Santi Ruiz

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on the atlas — 31

highlights — 59

A huge chunk of public land in the West, equal in size to the Netherlands, is “corner locked”, accessible only via these points.
Battle for the American West
There will be quiet periods of your life. They will feel slow and low in potential energy. The best use of them is to work on cool projects and share them.
101 things I would tell my self from 10 years ago
So firmly did Saddam believe in the underlying unity of the world that after enduring years of unrelenting UN inspections, he began to wonder if maybe Iraq did secretly possess WMDs after all. Why else would the Swedes keep badgering him? “Do you have any programs going on that I don’t know about?” he asked his deputy prime minister in 1998. “Absolutely not,” the minister replied, thinking this was a loyalty test—and only later realizing that the dictator was in earnest. Not long after, another one of Saddam’s aides approached him with the same question. “Do we have WMD?” he asked. “Don’t you …
Saddam’s Secret Weapon - The American Conservative
It is reasonable to believe that procedural regularity is an important facet of government legitimacy. But legitimacy is not solely — not even primarily — a product of the procedures that agencies follow. Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive, and fair. Mandatory procedures may sometimes advance those values. They can focus agencies on priorities they may have ignored, orient bureaucracies to broader public goals, and improve the quality of agency deliberations. But procedures can also burn agency resources on senseless pa…
The Procedure Fetish - Niskanen Center
“I felt with Liz Truss slight affection but above all profound pity,” Stewart said. “Because she’s approaching these big conversations as though she’s sort of performing as an underprepared undergraduate at a seminar.”
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? | The New Yorker
“It’s clever, silly people. It’s a lack of seriousness,” he said, of Truss and many of his peers.
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? | The New Yorker
No one would accuse Cummings of having a popular platform. His jam is A.I. and Nietzsche. But, after the Brexit vote, he kept waiting for May’s government to act on what was, to him, its obvious implications: to restrict immigration, reform the state, and explore dramatic economic policies, in order to diverge from the E.U. and to boost the country’s productivity. “I kept thinking, month after month, God, like, it’s weird the way they are just thrashing around and not facing it,” Cummings said.
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? | The New Yorker
How you interpret the Brexit vote informs, to a great extent, how you make sense of the past fourteen years of British politics.
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? | The New Yorker
Geraint Thomas, a Welsh lawyer who runs the center, was in his office, worrying about a heating bill. A few years ago, it was some four thousand pounds a year, but after recent price hikes it was now about fourteen thousand.
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? | The New Yorker
it is the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars.
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? | The New Yorker
In “Heroic Failure,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole explains Brexit by describing Britain’s fall from imperial nation to “occupied colony” of the E.U., and the rise of a powerful English nationalism as a result.
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? | The New Yorker
The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology.
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? | The New Yorker
Covering British politics during this period has been like trying to remember, and explain, a very convoluted and ultimately boring dream. If you really concentrate, you can recall a lot of the details, but that doesn’t lead you closer to any meaning.
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? | The New Yorker
One of my goals for 2025 is to read at least the Five Books of Moses, as well as some of the Writings. I welcome tips on how to engage with this text, including the best way to organize an effective reading group… do please send me a note if you’ve done this.
2023 letter | Dan Wang
I’m trying to tell a story that preserves American agency. It is that China will not fade away, meaning that America must reform itself for a protracted contest with a peer competitor.
2023 letter | Dan Wang
Around 30 people sat in a living room, listening to the history of Chinese in Southeast Asia. They would spend much of the time talking about themselves as “Jews of the East.
2023 letter | Dan Wang
A few lost their jobs in Beijing’s crackdown on online tutoring.
2023 letter | Dan Wang
The European Union’s working-age population will shrink by one-fifth through 2050, according to a recent report by German insurer Allianz.
Rich Countries Are Becoming Addicted to Cheap Labor - WSJ
Demand-pull mechanisms may also jumpstart long-duration energy storage.52
How to Save America’s Transmission System - Institute for Progress
More generally, the hard path requires increasing the scale at which electrical grid planning takes place, and creating the tools for those large-scale plans to be implemented. The soft path, on the other hand, leans into smaller scale technologies that don’t require building centralized power stations and long-distance transmission infrastructure. Encouraging energy conservation and more energy efficient buildings would be a soft path approach. Residential and commercial buildings make up about 40% of total energy use in the US (when losses are included),45 but adopting energy efficient const…
How to Save America’s Transmission System - Institute for Progress
Thus the overwhelming priority of energy policy must be making it easier to build things.
