Newmark's Door

"The Secrets of New York's Best Bagel"

Quite interesting discussion by the co-owner of Utopia Bagel. (13-minute video.)

Related: "How Many Bagels Does It Take to Keep a Place in Business?" (NY Times, possibly gated.)

"Deebo Samuel Isn’t a Wide Receiver or a Running Back. He’s a Skeleton Key."

He surely is someone to see.

"St. John’s Lou Carnesecca is college basketball’s most priceless treasure"

Nice story on Looie, 97 years young.

“I love it so much,” Carnesecca says, “that I would have coached for nothing.”

"For the ones, who don't know the internet."

"Popular Internet Acronyms".

"Life in a Northern Town"

Dream Academy.

A Hey A Ma Ma Ma

Hey Ya

"Something's Coming On"

Live at Woodstock,, Joe Cocker.

"An Expert Explains Why All Your Classic Rock Heroes Are Selling Their Catalogs"

Because the market looks like it's peaking?

"How many lives has bioethics cost?"

I think we need fewer bioethicists and we need to less from the ones we have.

"Interstellar Travel is Hard"

A short and simple possible resolution to the Fermi Paradox.

"Dear Conservatives, Elon Musk is Not Your Friend"

Among several good reasons, Musk is an exemplar of crony capitalism.

"Why bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme"

I've not spent much time on the Bitcoin controversy--world-saver or fraud?--but this seems convincing at first glance.

"Capitalists: Paying for the Rope to Hang Them"

Awful.

Lenin famously said that capitalists would sell the rope that Communists would use to hang capitalists. But it turns out his imagination failed him: who knew that capitalists would pay for the rope with which the revolutionary left will kill capitalism.

"Exposing the Lie of Israel Apartheid"

That it is a lie seems obvious to anybody who spends a little time looking at the facts. But that's in shorter supply these days.

"Why is the placebo effect getting worse, but only in America?"

Piece argues that the placebo effect is not, as is commonly thought, a "physiological healing process triggered by belief or expectation".

"The Imbecile King Who Put His Foot On The Gas Pedal"

That would be Charles II of Spain.

"Why are meetings so bad?"

Excellent question that Tyler Cowen tries to answer.

I'd add one possibility that Tyler hints at in his #7, but I don't think states as forcefully as he should: a lot of people really like to hear themselves talk.

[Glenn] Reynolds's Laws

A pretty good, concise guide to modern politics and policy-making. Sample:

Reynolds’ Second Law
“The more a government wants to run its citizens’ lives, the worse job it will do at the most basic tasks of government.”

"When a Nurse asks you to rate your pain on a scale of 1-10, never say 10+. Miscellaneous"

Sensible. And also offers a sensible reason for why they ask what I have thought was a pretty silly question.

"The death of behavioral economics"

I, for one, won't miss it.

"Stocks Are Great for the Very Young — and the Very Old"

A perspective I hadn't seen before.

Conventional investing wisdom says that the older you get, the less of your financial assets should be in the stock market. One frequently heard justification is that stocks rise reliably in the long run but can fluctuate a lot in the short run and that if you’re old, you don’t have time to recover from a bear market.

Both parts of that formula are problematic. 

"The Best Thing I Ever Done"

16-minute video about an institution in Brooklyn--"The Holy Grail of Classic New York–Style Pizza": Di Fara pizza. (Which you can now get delivered to your door anywhere in the U.S. courtesy of the miracle that is Goldbely.com. We enjoyed our Di Fara pizza very much.)

"The Supreme Court Confronts the Administrative State"

A whole lot of important Supreme Court cases coming up. Here are some comments on two of them.

"A ‘contrarian’ idea: Not all good things should be mandatory"

Amen to this.

Why do some people have trouble with the idea that some things that are good should not be made mandatory?

Vaccines are the obvious example today.

"California Wants to Double Its Taxes"

I say, go for it. Let a thousand flowers bloom. (Just so long as North Carolina doesn't try it.)

More: "Democrats propose California universal healthcare, funded by new income, business taxes" and "How High Will California's Taxes Go Before There's No One Left To Tax?"

"The Great Epstein Cover-up, Part I"

I wish we still had curious, objective, independent journalists to try to answer some of these questions.

Part two is here and relates some interesting coincidences:

The feds not only did not move Epstein to a super-maximum security prison as some observers recommended, but they also did this:

— The day before Epstein died, he was taken off suicide watch.

— Against orders, his cellmate transferred elsewhere, leaving Epstein completely alone in his cell.

— All the cameras on Epstein’s floor were mysteriously broken.

— Even the footage of his earlier suicide attempt had been mistakenly erased and the backup footage destroyed “as a result of technical errors,” according to assistant U.S. attorneys Jason Swergold and Maurene Comey.

"The real meaning of ‘Let’s go, Brandon’"

"It's not a slur, nor is it offensive or just about Biden - it's saying 'we see through your spin'".

"Controversies, Bitterness and the Mythology Behind the NFL's Greatest Play"

That, of course, would be the Immaculate Reception.