* “‘The Power Broker,’ 40 Years Later,” which is much more moving than it sounds.

* “Preschool Can Be Worse Than the Alternative.” We’ve worked on numerous proposals for New York City’s Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) program, and some of that experience has made us… skeptical… of the push for more structured education for everyone, everywhere, all the time.

* “Joseph Conrad’s powerful novels anticipate the bloody political conflicts of the modern world;” a more accurate essay I’ve rarely read.

* “The Real Anti-Facebook Is Good Old Email.” Which I still use more than any other online system, though sometimes I feel out of time for doing so. I do use Dropbox for distributing pictures, though.

* Terence Tao successfully attacks the Erdős discrepancy problem by building on an online collaboration.

* “The Rise and Fall of Erdogan’s Turkey: No other state has catapulted itself into the future quite as rapidly, nor relapsed back into its dark past as suddenly, as Turkey. First there was modernization, and now the beginnings of a civil war. The country is divided by mistrust and hate.”

* The Money Spent Selling Sugar to Americans Is Staggering: Why do we eat what we eat? Three experts attempt to answer.

* The Case of Richard Glossip, who is about to be murdered by the state—in the United States.

* “I have one of the best jobs in academia. Here’s why I’m walking away.”

* Tyler Cowen in conversation with Luigi Zingales, by far the best link in this set.

* The Victory of Oliver Sacks.

* “We’re heading Straight for AOL 2.0.” Except for me: I’m still using blogs when no one else is.

* “The Future of New York City Transportation: Goodbye Cars, Hello Rails: Young people are driving the city towards a carless future.”

* “Did Scarlett Thomas Miss Her Chance? What happens when the stars don’t align for a gifted novelist.” I find these “dark matter” stories as fascinating if not more so than the major success stories.

* Maybe this global slowdown is different; the de-materialization angle, particularly in conjunction with the proliferation of buying off the Internet, is particularly plausible.

* “Bret Easton Ellis, The Art of Fiction No. 216.”

* “There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts.” Except, you know, supply and demand.

* “America’s Fragile Constitution: The Founders misread history and established a dysfunctional system of government. A case for a little less reverence.” Or, things I’d never considered and now can’t un-consider.

* The next Houellebecq, Submission, comes out in the U.S. on October 20. I’ve not surprisingly preordered.

* “How Literary Fame Happens;” “luck” and “utility to future teaching priorities” are big parts of the answer.

* Why Millennials may be into food, from the comments.

* “What two religions show us about the modern dating ‘crisis;'” the scare quotes are mind because no “crisis” exists, but the data is interesting throughout. This article could be profitably read with Christian Rudder’s excellent Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity–What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves.

* Edmund Wilson’s Big Idea: A Series of Books Devoted to Classic American Writing. The result of the Library of America, whose books I really like (as objects, I mean: their contents are wildly variable, unsurprisingly).

* “The Limits of Language: Wittgenstein explains why we always misunderstand one another on the Internet.” I especially like this: “Since pretty much no one can agree on anything about Wittgenstein, I’m going to present things in the spirit of Pears’ interpretation, with the caveat that you could probably find a philosopher somewhere who would disagree with every following sentence.” Literary critics suffer from the same problem. No one can even agree what’s good, let alone right!

* College Calculus: What’s the real value of higher education?”

* “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University…”

* “Fiction, like sex, is messy. It’s complicating. Achieving softness and fluffiness doesn’t seem like much of a substitute.” Alain de Botton is so good. The book he is reviewing sounds less good.

* “Whole Foods’ John Mackey: Why Intellectuals Hate Capitalism,” a question that has interested me as long as I’ve heard English professors’s irrational slams on markets and commerce. “Understanding Elite Discontent” is also good on this subject.

* “New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality.” Commercial-scale fusion would ameliorate numerous political and environmental problems.

* New York Review of Books Fills a Niche by Reviving Forgotten Works.

* “In substantial part, we like news in order to support talking about the news, and not so much because news communicates important information or insights.”

* “Take your unwanted dog to a shelter. If you have no other choice euthanize him. PLEASE, PLEASE, don’t “drop him off in the country.” A brutal story, which I’m tempted to quote from.

* “The Nearest Thing to Life by James Wood review – ‘the foremost literary enthusiast of our time.’” The book is excellent.

* “How RED Cameras Changed The [Movie] Game.”

* “Why Are Millennials So Obsessed With Food? The author Eve Turow argues that a generation’s taste for natural ingredients will shape the future of restaurants, grocery stores, and agriculture.” Still, I’m not convinced the underlying trend is correct; it’s always dangerous to generalize based on friends and acquaintances, but I appear to cook more than anyone else I know, and by a lot.

* The most interesting piece I’ve seen on the Ashley Madison hack, which is by Megan McArdle (the piece, not the hack; at least so far as I know she’s not behind the hack). Perhaps the least surprising point is that the site has almost no women on it. Edit: “Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site” provides more detail, especially how virtually none of the “millions” of supposed accounts created by women had ever checked their internal mail or chat.

* How did art become irrelevant? Jeff Sypeck’s answers for poetry. Read it! I’d emphasize that pop music has assumed everyday poetry’s place in the culture. Highbrow academics who study poetry often haven’t realized as much, or choose not to recognize what’s happening on the ground. Poetry is out there but it isn’t mostly in books and it isn’t about the things academic critics find important.

* “Daggers Drawn:” literary critics used to have opinions and knowledge. They’ve since gone feckless. Which may explain why I write some of the reviews I write.

* Why don’t we drive more electric vehicles?

* Road kill: Despite improvements, driving in America remains extraordinarily dangerous. That about 30,000 Americans die in car accidents every year is one of my favorite fun facts for discussions about threats, dangers, urban planning, and so forth.

* “Teenager’s Jailing Brings a Call to Fix Sex Offender Registries,” a point that seems completely obvious to anyone paying attention. I wrote about a similar issue in footnote to this GWC post.

* Laura Kipnis On How Campus Feminism Infantilizes Women.

* “Why we’re so scared of GMOs, according to someone who has studied them since the start;” the fear is pervasive yet irrational and actually dangerous, especially for the food security of developing countries. We need another Green Revolution and this is the only real way forward.

* “A Book Buyer’s Lament,” something I feel keenly.

* “Why “Don’t Worry About Money, Just Travel” Is The Worst Advice Of All Time.” Seriously.

* The glamorous pursuit of garbage.

* Energy, by Sam Altman, a hard problem.

* “Lab Rats: How the Misogyny Police and Sloppy Journalists Smeared a Top Scientist: When “fauxminist” outrage over a minor faux pas can ruin a Nobel winner’s career, this is not good for women, for science, or for the culture.”