How to Save America’s Transmission System - Institute for Progress
Every Roman city was on an identical plan, center dominated by two major streets: the cardo, running from north to south, and the decumanus, running from east to west.
A Great Satan in this Grave
a paideuma will typically produce “a paideia, a set of social technologies designed to alter minds and hearts, which constitute its soulcraft.” Education is a major element of such a paideia, but not the only one: for example, “humanist eloquence was meant as a kind of social technology, incentivizing good behavior through the use of praise and blame.”
Virtue Signaling: Humanism and Politics - American Affairs Journal
Virtue was not merely the sine qua non, the necessary cause of good politics; it was, if fully developed and practiced, the sufficient cause. And instilling virtue was the rationale of all political education and political counsel.
Virtue Signaling: Humanism and Politics - American Affairs Journal
Perhaps, then, the ambivalent relation between sex politics and right-wing politics reflects the fact that revolution and reaction are inextricable from one another, whereas sex dimorphism really is irreducible.
Reactionary Hope by Mary Harrington | Articles | First Things
Much of our elite has adopted the Prophets’ rhetoric — scale back! consume less! protect biodiversity! — without actually knowing anything about how complex systems work or considering that humans are part of them. This is poison, because it means their proposals combine the worst of the Wizards’ approach (abstract, context-insensitive, casually destructive of a dozen other parts of the complicated interconnected systems they innovate on) and the worst of the Prophets’ (zero-sum, labor-intensive, willing to sacrifice freedom and prosperity in the interests of some other goal).
REVIEW: The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles C. Mann
All of these distractions require that readers expend a disproportionate amount of energy to unravel the structure of the prose, leaving less energy available for perceiving content.
The Science of Scientific Writing | American Scientist
In reading, as in most experiences, we appreciate the opportunity to become familiar with a new environment before having to function in it.
The Science of Scientific Writing | American Scientist
Nationwide, the rate of chronic absenteeism — defined as missing at least 10% of school days, or 18 in a year — nearly doubled between 2018-19 and 2021-22, to 28% of students, according to data compiled for The Associated Press by Thomas Dee, a professor of education at Stanford. Michigan’s rate was 39%, the third highest among states. States that have reported data for the most recent school year showed only minimal improvement; some cities have rates of more than 40%.
To Fight Absenteeism, Schools Turn to Private Companies — ProPublica
A Boeing or a Google is like a tiger: the highly-visible culmination of a vast subterranean drama. Turn over a spade and you’ll find them — the suppliers and subcontractors, investor networks, tooling manufacturers, feeder universities, advisors, researchers, shipping and packaging experts, friendly bankers and government officials, producers of upstream technological inputs, and a vast collection of lower-tier companies in related markets that act like an economic flywheel, absorbing and releasing excess labor as the economy shudders through its fits and starts.
REVIEW: Flying Blind, by Peter Robison - by John Psmith
A tiger is the temporary result of too many worms gathering in one place.
REVIEW: Flying Blind, by Peter Robison - by John Psmith
Real ecosystems have energy and nutrient flow both up and down the food chain, as well as laterally; they have vast swarms of bottom feeders, fungi, and other detritivores that recycle matter through decomposition and make its constituents bioavailable once more; they also have a constant source of energy input (usually the sun) to make up for the constant entropic drag that would otherwise grind things to a halt.
REVIEW: Flying Blind, by Peter Robison - by John Psmith
It is a linguistic commonplace that readers naturally emphasize the material that arrives at the end of a sentence. We refer to that location as a "stress position." If a writer is consciously aware of this tendency, she can arrange for the emphatic information to appear at the moment the reader is naturally exerting the greatest reading emphasis. As a result, the chances greatly increase that reader and writer will perceive the same material as being worthy of primary emphasis. The very structure of the sentence thus helps persuade the reader of the relative values of the sentence's contents.
