Good reads (but you'll have to take my word for it) [UPDATED]

Just that - a list of good stuff to look at. Despite what it sounds like.

1. Scott Alexander on cost disease. Ok, I grant that that does not sound at all interesting. But it is. Honest.

2. Alistair's Adversaria. This guy says a lot of interesting things and has lots of interesting links. Give him a go.

3. How politics works: how Sadiq Khan's amazing announcements could have been Zac Goldsmith's.

4. Ollie the bobcat and the Washington Bubble.

5. A long Dominic Cummings post about how Brexit happened. "Why is almost all political analysis and discussion so depressing and fruitless? I think much has to do with the delusions of better educated people. It is easier to spread memes in SW1, N1, and among Guardian readers than in Easington Colliery." It would be worth testing that kind of thesis. Political innovations come in the good (universal suffrage, abolition of slavery, privatisation) and the bad (fascism, communism, Jeremy Corbynism). Presumably all of them start off more strongly amongst the well-educated than amongst the less well-educated - not knowing stuff like that is part of what we mean by less well-educated. But are the less well-educated better at spotting when the Emperor has no clothes on? Anecdotes of 20th century British political history are pretty supportive of that thesis (not a lot of fascist or communist MPs), but maybe that's just because the 20th century came up with a lot of really bad political innovations.

6. In praise of the analogue: "one of the earliest noble causes of the digerati was the One Laptop Per Child global initiative, led by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, a Garibaldi of the Internet age. The OLPC crew raised stupendous amounts of money and created machines that could run on solar power or could be cranked by hand, and they distributed them to poor children around the developing world, but alas, according to Sax, “academic studies demonstrated no gain in academic achievement.” Last year, in fact, the OECD reported that “students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes.”"

7. Cockfosters (photos).

8. Obituary of JSG Boggs.

9. A wonderful hatchet job.

[UPDATE] 10. A second-wave feminist's critical take on trans-activism: "Mount Holyoke, a women’s college, decided not to produce a play about women and their vaginas because some audience members who identify as women—but don’t have vaginas—would feel excluded." For a not unconnected bonus, here is a pretty forthright chap who says that children are being taught lies. He makes a similar point along the way: "These people [advocates for multiple gender identities and laws to protect them] claim that identity is a social construct, but even though that’s their fundamental philosophical claim, and they’ve built it into the law, they don’t abide by those principles. Instead, they go right to subjectivity. They say that your identity is nothing more than your subjective feeling of what you are. Well, that’s also a staggeringly impoverished idea of what constitutes identity. It’s like the claim of an egocentric two-year old, and I mean that technically."