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here are some Big Ideas that have stuck out to me:

The medium is the message. Borrowing from McLuhan, he explained that every medium — TV, radio, typography, oral transmission — changes and biases the message itself

The written word, for example, tends to bias the message towards linear thinking, logic, exposition, and delayed response.

The castle that crowns the hill above the village of Gósol used to be among the grandest along Spain’s border with France, with views of fertile farms and forests rich in timber that stretched up to the cloudy mountaintops.

But the castle is in ruins now, and until last year, Gósol had fallen on hard times, too. The town census had gone down in nearly every count since the 1960s.

It took a pandemic for Spaniards to heed his call.Among those who packed their bags was Gabriela Calvar, a 37-year-old who once owned a bar in a beach town near Barcelona, but watched it go under during last year’s lockdowns and decamped to the town in the mountains for a new start.

The most important is residential zoning restrictions.

zoning restrictions in the nation’s 220 top metro areas lowered aggregate U.S. growth by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009

Reeves’s second structural barrier is the college admissions game.

Environmentalists point to examples of ecotourism initiatives around the world that have backfired. In Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, famous as the place where Charles Darwin did research that developed into his theory of evolution, the government opened or expanded two airports in the archipelago in 2007 and 2012, resulting in a huge jump in the number of tourists. The increased traffic brought invasive species that killed off some native animals.

“There’s no such thing as cost-free tourism,” said David Weaver, a geographer who teaches at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and has written a book on sustainable tourism. “We’re still waiting for those exemplars of sustainable tourism done right.”

The Maya Train is just the latest in a series of moves by Mr. López Obrador that have angered environmentalists. They chafe at the deep cuts that the president has made to Mexico’s environmental protection agency and to green civil-society groups, while at the same time doubling down on investments in Petróleos Mexicanos, the state oil company.

Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".

Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.

Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.

Though Annalee Newitz began work on “Four Lost Cities” long before the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s impossible to read it today without periodic is-this-where-we’re-headed? musings. The book functions as a travel guide to places that no longer exist

The chapters on Pompeii, the volcano-buried city in the orbit of ancient Rome, famous for its exquisitely preserved ruins, its brothels and taverns and graffiti, and on Angkor, a metropolis of medieval Cambodia, didn’t fire my imagination so much, perhaps because I already knew something of their histories.

Nine thousand years ago, the people of Catalhoyuk, maybe 10,000 of them, lived in cuboid clay houses packed against one another above the Konya Plain of south-central Turkey. Their dwellings were uniform, suggesting a highly regulated society: one or two rooms, painted in white or with red ocher designs. You exited not via a front door but by climbing a ladder to the roof. Much of life was lived up there: cooking, socializing, ambling along sidewalks that ran across the top of the city.

Mr. Andreessen outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.

In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few.

this view is already enshrined in our culture. Major tent-poles of public policy support it.

Kevin McCarthy and his House Republican leadership team have called on Newt Gingrich to advise them on their midterm election strategy

Man of No Principles hires Man of Low Character: What could possibly go wrong?

Before and during his four-year reign as speaker of the House, Gingrich pioneered much of the savagery we see today: treating opponents as criminals, un-American and subhuman; using shocking language; perpetrating a grinding attack on the press; and sabotaging government operations and institutions.

The war that arrived a decade ago is still too painful and too controversial to be taught to schoolchildren

They are desperate and want to see real change, so they’ve stopped looking at the news or remembering past events.”

But the Americans didn’t give us that chance. They did all the things possible to ensure that Iraq is going to be ruined.”

“How happy is the one who says ‘I am a Turk,’” said Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, speaking in an emotional finale of a speech in 1933 — a time when Turkey was still trying to forge a national identity out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The notion seemed simple enough: If you think you’re Turkish, then you are.

Of course, it’s not that straightforward. On the one hand, Article 66 of the 1982 Constitution defines a Turk as someone who feels the bonds and benefits of citizenship rather than in terms of ethnicity or race. On the other hand, Article 3 states that Turkish is the country’s sole official language, and Article 24 makes religious education compulsory. Throughout the document, as well as in political discourse and popular parlance, the notion of “Turkishness” is both ill-defined and staunchly defended.

