Three links with brief comments

1. Things to hang on your mental mug tree. Rory Sutherland and therefore recommended. His comment about architecture reminded me of an observation from Roger Scruton to the effect that the main consumers of architecture are the people on the outside of the building rather than the inside. It's not surprising that the owners of buildings are not prepared to pay much for the architecture. But he has a lot more to say, all worth thinking about.

2. This, from Megan McArdle, makes several good points about That Google Memo. Here's one: "A "natural" split of, say, 65-35 could evolve into a much more lopsided environment that feels downright unfriendly to a lot of women." Here's where the danger is. If the majority of people in a given profession consider (rightly or wrongly) that it is natural that one gender predominates then it's easy for them to create a culture that is ready to welcome people from that gender and harder to welcome the other. I suspect that doctors and lawyers, after a difficult initial period, just realised that there was no 'natural' reason for men to predominate. But think of those rooms in One Born Every Minute where the midwifes hang out drinking tea and eating chocolates in between delivering babies. Everyone there is going to be thinking (even if only subconsciously) that it is entirely natural that it is a female-dominated space. They are probably right about that too. But it could end up putting off a few good men from helping there too.

3. This distinctly dull article about abortion has one point to make (sometimes people talk about the foetus as separate from the mother, sometimes not, and they are not necessarily consistent about this as they pick and choose depending on the point they are making). Your average sixth former has thought about all this already. But this work has - bizarrely - "received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme". I'd like to think that Brexit will at least have some upside if this sort of thing gets left by the wayside in favour of funding actual research and innovation, or just plain tax cuts.