Wow, Friday night has become just another weeknight in terms of socialization.

I'm grateful to Jonathan for writing this and very pleased to publish it in Works in Progress – he does great work, and I like him and respect his views immensely. I have two thoughts in response. One is that I am not hugely compelled by people telling others what they should focus on. As long as you're not doing active harm to the world, it's fine to work on a less high-priority area than you could. Comparative advantage is not always easy to judge from outside and part of living a satisfying life is doing what you find most intrinsically interesting and rewarding. And entrepreneurship is *inherently* about working on things that other people underrate! There wouldn't be any opportunities for discovery if it was clear exactly what everyone should focus their time on. (I don't have much time for people who complain that a handful of EAs are worried about shrimp welfare either, unless they are actually hurting the shrimp.) Two: even if you concede Jonathan's argument that encouraging nice buildings and places does not instrumentally advance the cause of YIMBYism – we can agree to disagree – I think that it is a mistake to dismiss aesthetics as being trivial. People want beauty and pleasure in their lives, not just boxes to sleep and work in. Cities should be amazing places to be, and the way they look and feel is a big part of that. The greatest cities I have been to are Paris, London, Tokyo, and New York, all of which are breathtakingly beautiful cities in their own way, even though some of them create that beautiful whole from various ugly parts arranged well. I think this is often true of parts of London, where individually ugly buildings nonetheless combine to make a beautiful skyline or street. The best places, like inner Paris and lower Manhattan, combine beautiful streetscapes with individually-beautiful buildings. If you think too much about "units of housing" and not enough about which places people most want to live in and visit, you will miss a lot of what actually matters to people about the places they live and visit. It is a constant error to think that the "function" of buildings and cities does not include "being pleasant and looking nice". This is all obviously subjective, but so are lots of other important things that still benefit from some form of collective decision making – pollution, noise, public order, the provision of public goods. The interesting meta-question to me is what institutions allow for the best ways to make these decisions and resolve conflicts between people.

I am now a single-issue voter.

I always thought that the ancient Romans were tolerant about sexuality, until the rise of puritanical Christianity. Reading Kyle Harper, I learnt that this picture is not exactly false, but it is extraordinarily misleading: worksinprogress.co/issue/wer… - Sexual penetration of a free Roman man was severely punished, possibly by death. Consenting to penetration was also seriously punished. Lesbianism was not criminalised, but was regarded with contempt. - The one great subject of permissiveness was the penetration of enslaved people. Although relatively few people owned slaves, many prostitutes were enslaved and prostitution was ubiquitous, so coerced sex was widespread. - In some parts of the empire, many married women probably seem to have worn face veils in public. - There was not even theoretically a norm of male fidelity: although wives were required to be faithful to their husbands, the inverse was not even aspirationally true. - Early Christianity wrought a kind of revolution on ancient morality. All forms of sexuality apart from procreative sex within monogamous marriage were relentlessly and violently condemned, and even marital sex was allowed only rather grudgingly. In effect, the Christians extended to men the restrictions that had previously applied only to women. - To a limited extent, they also extended the protections previously enjoyed by free men to other groups of people. Although the early Christian record on slavery is mostly very poor, they did introduce the first laws against the forcible prostitution of slaves. Transgressors were to be arrested and sent to the public mines, ‘which is’, the law ran, ‘less of a punishment than that of a woman who is seized by a pimp and compelled to endure the filth of an intercourse that she did not will’. It is not clear how much behaviour actually changed in practice – the Christians were never able to get people to behave exactly as they wanted. But the change in official norms was revolutionary, and not quite the revolution I expected.

So basically, you can accept any rent a landlord asks for and then retrospectively claim you were desperate, and a tribunal will change your rent because some properties that aren't the same size or even in the same building are being advertised at a lower price.

The long march towards Total Judicial Communism continues. We have devolved price setting to a couple of former solicitors scrolling Zoopla. Madness. telegraph.co.uk/money/proper…

Huge thanks to our Issue 26 partners @meetgranola, @privy_io, @daylightco, @AISLE_Inc, @mishaglouberman, and SUN SET. Building something WIP readers would love? Get in touch: partnerships@worksinprogress.co

Exclusive: Microsoft cancels UK data centre deal with Nscale. Comes just as Nscale hopes to pull off a $35 billion IPO telegraph.co.uk/business/202…

What do a cutting-edge bone implant and Mrs Potts from Beauty and the Beast have in common? Both are made from porcelain, a material humans first made over 3,000 years ago and are still reinventing today. worksinprogress.co/issue/eve… We focus on advances in computing, but the world around us has been transformed just as much by materials science. And within this already underrated field sits an even more underrated material. Plenty of people have heard of semiconductors, but almost no one thinks about porcelain. For @WorksInProgressMag, @CharlesCMann wrote about its remarkable journey: - Porcelain is basically an ancient nanotechnology. 3000 years ago, Chinese potters found that firing a white clay called kaolin to around 1,200°C transformed it completely: its crystals get rebuilt, producing a material that is hard, dense, and sometimes translucent. Nobody knew why it worked at the time: they discovered it by trial and error. - Europeans prized porcelain immensely – but had no clue had to make it. When porcelain arrived in Europe in the 12th century, it was so superior to European ceramics that aristocrats called it "white gold." But despite attempting to reverse-engineer it, Europeans failed to create porcelain for centuries. - Fake it until you make porcelain. Böttger, an alchemist imprisoned in the early 1700s for falsely claiming to make gold, was set to work with a legitimate scientist on making porcelain. Remarkably, the scientist succeeded where others had failed for centuries, creating the first European porcelain cup. But he did not live to profit: ever the liar, Böttger claimed his discovery for himself. - Less slippery when wet. Innovation in materials science picked up again in the 20th century and continues to this day, producing Porcelain 3.0. Today, porcelain can be found across a surprising number of household objects: from kitchen countertops to tiles that become less slippery when wet, which also makes them safer. - The most futuristic use of all: researchers can now 3D-print porous porcelain scaffolds to repair damaged bone. The advantage is that blood vessels and bone cells grow into the scaffold’s tiny openings, while the scaffold slowly dissolves as new bone replaces it, allowing a bone-like natural structure to persist. Porcelain has already gone from fragile imperial teacups to artificial joints and scaffolds that help bone regrow. But its 3000 year long story is far from over: expect this underrated material to play new roles in everything from medicine to architecture in the coming decades!

I’ve never really been one to read or subscribe to magazines, but Works in Progress is making a pretty compelling case. The ideas, the writing, the design. All of it is so good. worksinprogress.co/print/