Turkish officialdom has found it almost impossible to accept that non-Muslims like Armenians and Jews could be loyal to the state. But with non-Muslims accounting for just 0.5 percent Turkey’s population, discrimination against them has been, in effect, a minor issue. The real problem is the Kurds. They are Muslim, yes, but many insist on an identity of their own, and there are too many of them — 18 percent of the population, according to one estimate — to ignore.

check this section out from the study he cites: Marijuana intoxication can cause distorted perceptions, impaired coordination, difficulty with thinking and problem solving, and problems with learning and memory. Research has shown that, in chronic users, marijuana's adverse impact on learning and memory can last for days or weeks after the acute effects of the drug wear off. As a result, someone who smokes marijuana every day may be functioning at a suboptimal intellectual level all of the time.

At what point could this not be said of alcohol as well? And yet alcohol is far more addictive, far more related to social problems and violence, and daily drinking of large amounts can be dreadful for the liver (see graph above).

There's also what the study does not analyze: the whole point of marijuana use is to disrupt settled ways of thinking and feeling, to offer a respite, like alcohol, from the deadliness of doing. But for  reasons we don't quite yet understand, marijuana, like other essentially harmless drugs in moderation, can prompt imaginative breakthroughs, creative serendipity, deeper personal understanding, and greater social empathy and connection.

I keep seeing articles about the “fiscal cliff” that do, in fact, describe it — often in the headline — as a debt crisis. But it isn’t. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its deficit. In fact, its borrowing costs are near historic lows.

what we’re having is a political crisis, born of the fact that one of our two great political parties has reached the end of a 30-year road. The modern Republican Party’s grand, radical agenda lies in ruins — but the party doesn’t know how to deal with that failure, and it retains enough power to do immense damage as it strikes out in frustration.

Republicans have suffered more than an election defeat, they’ve seen the collapse of a decades-long project. And with their grandiose goals now out of reach, they literally have no idea what they want — hence their inability to make specific demands.

The dystopia often imagined in the world of artificial intelligence—in which computers somehow take on a life of their own and come to rule mankind—has actually happened in the world of finance. The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own, beyond human control. The people flow into and out of them but have only incidental effect on their direction and behavior. The firms may not be intent on evil; they aren't intent on anything except short-term profits: they're insensible.

Stop and think once more about what has just happened on Wall Street: its most admired firm conspired to flood the financial system with worthless securities, then set itself up to profit from betting against those very same securities, and in the bargain helped to precipitate a world historic financial crisis that cost millions of people their jobs and convulsed our political system. In other places, or at other times, the firm would be put out of business, and its leaders shamed and jailed and strung from lampposts. (I am not advocating the latter.) Instead Goldman Sachs, like the other too-big-to-fail firms, has been handed tens of billions in government subsidies, on the theory that we cannot live without them. They were then permitted to pay politicians to prevent laws being passed to change their business, and bribe public officials (with the implicit promise of future employment) to neuter the laws that were passed—so that they might continue to behave in more or less the same way that brought ruin on us all.

If Goldman Sachs is going to change, it will be only if change is imposed upon it from the outside—either by the market's decision that it is no longer viable in its current form or by the government's decision that we can no longer afford it.

I feel very lucky to have entered the conservative movement when I did, back in the 1980s and 1990s. I was working at National Review, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. The role models in front of us were people like Bill Buckley, Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, Russell Kirk and Midge Decter.

These people wrote about politics, but they also wrote about a lot of other things: history, literature, sociology, theology and life in general. There was a sharp distinction then between being conservative, which was admired, and being a Republican, which was considered sort of cheesy.

The Buckley-era establishment self-confidently enforced intellectual and moral standards. It rebuffed the nativists like the John Birch Society, the apocalyptic polemicists who popped up with the New Right, and they exiled conspiracy-mongers and anti-Semites

The majority of medieval cities and towns were founded between 11th and 14th centuries often for defensive purposes. Medieval cities and towns were often founded near castles or manors of feudal lords and near monasteries as well as on other attractive locations like near the woods (for firewood), shores of rivers and seas, and near the ruins of Antique cities where could have been found building material.

By seizing the Republican presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night,

Rarely if ever has a party seemed to come apart so visibly. Rarely, too, has the nation been so on edge about its politics.

They fear their party is on the cusp of an epochal split — a historic cleaving between the familiar form of conservatism forged in the 1960s and popularized in the 1980s and a rekindled, atavistic nationalism,

Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.