Articles

Here are some articles that I’ve saved. Some are one-sided, some are melodramatic, and a few have turned out to be completely wrong. But I thought all of them were interesting.

Industrialization

• Industrial Literacy
• Turning Air Into Bread / The Ethyl-Poisoned Earth
• A Plea for Culinary Modernism
• Scott and Scurvy / The Secret of Our Success

Postwar America

• Fast
• As We May Think
• Is This Tomorrow?
• Apollo and Dionysus
• The Refragmentation / WTF Happened in 1971?

Infrastructure

• A Rocket To Nowhere / The Lunacy of Artemis
• The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth
• This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful
• The Real Reason Your City Has No Money

Health

• Who by Very Slow Decay
• Post-Prozac Nation
• Maybe it’s Lyme / Help Me or Soon I Will Die
• Lifespan Extension: Separating Fact From Fiction
• Inside the Fall of the CDC
• The Cost Conundrum

Bureaucracy

• Demosclerosis
• We Were Builders Once, and Strong
• From Oversight to Overkill / Licensed to Pill
• The Pentagon Syndrome
• The Hollow Men
• Culture Eats Policy

Education

• Why So Many Kids Struggle to Learn
• The Misguided War on the SAT
• MIT is Reinstating its SAT/ACT Requirement
• Private Schools are Indefensible
• Escaping High School

Competition

• When the Culture War Comes for the Kids
• Getting In
• The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League–Obsessed Parents
• Crises of Elite Competition in the East and West
• Chaos at the Top of the World
• Meditations on Moloch

Higher Education

• The Two Cultures
• The End of the English Major
• The Real Problem at Yale is not Free Speech
• In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
• Lost in the Meritocracy

Misinformation

• Television and the Public Interest / The Fourth Estate
• Bad News / How Stewart Made Tucker
• Learning How to Kill / The Intimacy Machine
• Anatomy of a Moral Panic / Too Good to Check
• The Rise and Fall of ‘Social Bot’ Research
• The Information

Discourse

• It’s Time to Build / The Billionaire’s Dilemma
• How to Become an Intellectual in Silicon Valley / Extract or Die
• Web Design: The First 100 Years / The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant
• Elephant in the Zoom / How the Online Right Fell Apart
• The Internet is Already Over

Society

• On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
• I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup
• The Strange Disappearance of Civic America
• Was the Nuclear Family a Mistake?
• David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics
• How The Creative Class Broke America

Lives

• My Family’s Slave
• The Zero-Armed Bandit
• Billiards is a Good Game
• Death of a Quantum Man
• 36,000 Feet Under the Sea
• The Maintenance Race
• Autism’s First Child
• Sacrifice

Finance

• Leasing the Rain
• A Trip Behind the Spectacle at Davos
• What Happened at Alameda Research
• How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work
• The Value of Nothing

Development

• How the World Works / How Asia Works
• The Full Stack of Society
• The Rise of Made-in-China Diplomacy
• How Technology Grows
• The Long, Slow Death of Global Development

East and West

• A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew
• The Other Afghan Women / How We Beat America
• The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning
• The Industrial Party and the Sentimental Party

The Far Future

• Meltdown
• Lactaid and Stevia
• Industrial Society and its Future
• Futurist Prediction Accuracy
• 17776