What if it all comes back to how many houses we have? Income inequality, labor shortages, obesity, social mobility, climate change; what if they all relate back to restrictive building codes that promote urban sprawl and prevent density? Perhaps the silver bullet for many of society's biggest systemic ailments is a just to build more and denser housing. link
Optimizing your personal productivity is bullshit. And I say that as someone who once set up a toggl account to track my daily work tasks just for fun. Cal Newport, author of Deep Work (which I recommend at least the first half of) argues that for modern knowledge workers, the burden of productivity should be a systemic focus instead of a personal one; the onus should be on the employer to create a productive system in which you can work, instead of you needing to create your own personal gains. link
Congress once came pretty darn close to establishing a 30 hour work week. During the height of the depression, the American government thought that by limiting employees to 30-hour weeks, employers would have to hire more workers, thus creating more opportunity. FDR ended up sacrificing the 30-hour work week for the small price of ending child labor. link
Web2 is over. We've moved on to Web3. Well, not we. They have. They're starting companies that are run by popular vote (DAOs), do nothing but mint NFTs, and are generating tens of millions in revenue. Nathan Baschez's exploration of the space is a good primer if you want to join me among the previously, but still sort of, confused. link
New modeling shows the price of renewable energy production equipment is falling fast. Bill McKibben, who rarely sees things worth being optimistic about in his relentless coverage of the climate crisis, is pretty optimistic about this development. link
Americans have a collective $10 trillion sitting in their savings accounts. With low interest rates, it's effectively earning them nothing. Why is this the case? Probably because the alternatives aren't great. link
The billionaire owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves wants to build a brand-new city in the American southwest. link
Most major technologies began life looking like expensive toys. But so did the things that remained just expensive toys and never made the leap to the mainstream. Benedict Evans takes us through his frameworks for predicting which toys will become much more. Link
My favorite books are the ones I'm still thinking about well after I've turned the last page. By this measure, the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy from Cixin Liu will remain one of my favorites for a long time. Start with The Three Body Problem (and don't read the blurbs about the book - IMO they give too much away). link
You've heard of the placebo effect. What about its more insidious partner, the nocebo effect? While placebos are all about expected positive effect, nocebos go in the other direction and cause people to manifest negative symptoms even though the drugs they've taken are harmless. This is what happened to a man who ended up in the ER with very real symptoms after guzzling a bottle of pills he thought to be anti-depressants, but were actually sugar pills. link
An Italian monk made oblique references to the Americas over a hundred years before Columbus set sail. A newly translated text from the 1300's has this monk relaying stories of a 'land of giants' west of Iceland that has been visited by the sailors of Norway and Denmark. link
"Grass is green and hyperlinks are blue." Scientists can tell you why grass is green, but the questions remains as to why hyperlinks are blue, and who decided they should be that way. Mozilla UX designer Elise Blanchard goes back as far as 1964 to uncover the roots of this ubiquitous web element. Beware: many many screenshots of vintage computer interfaces. link