Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. A Rare Freak Out

Tim Worstall, writing in The Critic, argues that it makes no sense to panic about China’s alleged monopoly on rare earths:

Do not allow yourself to get confused by China having 40 per cent or whatever of rare earth reserves. Reserves are something made by humans — deposits are what God’s Friday afternoon engineer strew about the place. And rare earths are neither rare nor earths, and they are nearly everywhere. The biggest restriction on being able to process them is the light radioactivity the easiest ores (so easy they are a waste product of other industrial processes — monazite say) contain. If we had rational and sensible rules about light radioactivity — alas, we don’t — then that end of the process would already be done.

2. Peter Drucker Understood AI

Peter Drucker, the most influential student of business management, belonged to an age before algorithms and data lakes. Yet his belief – that a “functioning society” was one where business, government, and the social sector worked together to enable humans to thrive – offers a useful lens on AI. Michael Kelly, the head of the Drucker Institute Claremont Graduate University, asks: what would Drucker say now?

Drucker defined productivity not as doing more, but as enabling people to contribute meaningfully. AI should amplify human capability, not replace judgment. In healthcare, for example, AI should process vast data sets so clinicians can focus on patients. If we are to achieve the massive AI-driven productivity gains economists predict, we must be able to balance machine efficiency with human judgment and empathy.

3. When I First Exclaimed, Hello!

Pilita Clark recalls the first time she used an exclamation mark in an email: “Possibly around the time I sent my first emoji, I caved. ‘Hello!’ I started writing to colleagues. ‘That’s fantastic news!’ ‘Thanks!’” It turns out there is substantial research on this workplace tick:

Littering work emails with this problematic piece of punctuation does raise the risk of being judged less adept at analytical thinking and less powerful, which doubtless matters if you work for a Wall Street bank or a London law firm. But crucially, the research shows you will not be deemed less competent. Also, you will seem more warm and likeable, and these findings apply to everyone, regardless of gender, so female exclaimers need not worry about being judged more harshly than any male counterpart. Likewise, men harbouring urges to be more exclamative should feel free to submit.

4. The Massive, Efficient Data Center

In a great “explainer” essay about how data centers work, Andy Masley details what ought to be an obvious point: a data center’s huge appetite for electricity is a model of efficiency. He elaborates:

The data center is highly energy optimized for dealing with huge numbers of computer programs from lots of people at once, much more optimized than any home computer. The reason it’s using so much more energy is that hundreds of thousands of people are using it at once, not that it’s wasteful with the energy it uses. Data centers are maybe the single most energy efficient buildings we have created in terms of how much energy they use relative to how many people are interacting with them at once. The data center seems bad only because it concentrates these tasks in a single physical location.

5. Leaning Out

Katy Waldman is not impressed by the latest crop of books about women in the workplace. Writing in The New Yorker, Waldman offersa long, reflective review of how both the literature and the thinking have evolved:

The feminist self-help industry, professing to foreground meaning and purpose, has instead become a mirror in which our financialized society admires its reflection. The irony of this capture is that imperatives such as “bring your whole self to work” are now issued by people who seem to have no idea what a whole self is. In their world, which is also ours, selfhood has degraded into taste, preferences, demography, and outlays of attention and money. It is interpreted by market researchers with the help of algorithms and large language models; it has little to do with our inner lives, imaginations, or souls.

6. The Future of College Town, USA

When Kyla Scanlon returned to visit her alma mater, Western Kentucky University, she realized that Bowling Green, like many American college towns, is destined for decline:

Even if colleges fixed their cost and value proposition tomorrow — even if tuition dropped and job prospects improved — there would still be fewer students to fill seats. We are hitting peak 18-year-old, and the decline is just beginning…America is facing its next Rust Belt moment — but it’s not our steel mills shutting down, it’s our education mills. The local impact could be the same: entire regions hollowed out, communities that feel abandoned, and another generation left behind by the very institutions that promised them a future.

The piece offers an extraordinary chart that shows how declining enrollment at WKU doesn’t mean students are going elsewhere. It means they’re opting out of school.

Websites Worth Reading

Import AI: Anthropic co-founder’s blog

Argentina’s Superpower Potential: Visually rich essay on Uncharted Territory

HLG

The Massive, Efficient Data Center