* “What is Code?“, the most important link in this batch, and the most immediately actionable.

* The EITC, an Alternative to a Higher Minimum Wage. While EITCs are much less distortionary than minimum wages they are also less popular, perhaps because they’re not really understood by most people and aren’t as easy to sloganeer.

* Someone found this blog by searching for, “can nurses become professional even if they are messed up?” I hope so! If messed up people can’t become professionals, we’d have to get rid of three quarters of the professionals out there.

* “The Shaming of Izzy Laxamana: A Tacoma girl defied her father. He cut off her hair. She killed herself. The story would sound medieval if the details weren’t so modern.” Vile.

* “House Says No Thanks to Trade Bill,” demonstrating another triumph of politics over knowledge of basic economics. I deliberately truncated the title to reduce the mood affiliation of the piece, since this is a bipartisan failure. This article is also very good. Craven politics and group affiliation should not have this power at this date.

* State tax rates discussed and explained by Scott Sumner, or “What’s wrong with Louisiana?” The post is fascinating, contrary to the title.

* “ From Left Bank to left behind: where have the great French thinkers gone? From Voltaire and Rousseau to Sartre and De Beauvoir, France has long produced world-leading thinkers. It even invented the word ‘intellectual’. But progressives around the globe no longer look to Paris for their ideas. What went wrong?” This is a question I’d like answered; one big issue: French intellectuals seem to have missed the big shift towards empiricism, which is embodied by Edge.org writers and scientists. It is almost impossible to be a modern intellectual without at least paying attention to empiricists, which is also, incidentally, a serious problem in contemporary humanities departments.

* “Why Startups Love Moleskines;” I prefer Rhodia.

* “Everything we have been told about drugs and drug addiction and how society should deal with them is wrong, says the British author and journalist John Hari. He chooses the best books on the War on Drugs.”

* “Sex, Money, and the Trillion Dollar Shadow.”

* LinkedIn is creating a revolution in university rankings. Good. University rankings are bogus yet pervasive and loved, even by people who should know better. In grad school I listened to a woman who had a cube near mine proclaim that the University of Arizona’s rhetoric and composition department was “#2 in the nation,” and I would usually ask her, “According to who, and by what metrics?” She never knew and I never found out.

* Sexting and society: How do writers respond? (2011)

* “I Tried the ‘Warby Parker of Mattresses.’ It’s Spongy but Worth It.” No word on Tuft & Needle as a comparison. The author is also oddly silent on an important activity often conducted on mattresses.

* The myth of the Manhattan construction boom.

* “America’s Newest War: As the war on drugs loses its luster, legislators are intent to make the same mistakes with sex workers.”

* The Education Myth.

* “All About Eve—and Then Some,” hilarious throughout, including: “Even fun, though, can get to be a drag if you have too much of it.” She seems to have understood men, including brainiacs, and to have had a sense of humor: “Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer. Eve Babitz.”

* Inside the passionate “girl-topia” of BookCon: Where authors are rock stars and geek-chic girls rule.” Maybe.

* “Things I Learned about Credit Bureaus This Week.” This is the sort of thing that would appear in major newspapers, if we had any real journalists left.

* The Campus Crusaders,” and not in a good way; much of the academic study of the humanities has been distorted and disfigured by an overweening obsession with the topics discussed.

* In Tyler Cowen’s words, “Blatant discrimination against Asians, from academia at that, remains an under-reported story.” Highly marketed schools may be less racist than they once were but they’re still racist along different axes.

* “Global aviation is the fastest-growing cause of climate change. And the EPA might let it off the hook.” Facts not much discussed, apparently because the environmentally noisy class is also the travel-and-leisure class.

* Crossrail: Tunneling beneath London. I have a jones for giant projects.

* Why has Apple spawned so few startups?

* “You hear the playback, and it seems so long ago…” Jeff Sypeck on eight years of Quid Plura. Like him I feel this:

When Facebook and Twitter prompted an exodus that made the blogosphere feel as empty as Iceland’s interior, I stuck with it. The culture craves pithier social media—photo memes, five-second movies—but I like long-form writing, even if some days I feel like a ham radio operator or a shut-in dialing into the Internet with a screeching modem and a Commodore 64.

