This Week’s Selections

My Year as a Degenerate Gambler (link)

Reversing extinction (link)

The End of Computer Programming As We Know It (link)

On Gout (link)

The Moral Beauty of Middlemarch (link)

Blood Ties: Conjuring Up My Own Personal Conquistador (link)

Other Items of Note

Noah Millman: Why We Will Never Stop Bombing the Middle East (link)
“Low-wage work isn’t a job. It’s a whole world with its own logic and norms.” (link)
The Perils of Making the Biggest Jeweled Egg in the World (link)
Yascha Mounk: “The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides” (link)
A proposal to reform Congress (link)
Virginia Postrel: How sports were integral to the early success of television (link)
Slave-like Conditions for Chinese Laborers in Brazil (link)
How trans activism became so radical (link)
Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did (link)
Hollis Robbins on why college syllabus look the same across institutions (link)
Kat Rosenfield on when reacting beats reading (link)

Megan McArdle: The myth of the billionaire wealth tax (link)
What Crystals Older Than the Sun Reveal About the Start of the Solar System (link)
George Will: America needs immigrants (link)
Fareed Zakaria: “Iran is an imperial trap. America walked right in.” (link)
The enduring fight over fighting words (link)
Me: Independents outnumber Republicans and Democrats yet win nothing. It’s time for a new strategy (link)
A kind of strength training (link)
A history of the postcard (link)
Fake ambassadors from another time (link)
“In response to the growth of illiberalism at home and abroad, we aim to illuminate, preserve, develop, and expand what liberalism brings to the world.” (link)
Andrew Sullivan: “Meet James Talarico, the next generation’s religious crusader for woke illiberalism.” (link)
The filibuster saves America (link)
Matt Welch’s obituary for Brian Doherty (link)
Matt Yglesias answers emails from his readers on various matters (link)
Do motor through Joshua Tree National Park (link)
Plymouth, Minnesota: The Midwestern Sublime (link)
25 medieval manuscripts you can look at online right now (link)
Tyler Cowen analysis of Cape Town’s geography (link)
Nancy Rommelmann dispatch from Portland (link)
The collector who fled Russia with a haul of second world war images (link)
Habermas RIP (link)
What songs get requested most at piano bars (link)
LOTR superfans only (link)
Why movies don’t feel “real” anymore (YouTube)

For Oscar’s weekend, you might like these reviews of…