The Science of Scientific Writing | American Scientist
The list gives us too few clues as to what actions actually take place in the passage. If the actions are not to be found in the verbs, then we as readers have no secondary structural clues for where to locate them. Each of us has to make a personal interpretive guess; the writer no longer controls the reader's interpretive act.
The Science of Scientific Writing | American Scientist
Most writers produce prose linearly (from left to right) and through time. As they begin to formulate a sentence, often their primary anxiety is to capture the important new thought before it escapes. Quite naturally they rush to record that new information on paper, after which they can produce at their leisure contextualizing material that links back to the previous discourse. Writers who do this consistently are attending more to their own need for unburdening themselves of their information than to the reader's need for receiving the material.
The Science of Scientific Writing | American Scientist
In our experience, the misplacement of old and new information turns out to be the No. 1 problem in American professional writing today.
The Science of Scientific Writing | American Scientist
This is the kind of passage that in subtle ways can make readers feel badly about themselves. The individual sentences give the impression of being intelligently fashioned: They are not especially long or convoluted; their vocabulary is appropriately professional but not beyond the ken of educated general readers; and they are free of grammatical and dictional errors. On first reading, however, many of us arrive at the paragraph's end without a clear sense of where we have been or where we are going. When that happens, we tend to berate ourselves for not having paid close enough attention. In …
The Science of Scientific Writing | American Scientist
if the topic position is constantly occupied by material that fails to establish linkage and context, readers will have difficulty perceiving both the connection to the previous sentence and the projected role of the new sentence in the development of the paragraph as a whole.
The Science of Scientific Writing | American Scientist
Increase your surface area for luck
How to be More Agentic - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
Neil deGrasse Tyson is, supposedly, an educator and a populariser of science; it’s his job to excite people about the mysteries of the universe, communicate information, and correct popular misconceptions. This is a noble, arduous, and thankless job, which might be why he doesn’t do it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: pedantry in space | Idiot Joy Showland
The people you consider eloquent may be otherworldly wordsmiths, but chances are they’ve just thought about it before.
look what the cat brought in - by Anson Yu
Fortunately, Georgia, a small former Soviet republic of just 3.4 million people wedged between Turkey and Russia, undertook a radical experiment. Can a popular social figure alter birth rates by bestowing special honors on high-birth-order children?
In Georgia, a Religiously-Inspired Baby Boom? | Institute for Family Studies
Since the future-child and total effects are more important for promoting aggregate fertility, our findings show that leave does in fact increase fertility when benefit increases are generous.
The effect of leave policies on increasing fertility: a systematic review | Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
In line with previous reviews, we find that childcare expansions increase completed fertility, while increased cash transfers have temporary effects. New evidence on parental leave expansions, particularly from Central Europe, suggests larger effects than previously established.
Can Policies Stall the Fertility Fall? A Systematic Review of the (Quasi‐) Experimental Literature - Bergsvik - 2021 - Population and Development Review - Wiley Online Library
An essential characteristic of Western Classicism was its intense preoccupation with the contemporary world. While seeking to control human drives that tend in opposite directions, it attempted to make the past and the future coalesce in the contemporary situation.
Nietzsche And His Century (external) – NIHILUS
It was hoped that adaptive management and fish passage improvements at the dams would lead to recovery. That has not happened. A dismal prognosis emerges from the most recent reports.
Born-Again Engineering - Comment Magazine
If those who believe in the power of government to improve people’s lives want to win over the public in an era of increasingly-intense fiscal trade-offs, they’ll have to recognize that their efforts to strengthen government’s impact are often self-defeating.
A paradox at the heart of American bureaucracy - Regions
The psychoanalysis that Aaron Green practices is of the most unswervingly classical Freudian sort.
The Impossible Profession—I | The New Yorker
It's far from common knowledge that the United States ever had a cultural policy, much less that it currently has one.
A Cultural Agenda for Our Time | National Affairs
‘I only exist,’ he tells Barbie, ‘within the warmth of your gaze.’ Those nine words express far more about the impossibility of being a man than America Ferrera’s tedious speech says about the impossibility of being a woman.
One year of envy, lies, and greed - by Sam Kriss