I hate these Arbitrary Lines
Writing
For brilliant weekend editor Vic Matus of The Washington Free Beacon, I reviewed Nolan Gray’s Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. It’s an easy, readable guide to zoning in America. But in order to build a broadly compelling argument (that zoning is bad), Gray stays away from the rawest nerves in the YIMBY/NIMBY debate.
Specifically, he avoids talking about how zoning is intergenerational warfare, and how it kneecaps any attempt by the right to make America more pro-family. Those are better reasons for people like me to care about zoning than its effect on GDP growth, or even on walkable cities. I like GDP growth and walkable cities, but I would like to raise a family and build a good life for my descendants more. Arbitrary Lines is a good book, but I’d like to read a book against zoning that directly explains why my generation needs to mobilize against it.
Reading
A lovely eulogy of New Yorker editing mainstay John Bennet, chock full of useful editorial aphorisms: how’s “only shitty writers need transitions” for a blow to the ego? Here’s another: “A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that’s open in the back. An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass.”
Media theorist L.M. Sacasas wrote a sharp, concise explanation of modern experiences of knowledge, information, and the public sphere.
Helen Andrews at The American Conservative with a deeply reported piece on the Canadian panic over “mass graves” at Indian residential schools, describing how the story has metastasized despite almost no evidence mass graves exist.
Why we’re massively underrating economist Douglass North and his game-theoretical understanding of economic progress, says Anna-Sofia Lesiv.
Why live in America, asks Nick Burns? To perform American experiments on ourselves, answers Nick Burns. He’s right.
Amtrak wants to spend $10 billion dollars on renovating Union Square Station in DC; Substack Behemoth Matt Yglesias explains why that’s a terrible use of money (TLDR: run more trains instead).
Oliver Traldi is writing a book.
This Smithsonian Magazine essay on hedges and their history in England isn’t the best, but the pictures are really something.
Science is Fake
A systematic review of depression studies shows no link at all between serotonin levels in the brain and depression. Blackpill: 90% of survey respondents believe in the chemical imbalance theory of depression.
RCT: Mindfulness training in schools for kids 11-14 has no effect on wellbeing, depressive symptoms or social-emotional functioning.
If you pre-register social priming studies , they’re less likely to replicate. More importantly, in a set of 65 studies, the only ones that replicated were studies with the same researcher as the original.
Someone ran an opt-in potato diet study on Twitter. The results are in: for a not-insignificant sample size, eating only potatoes for weeks on end results in substantial weight loss, and most participants didn’t lose muscle. Not sure what to make of it.
I love the overall aesthetic of this post. Great prose, as always.