Eric Rasmusen at 19:15, 10 February 2026

2026-02-10T19:15:59Z

Eric Rasmusen at 21:50, 6 February 2026

2026-02-06T21:50:42Z

Eric Rasmusen at 20:37, 5 February 2026

2026-02-05T20:37:13Z

Eric Rasmusen: /* Also-Rans */

2025-12-29T15:01:54Z

‎Also-Rans

Eric Rasmusen: /* The List */

2025-12-29T15:01:26Z

‎The List

Eric Rasmusen at 00:31, 28 December 2025

2025-12-28T00:31:12Z

Eric Rasmusen at 00:28, 28 December 2025

2025-12-28T00:28:28Z

Eric Rasmusen at 00:26, 28 December 2025

2025-12-28T00:26:18Z

Eric Rasmusen at 22:08, 27 December 2025

2025-12-27T22:08:17Z

Eric Rasmusen at 22:04, 27 December 2025

2025-12-27T22:04:36Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 19:15, 10 February 2026
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−	See also [[Best Things of 2025]].	+	See also [[Best Things of 2025]] and [[Best Things of 2026]] and [[Best Articles Read in 2026]].

	==The List==		==The List==

@@ Line 24: / Line 24: @@
 :::To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Changes in farming practices such as no-till farming, avoiding the use of the plow, cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this. If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil, and less returns to the atmosphere. If we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots, we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil. I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology.
-#  <li value="7"> Deleted.
+#  <li value="7">  [https://roblong.substack.com/p/how-to-party "How to Party: In New York City, people show up for free drinks. . .,"] Rob Long's substack (2025).
-#  <li value="8">[https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3181150/jimmy-carter-friend-dictators-and-champion-terrorists/ "Jimmy Carter, Friend of Dictators and Champion of Terrorists,"] Washington Examiner, excellent survey of his disgraceful life.
+#  <li value="8"> [https://chicagomaroon.com/28397/grey-city/tale-two-curricula-general-education-st-johns-college/ "A Tale of Two Curricula: General Education at St. John’s College and the University of Chicago: A small liberal arts college in Maryland shows a vision of what the University of Chicago might have been,"] (2025).
-::: Carter likely first met with Hamas leaders in January 1996. In March and February of that year, Hamas participated in a string of suicide bombings, murdering 65 people, including three U.S. citizens. Dead Americans did not move Carter to admonish his friends in Gaza. Carter again met with Hamas in April 2008 as it was launching hundreds of missiles every month at civilian targets within Israel, promising that the group wouldn’t undermine peace. After Hamas first attempted to launch an Oct. 7-style attack in 2014, Carter called on Israel and the U.S. to recognize the offshoot of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood as the “legitimate political actor” that represents the “Palestinian population.”
+::: "The pair instituted a Great Books curriculum that was completely compulsory and spanned all four years of undergraduate education. Most of the existing faculty, who experienced difficulty with the curricular transition, chose to leave and were replaced by new faculty members. Instructors of this new curriculum adopted the singular title of “tutor”; the terms “professor” or “teacher” were avoided because pedagogical responsibilities were to be attributed exclusively to the authors of Great Books."
 # <li value="9"> [https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-class-of-2026 "The Class of 2026,"] John Carter, Substack (2025).
@@ Line 51: / Line 52: @@
 ::: We tend to conflate feminism and anti-racism under the general heading of "social justice", but this blinds us to important details. From about 2011 to 2014, the Internet was obsessed with gender, with race on the back burner. 2014 to 2016 was a sort of transition period, and after that the Internet became obsessed with race, with gender almost forgotten.  When was the last time you heard people argue about "creeps", "nice guys", or "friendzoning"? Mansplaining? #NotAllMen? MRAs and PUAs? If you're in your early 20s, you might not even know what half these terms mean; if you're older than that, you’ll remember them with a sort of cold dread. But they're gone now - you'd have more luck looking for recent discourse about Osama bin Laden. Nor has some some other gender discourse arisen to replace them. Everyone just stopped caring and moved on to race.
-*[https://roblong.substack.com/p/how-to-party "How to Party: In New York City, people show up for free drinks. . .,"] Rob Long's substack (2025).
@@ Line 89: / Line 89: @@
 * <li value="4">[http://www.unmissablejapan.com/industry/kojo-yakei?ref=scopeofwork.net&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email "Kojo Yakei,"] UnmissableJAPAN.com (2021?)
 :::  Japan’s urbanites used to go out of their way to avoid the country’s sprawling petrochemical zones, but now they’ve been reinvented as tourist attractions due to their unique, otherworldly beauty. The ‘kojo yakei’ (meaning ‘factory night view’) phenomenon kicked off a few years ago, and now tourists are signing up en masse for bus trips and boat cruises of Japan’s industrial complexes, so they can admire the aesthetics of these chemical bakeries.
 * <li value="2">[https://www.stevesailer.net/p/yglesias-why-did-bidens-handlers/comments "Yglesias: Why Did Biden's handlers go nuts? ] Biden insiders turned out to be boring mainstream Democrats. Yet, they still went crazy for transgenderism, immigration, George Floyd, and "equity." How come?"] Steve Sailer (2025).

