Top Articles I’ve Read in H1 2024
Two poems that I love, part of every article from the series “Top Articles I Read…”:
1. If, by Rudyard Kipling
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!
2. An If for Girls, by ELIZABETH LINCOLN OTIS
If you can dress to make yourself attractive,
Yet not make puffs and curls your chief delight;
If you can swim and row, be strong and active,
But of the gentler graces lose not sight;
If you can dance without a craze for dancing,
Play without giving play too strong a hold,
Enjoy the love of friends without romancing,
Care for the weak, the friendless and the old;
Parenting
1. Dads Rock: The Evidence
The evidence is clear: Dads matter; they are doing more fathering than ever; they bring something extra to parenting; and they want to do more.
2. How to Delay the Age at Which Kids Get Smartphones
In this post, I will share valuable insights from my experience working with thousands of families over the past decade, utilizing the educational programs at the nonprofit organization ScreenStrong. While Jon and Zach emphasize the crucial step of collective action, my focus will provide specific actions for families to implement the simple yet powerful solution to skip smartphones and social media through adolescence.
3. Can You Raise a Teen Today Without a Smartphone?
If you are leaning toward delaying a smartphone for your teen, let me encourage you to join the crowd that is doing just that. Your child’s well-being depends on it.
4. Dear Teacher, My child will no longer bring a smartphone to school.
You are now committed to a smartphone-free childhood. The next step? Send this letter to your school.
Life, Love — Friendship, Art
1.Slut-onomics: How the scarcity of sluts tears the social fabric apart
Promiscuous women have always been in great demand. Slutshaming was a way for men to handle their limited supply.
2. You Might Be a Late Bloomer
The life secrets of those who flailed early but succeeded by old age
3. 17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian
The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels to me now almost like a different species of consciousness. (It can only be so — if we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals, and beliefs, we ossify and perish.)
Seven years into this labor of love, which had by then become my life and livelihood, I decided to set down some of the most important things I learned about living in the course of writing this personal record of reckoning with our search for meaning. Every year in the decade since, I have added one new learning and changed none of the previous.
4. Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change
It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.
5. How men can be invaluable at the dance: Relational skills matter more than ever, especially for men, so how and where are they best developed?
..more egalitarian marriages require more relational skill. There’s more negotiation over roles and responsibilities, more of a need to be flexible about identities, and a higher expectation of emotional intimacy and support.
6. The Case for Marrying an Older Man
A woman’s life is all work and little rest. An age gap relationship can help.
7. William James on Love
If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life.
8. The Hypocrisy of Judging Those Who Become More Beautiful
Normally, correcting disadvantages beyond our control is seen as laudable. So why do people look down on individuals who alter their looks?
9. What It Takes to Grow: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the Key to Self-Realization
A person can grow, in the true sense, only if he* assumes responsibility for himself.
10. A few final words from the incomparable Linda Hirshman
The influential feminist and author left me a moving essay about her last days.
Politics
1. Will China squander its moment in the sun?
A great civilization could be a lot greater, if its leaders gave up their obsession with control. — Noah Smith
China’s productivity growth — the ultimate driver of any nation’s long-run growth after it finishes building out its capital stock — had slowed almost to developed-world levels even before the real estate bust…There are many possible reasons for this premature productivity slowdown. Most of them point to excessive command and control.
2. Fentanyl: The Portrait of a Mass Murderer
It’s the big threat. A cheap, white powder — 50 times more powerful than heroin — which kills more than 70,000 people each year in the United States and countless others across the rest of the Western Hemisphere. EL PAÍS, in a long-term investigation that spanned two continents and included interviews with anti-drug czars in the U.S. and China, visited the clandestine laboratories in Sinaloa, where fentanyl is manufactured. In the vicinity of these Mexican labs, addicts serve as guinea pigs for drug traffickers. This newspaper has gathered testimonies about how this lethal substance crosses the border to the north and spreads like a plague through the streets of the most powerful country in the world. The trafficking of fentanyl is part of a global network with one foot in China, which the White House has declared war on
3. The Fundamental Problems with Social Media Age-Verification Legislation
… every one of these pieces of legislation — including some that have become law — have fundamental problems ranging from the functionality of age-verification technology to violations of the First Amendment inherent to the technology itself.
This series explores each of these issues in depth, giving them the care and attention they deserve. We analyze problems with the technology that purports to verify age, cybersecurity concerns surrounding identity verification, different First Amendment concerns, the ways that the government can abuse these age verification databases and more.
4. Child Safety: More than Tree Stumps and Toe Mold
It is simplistic and wrong to create a rivalry between fun and safety. It is also unfair to create this imaginary army of purported kid-coddling, fun-inhibiting evil doers out of police officers, fire fighters, coaches, pediatricians, child safety researchers and professionals, children’s hospitals, all with a proven track record of saving lives. Common sense measures such as taking a kid out of a football game after a hard hit are intended to raise a kid for a lifetime of play, fun and sports activity. That’s not a team of rivals, but rather a community of care.
5. Stupidity: A Reading List
The single best thing you can learn in college is stupidity. Currently it’s just an (extremely popular) extracurricular. But they really should turn it into a major — Stupidity Studies.
The fastest way to get smart is to avoid the pitfalls of the stupid. But you need to learn them first.
Today I’ll step forward as your esteemed Professor of Stupidity. (Can I put that on my LinkedIn profile?) Below is my stupid reading list — designed for a twelve week course.
Business / productivity/Econ
1. TSMC’s debacle in the American desert
Missed deadlines and tension among Taiwanese and American coworkers are plaguing the chip giant’s Phoenix expansion
2. Arts, By Tyler Cowen
Contrary to common opinion, the commercial incentives brought by wealth are not typically corrupting. Many artists chase profits, but the commercial and artistic impulses are not always at war. The letters of Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven reveal that all were obsessed with earning money. Mozart wrote in one of his letters: “Believe me, my sole purpose is to make as much money as possible; for after good health it is the best thing to have.” Charlie Chaplin once noted: “I went into the business for money and the art grew out of it.” Many talented artists are motivated not just by narrow self-interest, but also by a desire to make money to help friends or to finance their creative urges.
The idea that the great artists in history were starving has been overplayed.
3. The Curse of Culture, Stratchery
[corporate] culture is not something that begets success, rather, it is a product of it. All companies start with the espoused beliefs and values of their founder(s), but until those beliefs and values are proven correct and successful they are open to debate and change. If, though, they lead to real sustained success, then those values and beliefs slip from the conscious to the unconscious, and it is this transformation that allows companies to maintain the “secret sauce” that drove their initial success even as they scale. The founder no longer needs to espouse his or her beliefs and values to the 10,000th employee; every single person already in the company will do just that, in every decision they make, big or small.
4. The Use of Knowledge in Society, by Friedrich A. Hayek
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources — if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
5. The Myth of Natural Monopoly
It is a myth that natural-monopoly theory was developed first by economists, and then used by legislators to “justify” franchise monopolies. The truth is that the monopolies were created decades before the theory was formalized by intervention-minded economists, who then used the theory as an ex post rationale for government intervention. At the time when the first government franchise monopolies were being granted, the large majority of economists understood that large-scale, capital-intensive production did not lead to monopoly, but was an absolutely desirable aspect of the competitive process.
6. Recovering Corporate Patriotism
Despite origins steeped in sovereign favor and national interest, the modern corporation has increasingly seen its capacity for civic duty and engagement diminished. Over time, concern for the national interest has been squeezed out by the twin forces of profit maximization and cosmopolitanism.
7. AI and Economic Calculation
What is economic calculation, and can machines do it for us? Computer says “no”.
To riff off of Boettke and Candela, economic calculation consists of the discovery of contextual knowledge, not the computation of data. Powerful computation machines are unable to discover contextual knowledge of opportunity costs without humans in the loop to distill their preferences into algorithms (which is itself a challenging epistemic question).
Knowledge is not data, and data are only an incomplete surrogate for knowledge. Knowledge is perception, interpretation, and judgement; the distillation of those elements into action in an economic system with prices (and profit and loss) creates data. Economic calculation has an irreducible cognitive dimension because it is grounded in subjective personal judgements about opportunity costs.
Local stuff (on Macedonian language)
1. Најлошо е да бираме страна помеѓу Цариград и Москва
Не грешат ниту оние што сметаат дека МПЦ доби томос од српската црква, ниту, пак, оние што тврдат дека актот на признавање, сепак, треба да „дојава“ од Цариград
2. Каков е развојот со или без ЕУ? (Љупчо Поповски)
Зошто Македонија во 2000 година имаше БДП по жител 1.861 долари, а Бугарија 1.621? И зошто во 2022 Бугарија отиде до 13.970, а Македонија само до 6.590?
За да одговориме на прашањето дали земјите можат да се развиваат еднакво или приближно успешно и ако не се дел од ЕУ наједонставно е да се послужиме со факти. А и со еден труд на Јан Хегемејер и Јан Михалек насловен „Економското влијание на источното проширување на ЕУ врз новите земји-членки“, објавен 2021. Клучниот заклучок на Хегемејер и Михалек преку повеќе споредбени анализи за 10 земји е дека членството во ЕУ носи значителни придобивки. За пет од 10-те анализирани земји, 12-годишната добивка во нивоата на БДП по глава на жител во однос на сценариото да не се членки на ЕУ е најмалку 30 проценти. Тие заклучуваат дека придобивките се долготрајни и се зголемуваат со текот на времето: за многу од анализираните земји, пресметаната добивка се удвоила помеѓу шестата и 12-тата година по пристапувањето во ЕУ.
Може ли Македонија да учи од овие примери за економскиот растеж? Се разбира дека — да. Знае ли како да научи? Одговорот е комплициран. Сака ли да научи? Одговорот е уште покомплициран. Дали на некои структури во државава и во бизнисот и во политиката им одговара Македонија само да чука на европските порти, а никако да влезе. Тоа е повеќе од сигурно.
