Monthly Roundup #43: June 2026

Your monthly hit of all the things that are fit to print without a better place to live. Today is election day here in New York City, so again a reminder that if you are a registered Democrat and live in NY-12 today is the final day to vote for Alex Bores for Congress, and as per my argument yesterday that this matters a lot for ensuring we have a sensible Congressional response to AI. RIP Five Thirty Eight ABC and Disney completely take down Five Thirty Eight and all its articles, after telling Nate Silver they would refuse to sell it to him at any price because Nate had criticized their management of the brand. Nate Silver took this opportunity to reminisce and tell some stories about the old website, and the reasons the path of not seeking revenue and working with an entity too big to care ultimately doomed them. ‘What a bunch of assholes,’ indeed. I can grudgingly accept this sort of thing when it maximizes profits and the amount is meaningful, but this is different. Jack: This sort of digital arson is so frustrating. Pretty sure Dante had a place in mind for rights-holders who destroy valuable archives. Patrick McKenzie tries to justify this as it costing effort to keep a website afloat, and I do get that this is a thing, but in this case not so much. RIP Books Arnold Kling says we read fewer books because we should read fewer books, because alternatives have improved and opportunity costs are higher. Sounds right. I read a lot, but little of it is books. I’d like to read and review more books, but opportunity costs end up being too high. Dad books, as in serious nonfiction books especially ones that teach you about history or how things work, are in freefall. Kling is presumably right that this is due to superior alternatives. The danger is that substitution is largely instead into worse products, but mostly I don’t think the dads retained all that much from those books. I continue to be torn on whether my failure to read more books is a mistake. Bad News Texas BB