I now have a Twitter feed, which functions mostly as a glorified RSS feed, but I don’t participate much in Twitter or Facebook. They’re too short form to be interesting to me, most of the time.

* 22 years after Verizon fiber promise, millions have only DSL or wireless.

* “Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.” To call this system “insane” is an understatement. Even calling it a “system” might be overly kind.

* “Thinking too highly of higher ed;” if you read nothing else this month read this.

* Jeff offers perspective on the mattress industry and writers more generally.

* “Thinking too highly of higher ed,” by Peter Thiel, who also wrote Zero to One (which you, like everyone, should read).

* “The global secular savings stagnation glut,” the sort of link I rarely post here and yet:

What this discussion should make clear is that secular stagnation isn’t much of a puzzle. Rather, it is a dilemma. The ageing societies of the rich world want rapid income growth and low inflation and a decent return on safe investments and limited redistribution and low levels of immigration. Well you can’t have all of that. And what they have decided is that what they’re prepared to sacrifice is the rapid income growth. In aggregate that decision looks somewhat reasonable if not entirely right. But it is a choice with pretty significant distributional consequences. And the second era of secular stagnation will come to an end when political and demographic shifts allow the losers from this arrangement to say: enough.

* “If We Dig Out All Our Fossil Fuels, Here’s How Hot We Can Expect It to Get.”

* “Walter Scott, child support defendant murdered by cop, earned about $800/month.”

* “Nutritional Science Isn’t Very Scientific: The research behind dietary recommendations is a lot less certain than you think.” Just about the only obvious thing is “Don’t eat refined carbohydrates,” like sugar and white rice, and eat vegetables and nuts.

* “What If We Admitted to Children That Sex Is Primarily About Pleasure?”

* The Steady Rise of Bike Ridership in New York”

* “Is Capitalism Making Us Stupid?“, a brilliant article with a stupid title.

* Manipulating best-seller lists, which is well known to people in the industry but little known outside it. This especially is interesting: “To end up in the top ten on Amazon, all it takes is about 300 printed copies sold in one day,” because it’s well within my own not-substantial financial reach.

* “What Do Unions Know About Running Schools?” Hilariously, not much it would appear; the New York City Teachers Union opened a charter school in 2005, but it’s now closing: “What’s striking is that the school was managed poorly even after the union staked its reputation on the project. This suggests that the union either did not take the charter project seriously – or that it knows less about running schools than it thinks.”

* We’ve entered a golden era of book design; I myself am shocked at how well Damonza’s cover design for Asking Anna works.

* “To Have and To Hold: The challenges of digital publishing have galvanised a new spirit in book design and production. Is it just the decadent flourish of a disappearing format?” I’ve long said that publishers need to differentiate paper books from ebooks by making the former into the art objects they really ought to be.

* Terence Tao: the Mozart of maths.

* Someone found this blog by searching for “poems about the consequences of sexting.” I’m… puzzled.

* “Radical Vaccine Design Effective Against Herpes Viruses,” which is hugely important in many ways, but the development of this vaccine should retard AIDS transmission.

* “Who’s the daddy? Paternity can now be verified by a simple test” is interesting mostly for its subtext: that men are suckers and don’t matter. Farrell may be more right than many want to admit in The Myth of Male Power.

* Grantland (and hence SFW): What happens when teenagers and young adults, the main consumers of porn, won’t pay for it? Or: “A trip to the Adult Video News Awards.”

* “US students are fleeing law schools and pouring into engineering,” or, economics works!

* “Why great novels don’t get noticed now: ‘Dear Thief’ was one of the best novels published last year. So why haven’t you heard of it? Gaby Wood meets its author, Samantha Harvey.” I ordered a copy.

* “Dancing On Our Own: Why White America Ditched Couple Dancing.”

* Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, 10 years later.