California’s year of fees
California housers informally dubbed 2026 the “Year of Fees”: On the heels of the SB79 win that will decisively legalize midrise transit-oriented development statewide when it takes full effect in the early 2030s, YIMBYs…
California's year of fees, observations from the Camino, and 18,000 questionable images
2026-09-02
Observations from Europe
My family vacationed (or as they might say, “vacationed”) in Spain over the last couple of weeks, and we walked a portion of the Camino de Santiago from Sahagún to León. We had our three and six year olds in tow, so ther…
Can antibody explain these images?
Back in May, science sleuth Sholto David came across a suspicious image from the major life-sciences supplier Thermo Fisher. It was a Western blot showing the performance of one of their antibodies that is commonly used …
The future of the university
There’s been a lot of writing lately on what AI is going to do to the university. The most recent entry is from Kevin Munger, who writes in Asterisk that the threat isn’t that AI replaces universities or makes them obsol…
The antimicrobial resistance problem
Antimicrobial resistance poses a challenge to normal incentives for invention. It’s driven by the overprescription of antibiotics, and so any new antibiotics we discover we might prefer to keep in reserve, to be used onl…
Texas transmission and the Permian basin
Texas has long been an unlikely darling for the renewables industry, rocketing to leading positions in wind and solar deployment driven by a combination of a laissez-faire attitude towards permitting and ERCOT’s connect-…
The public housing miracle that never happened
I like Jerusalem Demsas’s writing on basically any topic, but she’s at her best when she can dive into housing policy. Case in point: this devastating takedown of a deeply wrongheaded op-ed and report from two Vanderbilt…