do? Cops beat people for the sake of it. They behave like animals.

* Fresh Climate Data Confirms 2015 Is Hotter Than Any Other Year in Human History.

* SpaceX and Boeing compete to get astronauts to space; everyone is the winner. See also my review of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

* “Is great philosophy, by its nature, difficult and obscure?” Or might philosophers write obscurely in order to seem profound, or merely make it difficult or impossible to evaluation what they’re saying?

* A history of men’s boots and shoes, and why modern ones are so good; the piece is fascinating but in a way hard to describe.

* “Many Say High Deductibles Make Their Health Law Insurance All but Useless;” alternately, one could read this as “At the margin, revealed preferences show that people don’t want as much healthcare as many eggheads imagined.” The reporter of course chooses not to explore this possibility.

Links: Energy (fusion, cars), AI research, flu shots, Texas, “trigger warnings,” and more!

October 31, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , 1 Comment

* Stellar work: Research into fusion has gone down a blind alley, but a means of escape may now be at hand. File this under “Good news that should be more widely reported.” Most of the world’s “political” problems are really energy problems in another form, which is why I often link to discussions of energy, energy production, and energy politics.

* “Why Texas Is Our Future,” and why so many people are moving there, from “Texas Forever: How I Found the American Dream in the Lone Star State.” The latter piece inspired me to check just how much I lose to New York City and State taxes. The answer is distressing. Many superficially liberal cities are actually inhumane to normal residents, and many superficially conservative cities are actually far more humane.

* Charles observes, probably correctly: “I think if people knew what passes for “AI research”, they’d be a lot less worried about a dystopian outcome. Or, to quote Andrew Ng, “I don’t work on preventing AI from turning evil for the same reason that I don’t work on combating overpopulation on the planet Mars.”

* “For God’s Sake, Go Get a Flu Shot.” This may be the most immediately actionable piece you read today.

* “Why San Francisco’s way of doing business beat Los Angeles’.”

* “Bernie Sanders’ campaign is such a counterexample. It fits poorly with the ‘low nonwhite representation is caused by insufficiently strong social justice orientation’ theory, but very well with the counter-theory I propose in that post: nonwhites are just generally less eager to join weird intellectual signaling-laden countercultural movements.”

* The invisible device that powers everything you do, on lithium-ion batteries and John Goodenough, who is responsible for more of the modern world than is commonly realized.

* Car dealers are awful. It’s time to kill the dumb laws that keep them in business.

* A professor sympathetic to “trigger warnings” tires of them. And, in addition: “My trigger-warning disaster: ‘9 1/2 Weeks,’ ‘The Wire’ and how coddled young radicals got discomfort all wrong.”

* Is wheat only so bad for you because of industrial farming and breeding? See also Gary Taubes’s Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, which changed my eating habits, though I think Taubes overstates the case against fruit. It may be that “flour” is not as bad for you as is commonly assumed, but rather that the peculiar way flour is produced and disseminated is horrible for you.

* Why high-speed rail doesn’t work in the U.S., from someone who actually works on rail projects.

* First test drives of the 2016 Volt are emerging and make the car sound promising.

Links: Your house, cars, dubious campus policies, nuclear power, NIMBYs, and more

October 24, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , Leave a comment

* “The most disruptive technology of the last century is in your house,” an underappreciated and lovely point: “The number of hours that people spent per week preparing meals, doing laundry and cleaning fell from 58 in 1900 to only 18 hours in 1970, and it has declined further since then.”

* Europe’s love affair with diesel cars has been a disaster.

* The Little Disturbances of Man.

“The Limits Of The Digital Revolution: Why Our Washing Machines Won’t Go To The Moon:” On the future of work and why innovation may be slowing.

* For Students Accused Of Campus Rape, Legal Victories Win Back Rights, which makes too much sense; see also “‘Have We Learned Anything From the Columbia Rape Case?’ Not at the New York Times.”

* “You’ll Be Able to Buy Any Volvo as an Electric by 2019,” though I wonder if this is true.

* “Nuclear power is cheap, reliable, emissions-free–and struggling to keep up.” Nuclear power should be at the top of the agenda, especially when combined with electric cars. By the way, the next edition of the Chevy Volt is getting great reviews, and the development process behind the car is detailed in The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World. The Powerhouse is not a Tom-Wolfe-quality book but is interesting throughout and will make you respect the Volt.

* FYI for the grad students among you:

The decline of school-age children has important implications for colleges. College enrollment fell over the past few years just as the college-age population peaked. According to Census projections, the college-age population won’t return to the 2012 peak for more than 20 years.

* Students don’t seem to be learning anything in school, globally, which ought to depress those of us who do classroom work.

* Depressing, but: “This speech convinced me Israel’s wave of violence is so much worse than it looks.”

* How NIMBYs make your paycheck smaller.

* “Free” college tuition for everyone is not a good idea:

A more pressing issue is that community college is already close to de facto free for lower-income individuals, if they piece grants and aid together. Yet the completion rate at these colleges is at best approaching thirty-eight percent. The real problems come before college, and encouraging more people to attend four-year colleges is unlikely to do much good. In any case, here is further evidence that higher subsidies to community college attendance very often do not lead to more actual education. The same or worse is likely to hold for state universities.

Links: Electric cars, the booming erotic toy industry, academic freedom’s worst enemies, iMacs get love, and more

October 17, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , Leave a comment

* In California, Electric Cars Outpace Plugs, and Sparks Fly.

* “The Race to Build the Perfect Couples’ Sex Toy,” conceivably NSFW but there are no photos or drawings of humans. I found it interesting throughout.

* “Cinemas must ‘drastically improve’ or lose audiences, says Christopher Nolan.” He’s wrong about the “real film” issue: he should be more worried at the shocking level of dilapidation at movie theaters, and the worse level of food available.

* “Professors teach students how to stifle academic freedom, U.K. scholar argues in new book,” and students are oddly eager to do whatever authority figures tell them to do.

* “Inside the lab: Why Apple still sweats the details on iMac,” a fascinating story; Apple also updated iMacs on October 13. I use a 5K iMac, and it’s an amazing machine. If you order one, make sure you get the Fusion drive upgrade. The 21.5″ models are now reasonably affordable.

* What a city designed only for bikes would look like.

* How Harvard fights unions; it is entertaining to me how university people, who are probably the most theoretically pro-union group in the U.S., can’t or won’t allow unions in their institutions, or actively fight against them.

* “The Porn Business Isn’t Anything Like You Think It Is,” which is safe-for-work.

* “Why ‘game’ and ‘pickup’ are popular in the Anglo-sphere” (otherwise titled “The Male Hunger For Endless Shallow Relationships Is A Symptom Of A Fundamentally Broken Society”); speculative. See also “The appeal of ‘pickup’ or ‘game’ or ‘The Redpill’ is a failure of education and socialization.”