On the absurd counter-productivity of cancelling Russian culture. 🔗

The last thing we need is to assume that once we are confident in our position, there is no more thinking to be done.

In order for people to use social media responsibly—i.e., not get addicted—we essentially have to use these platforms in ways that they were not designed to be used.

~from a review of Chris Martin’s Terms of Service 🔗

Everything about central bank digital currency (CBDC) is the stuff of totalitarian nightmare.

~A powerful essay against CBDCs 🔗

Expert ≠ leader (or vice versa):

The pandemic has shown us the dangers of expert rule, and the failures of political and institutional leaders to heed them. It has also demonstrated, through its absence, what good governance might look like. …

From Mallory Owens’s review of Bruno Maçães’s History Has Begun:

It would be disturbing enough if, as Maçães predicts, the great lords of Silicon Valley left us to amuse ourselves in our virtual sandboxes while they went off to conquer …

Tyler Cowen’s conversation with biographer-historian Ruth Scurr is delightful—bookstores, Cambridge, finding a book’s form, & much more. 🔗🎙

Beautiful light in my office this morning.

A beautiful obituary of Chinese philosopher and aesthetician Li Zehou. 🔗

In the Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs describes the potential for “A New Guild System”:

I envision a world in which the increased fragmentation of our media scene—fragmentation created by institutions that have lost their sense of purpose and …

Bitcoin and the U.S. Fiscal Reckoning - National Affairs

Until and unless Congress reduces the trajectory of the federal debt, U.S. monetary policy has entered a vicious cycle from which there is no obvious escape. The rising debt requires the …

A first post in my shameless theft of Robert‘s Last/Next notebook category. I’ll enjoy looking back on this in a few years. 📓

Daniel A. Kaufman defends “The Good Old Liberal Consensus” against its foes on both right and left. H/t to my friend Bharat. 🔗

This is a wonderful appreciation of Norm MacDonald—the best I’ve read so far. 🔗

“Destiny waits in the hands of God, not in the hands of statesmen / Who do, some well, some ill, planning and guessing, / Having their aims which turn in their hands in the pattern of time.”

~T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral