* “Think binge drinking is bad among students? Try going to a faculty party sometime.” This hits a point that I often make: teenagers and adults often want to do the same things, for the same reasons.

* Famous Rolling Stone article about alleged campus rape is actually made up.

* “Demography Is Rewriting Our Economic Destiny,” an underappreciated and significant issue; this can be read profitably in tandem with Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think.

* Welcome to paradise, on legalized prostitution in Germany.

* “Decades-long Arrest Wave Vexes Employers: Companies Struggle to Navigate Patchwork of Rules That Either Encourage or Deter Hiring Americans With Criminal Records;” if a third of Americans have arrest records something is seriously wrong with our society.

* “The Department of Labor’s “American Apprenticeship Initiative” (AAI) Shows Some Forward Thinking by the Feds” is the rare Grant Writing Confidential post likely to interest Story’s Story readers too.

* The new Michel Houellebecq novel, which is of course self-recommending.

* Purity of Essence: One Question for Nell Zink, author of The Wallcreeper, which I ordered based on the interview:

Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there’s never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think. So after I got out of college I worked construction, mostly. I waitressed some in winter. I was a very excitable waitress, but management valued me for my strange talent of taking drink specials seriously. They would order us to sell fuzzy navels at lunchtime, and I would obediently sell twenty fuzzy navels while the other waitstaff ignored them. My life changed forever in 1989, when a friend of my mother’s shanghaied me into taking the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s test of clerical aptitude. Apparently 98.9 percent was an unusual score. As I recall, it was a test of visual acuity and short-term memory involving long sequences of numbers. I started getting these blind, cold-call job offers in the mail from places like the Defense Logistics Agency. Working full-time in construction was really wearing me out.

* “The smart against the dumb: The new Cold War;” usually I avoid posting political stuff but will make an exception given the entertainment and insight of this piece.

* “Why It’s Impossible to Indict a Cop,” which is well paired with Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces

* Someone found this blog by searching for ‘”jake seliger” “global warming.”‘ I have no idea why.

* “A letter to … the girl who accused me of rape when I was 15.”

* “What should a Bayesian infer from the Antikythera Mechanism?“, which is highly recommended though you may not recognize some words in the title.

* “Only Yesterday” by William G. Tapply, which describes his use of notebooks; I took his novel writing seminars at Clark University.

* A weapon for readers; regular readers surely know that is how I read.

* “The best cure for wage stagnation nobody in Washington is talking about;” the larger absence of this issue among most of the commentariat is bizarre to me.

* “Why Are So Few Blockbuster Drugs Invented Today?” Weirdly, the article doesn’t mention Alex Tabarrok’s Launching the Innovation Renaissance.

* Pulitzer prize-winner has no money; contemplate this when making your own life choices.

* Inside Peter Thiel’s mind, an interview between him and Ezra Klein.

* “ A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code. My own,” or, why you should do things the easy way when possible.

* In “New Factor in Campus Sexual Assault Cases: Counsel for the Accused,” the New York Times describes how men accused of rape or rape-like offenses are getting lawyers. But the writer, Ariel Kaminer, doesn’t observe the obvious: serious crimes should be dealt with by cops and courts, not campus committees.

* “Polyamory Is Boring” (see especially the Know-Nothing thought experiment) and, relatedly, “Polyhacking.” The comments are great in both, especially about fiction’s relationship with monogamy.

* Jeffrey Goldberg: “Even Israel’s Best Friends Understand That It Is Disconnecting From Reality.” Following Israeli politics even from a distance is depressing.

* New York Times essays: “Have You Ever Had a Relationship End Because of a Book?” I haven’t, but I have had relationships end due to a total lack of books.

* “Fundraising Acceleration Is The New VC Investment Thesis;” for many years I’ve thought about writing a novel set in and around startups and it may now be number two or three on the docket. I think I may go very lascivious first.

* The Myth of Chinese Super Schools.

* Someone found this blog by searching for “sex japan drunk,” for reasons not obvious to me.

* Catherine Stukel delivers what shouldn’t be news: Is That Whining Adjunct Someone We Want Teaching Our Young?

* “A sexual harassment policy that nearly ruined my life;” expect to see more of these stories.