@@ Line 24: / Line 24: @@
 :::To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Changes in farming practices such as no-till farming, avoiding the use of the plow, cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this. If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil, and less returns to the atmosphere. If we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots, we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil. I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology.
-#  <li value="7">[https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/opinion/faith-god-christianity.html The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be,” ] David Brooks, New York Times (2024).
+#  <li value="7"> Deleted.
 #  <li value="8">[https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3181150/jimmy-carter-friend-dictators-and-champion-terrorists/ "Jimmy Carter, Friend of Dictators and Champion of Terrorists,"] Washington Examiner, excellent survey of his disgraceful life.

@@ Line 42: / Line 42: @@
 ==Also-Rans==
 * [https://www.thefp.com/p/the-secret-to-parenting-do-less-of-it  "The Secret to Parenting: Do Less of It,"] ''The Free Press,'' Camilo Ortiz and Julia   Burch (2025).
 :::The first commonly held fallacy is that more is more. This is the false idea that more parenting equals better parenting. It’s a myth that has led to a radical shift in how parents spend their time. Today’s working mothers spend as much time with their children as stay-at-home mothers did in 1975—and that is not just to help kids with their homework (though that has increased dramatically too). The second is that a parent’s primary goal ought to be protecting their child. Specifically, that they should protect them from the four D’s: discomfort, disappointment, distress, and a bit of danger. The third and potentially most crazy-making fallacy is that misbehavior in children is driven by underlying sadness, anxiety, or anger, which then becomes the job of parents (and often highly paid therapists) to uncover and fix.

@@ Line 9: / Line 9: @@
 ::: Just as we have a lot of hardware routines dedicated to interpreting and predicting events in the physical world, we also have an enormous number dedicated to managing social interactions. The latter are also full of bugs. To make matters worse, while the basic rules of physical motion are the same as they were 200,000 years ago, the rules of human society have changed in radical ways. Because of this, many of the intuitive responses that we have to social situations, which were appropriate in small-scale societies, are completely inappropriate in large-scale societies. This means that life in the modern world imposes extremely onerous cognitive burdens on us all.
-#  <li value="3">[https://www.stevesailer.net/p/malcolm-gladwell-on-tragic-dirt-vs?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1225250&post_id=165146818&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=fjeib&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email "malcolm gladwell on tragic dirt-vs"] (2025).
+#  <li value="3">[https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-by "REVIEW: The Education of Cyrus, by Xenophon,"] ''Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf'' (2024). Quoting Xenophon quoting Cyrus:
-:::"Bloomberg’s 12 years were so successful that the NYPD changed NYC lowlife culture. Before, bad guys went out on the streets packing guns in case they ran into other bad guys packing guns. By 2013, however, frisks weren’t finding many weapons because lowlifes were now more scared of the NYPD finding a gun on them than they were scared of not having a gun of them."
+:::"In one case, I was beaten because I did not judge correctly. The case was like this: A big boy with a little tunic took off the big tunic of a little boy, and he dressed him in his own tunic, while he himself put on that of the other. Now I, in judging it for them, recognized that it was better for both that each have the fitting tunic. Upon this the teacher beat me, saying that whenever I should be appointed judge of the fitting, I must do as I did; but when one must judge to whom the tunic belongs, then one must examine, he said, what is just possession."
 # <li value="4">[https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-real-north-korea-by-andrei "REVIEW: The Real North Korea, by Andrei Lankov"] Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf (2024).
@@ Line 39: / Line 39: @@
 ::: “Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies."
 #<li value="12"> [https://x.com/theepicmap/status/1883366650185138317 "A thread of 23 Survival Tips and Tricks You Might Not Have Known Before,"] Epic Maps, X (2025). Titles and cartoon-panel clear descriptions. In images, so not quotable so conveniently.
 ==Also-Rans==

@@ Line 17: / Line 17: @@
 ::: In the 1980s, Japan experienced a crisis of disinformation. For years, there had been mysterious disappearances of Japanese people with no known history of mental illness, drug addiction, or gambling debts. All kinds of people — men and women, young and old, just suddenly vanishing without a trace. Many theories were put forward to explain the puzzle (for instance, some believed it was alien abductions), but the most widespread, pernicious, and dangerous view was that North Korea was responsible. There were people who claimed to have actually seen teams of North Korean commandos lurking on beaches, nabbing random passers-by, and bundling them into waiting submersibles just off the coast. This was obviously crazy. Products, no doubt, of atavistic xenophobia and reactionary sentiments. The Japanese media, government, and academic authorities put a lot of effort into refuting this dangerous disinformation throughout the 1980s and 1990s…which made them look real silly when in 2002 Kim Jong-Il issued a formal apology for the abductions and ordered the surviving captives returned to Japan.
-# <li value="5">[https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture  "The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars: How do Internet atheism and Internet feminism help us understand the current cultural moment?"] ''Astral Codex Ten'' (2021).
-::: We tend to conflate feminism and anti-racism under the general heading of "social justice", but this blinds us to important details. From about 2011 to 2014, the Internet was obsessed with gender, with race on the back burner. 2014 to 2016 was a sort of transition period, and after that the Internet became obsessed with race, with gender almost forgotten.  When was the last time you heard people argue about "creeps", "nice guys", or "friendzoning"? Mansplaining? #NotAllMen? MRAs and PUAs? If you're in your early 20s, you might not even know what half these terms mean; if you're older than that, you’ll remember them with a sort of cold dread. But they're gone now - you'd have more luck looking for recent discourse about Osama bin Laden. Nor has some some other gender discourse arisen to replace them. Everyone just stopped caring and moved on to race.
 # <li value="6">[https://www.edge.org/conversation/heretical-thoughts-about-science-and-society HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY,"] Freeman Dyson (2007).
@@ Line 39: / Line 42: @@
 #<li value="12"> [https://x.com/theepicmap/status/1883366650185138317 "A thread of 23 Survival Tips and Tricks You Might Not Have Known Before,"] Epic Maps, X (2025). Titles and cartoon-panel clear descriptions. In images, so not quotable so conveniently.
 # <li value="2">[https://www.stevesailer.net/p/malcolm-gladwell-on-tragic-dirt-vs?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1225250&post_id=165146818&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=fjeib&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email "malcolm gladwell on tragic dirt-vs"] (2025).
@@ Line 61: / Line 58: @@
 ==Also-Rans==

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 See also [[Best Things of 2025]].
 # <li value="1">[https://www.thefp.com/p/martin-gurri-when-americans-gave-freedom-in-covids-wake-lockdowns-fifth-anniversary?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email "When Americans Gave Up Their Freedoms,"] Martin Gurri, The Free Press (April 8, 2025). On the Covid violations of civil rights and the lying by government officials (the article has hyperlinks):
@@ Line 48: / Line 50: @@
+*[https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/patronage Patronage,"] Aaron Renn (2025)
 :::" Imagine someone who aspires to be a Supreme Court justice or leading scholar of some non-religious topic. The idea of providing patronage to those kinds of people - say by funding their research - doesn’t even compute for evangelicals, who again put almost their entire focus on saving souls. Being populist in character, evangelicalism is naturally structured around charismatic leaders and their loyal followers."

@@ Line 6: / Line 6: @@
 #  <li value="2"> [https://josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-fast-and-slow "Populism fast and slow,"] Joseph Heath (2025)
 ::: Just as we have a lot of hardware routines dedicated to interpreting and predicting events in the physical world, we also have an enormous number dedicated to managing social interactions. The latter are also full of bugs. To make matters worse, while the basic rules of physical motion are the same as they were 200,000 years ago, the rules of human society have changed in radical ways. Because of this, many of the intuitive responses that we have to social situations, which were appropriate in small-scale societies, are completely inappropriate in large-scale societies. This means that life in the modern world imposes extremely onerous cognitive burdens on us all.
 #  <li value="3">[https://roblong.substack.com/p/how-to-party "How to Party: In New York City, people show up for free drinks. . .,"] Rob Long's substack (2025).
@@ Line 38: / Line 37: @@
 #<li value="12"> [https://x.com/theepicmap/status/1883366650185138317 "A thread of 23 Survival Tips and Tricks You Might Not Have Known Before,"] Epic Maps, X (2025). Titles and cartoon-panel clear descriptions. In images, so not quotable so conveniently.
@@ Line 43: / Line 46: @@
 :::Caplan’s most striking statistic is that fathers now spend more time with their kids than mothers did in 1960 - not because gender roles have changed, but because both parents’ workload has been growing in tandem. Equally startling is that mothers spend more time parenting today than in 1960, even though in 1960 they were much more likely to be full-time homemakers.
-#[https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-class-of-2026 "The Class of 2026,"] John Carter, Substack (2025).
 #"[https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/  "Considerations On Cost Disease,"] Scott Alexander, ''SlateStarCodex'' (2017).
@@ Line 51: / Line 53: @@
 # <li value="2">[https://www.stevesailer.net/p/malcolm-gladwell-on-tragic-dirt-vs?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1225250&post_id=165146818&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=fjeib&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email "malcolm gladwell on tragic dirt-vs"] (2025).
 :::"Bloomberg’s 12 years were so successful that the NYPD changed NYC lowlife culture. Before, bad guys went out on the streets packing guns in case they ran into other bad guys packing guns. By 2013, however, frisks weren’t finding many weapons because lowlifes were now more scared of the NYPD finding a gun on them than they were scared of not having a gun of them."
-−
@@ Line 71: / Line 69: @@
 Also-Rans:
 *<li value="3">[https://fitzgerald.narod.ru/crackup/067e-crackup.html "The Crack-Up"] by F. Scott Fitzgerald, ''Esquire'' (1936). A three-part essay, really, published in three issues.
@@ Line 95: / Line 96: @@
 * <li value="4">[http://www.unmissablejapan.com/industry/kojo-yakei?ref=scopeofwork.net&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email "Kojo Yakei,"] UnmissableJAPAN.com (2021?)
 :::  Japan’s urbanites used to go out of their way to avoid the country’s sprawling petrochemical zones, but now they’ve been reinvented as tourist attractions due to their unique, otherworldly beauty. The ‘kojo yakei’ (meaning ‘factory night view’) phenomenon kicked off a few years ago, and now tourists are signing up en masse for bus trips and boat cruises of Japan’s industrial complexes, so they can admire the aesthetics of these chemical bakeries.
 * <li value="2">[https://www.stevesailer.net/p/yglesias-why-did-bidens-handlers/comments "Yglesias: Why Did Biden's handlers go nuts? ] Biden insiders turned out to be boring mainstream Democrats. Yet, they still went crazy for transgenderism, immigration, George Floyd, and "equity." How come?"] Steve Sailer (2025).

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:04, 27 December 2025
Line 8:		Line 8:


−	# <li value="3"> [https://roblong.substack.com/p/how-to-party "How to Party: In New York City,	+	# <li value="3">[https://roblong.substack.com/p/how-to-party "How to Party: In New York City, people show up for free drinks. . .,"] Rob Long's substack (2025).
−	people show up for free drinks. . .,"] Rob Long's substack (2025).
	:::Besides, his uncle explained, the best thing about a cocktail party is that it comes with its own time limit. By eight o’clock people are shuffling off to their dinner plans — or making them on the spot with a new acquaintance. Just be ready at five o’clock to receive guests, he was told, because people in New York love any excuse to leave work early. It all sounded way too expensive to my friend, who was a young attorney just out of law school. His uncle had an answer for that, too.“Buy the cheapest liquor you can find, set it out on a table with mixers and cups — whatever you have, mixed up, coffee mugs, it doesn’t matter — and plenty of ice. Get a big supermarket ham, glaze the hell out of it, heat it up and serve it with rye bread and mustard. Done.”		:::Besides, his uncle explained, the best thing about a cocktail party is that it comes with its own time limit. By eight o’clock people are shuffling off to their dinner plans — or making them on the spot with a new acquaintance. Just be ready at five o’clock to receive guests, he was told, because people in New York love any excuse to leave work early. It all sounded way too expensive to my friend, who was a young attorney just out of law school. His uncle had an answer for that, too.“Buy the cheapest liquor you can find, set it out on a table with mixers and cups — whatever you have, mixed up, coffee mugs, it doesn’t matter — and plenty of ice. Get a big supermarket ham, glaze the hell out of it, heat it up and serve it with rye bread and mustard. Done.”

Top Ten Articles of 2025 - Revision history