The new issue of Works in Progress, arriving with subscribers this week, is our best ever and packed with must-read pieces. Our lead essay is @RobinRivaton and @bswud on how China's cities, and the competition between them, have driven its rise to techno-industrial preeminence. It also includes: - @danwwang on Chinese and American second-tier cities, - @tylercowen on the food of Brazil, - @vpostrel on the invention of supermarkets, - @CharlesCMann on the discovery of porcelain, - @salonium on the myth of accidental scientific discovery, - Stephen Kotkin on Leninism's fatal flaw, - @owl_posting on biomedical hedge funds, - @PMArslanagic on the formula for lovable cities, - @pietergaricano on Ukraine as the future of war, - @PatRubenFitz on the Bronze Age Collapse, and - @SCP_Hughes on the social lives of hard-partying Victorian elites. Plus: love and shame in Ancient Rome, making mosquitoes extinct, the return of 1930s dating norms, and why Pakistan is home to the world's best architect. And our new crossword, our cocktail column, classifieds, and more! The new edition has had a massive design upgrade with beautiful, premium matte paper, a larger form factor, and bigger, clearer and more elegant typeography. It is a joy to read. Copies arrive with subscribers this week: subscribe now or by October 16th to get yours. worksinprogress.co/print/

A friend of mine had to do a 15 minute interview about his job, income, previous rental history, etc, in order to *view* a flat. Luckily for him, he has a well-paid job, has lived in England all his life, and an impeccable rental history. I feel bad for people who don't.

This year I stopped my @TheEconomist subscription after 20 years @WorksInProgMag is replacing it for my in terms of reading time The format of a weekly newspaper is tough to pull off in a world where news moves so quickly — a world of Substack, notifications pinging and daily updates It wouldn’t surprise me if The Economist eventually moves to more long form reports and content and less news over time

Intriguing ideas here about using AI in education. I have a suspicion that parents who do these things at home will be giving their kids an enormous advantage over their peers in schools that do not adopt these methods pretty soon.

The adventures of Pangram’s @max_spero_

Ben has for many years been the best analyst in tech. I’m very much looking forward to this new @stratechery + @stripe partnership. stratechery.com/2026/present…

Agree with this by @dsquareddigest. Trying to reduce the "supply" of barriers to growth without addressing the "demand" for them will not work. People want these regulations because they have reasonable fears about what will happen without them! backofmind.substack.com/p/th…

How can someone make a 921% return in 13 years while the market overall has delivered 117%? This book is an amazing insight into the mind and decisions of someone who did it.

Mike joining Works in Progress is a huge moment for us and marks the start of the next phase in our project. He is one of the most insightful, interesting and enjoyable to read writers anywhere, and his book, The Land Trap, is fantastic and one of the most "Works in Progress" non-fiction books written in years. He is the perfect person to help us produce model-based analysis of business, economics and finance, and great original reporting on everything from robotics and drones to the state of America's cities. Most of all I am excited about working with (another!) one of my best friends. I first met Mike when he was a student and declared afterwards that he was so impressive that I would buy stock in him if I could. It's taken 14 years, but this is one step better. Works in Progress has become harder work as it has grown, but it's amazingly fun and rewarding as well, not least because I get to do it with some of my favourite people in the world. As Mike says, we've seen incredible growth in our first year in print and we have extremely high hopes for 2027. Above all we have to make everything we do as excellent as it possibly can be. We're looking for journalists and other writers who are doing truly excellent work to join our team, so if that's you, watch this space.

Beers of this strength are almost invariably revolting – they usually taste bad and make drinking a much higher stakes business than it ought to be. 4%, the moderate's choice, is just very hard to beat.

I initially had the same reaction as these writers – the idea of a book being banned because the author has expressed support for a terrorist group is outrageous, as is the punishment of people for saying they support Palestine Action (or any other terrorist group). What I didn't realise was that Rooney has promised to donate her royalties to Palestine Action. It seems a lot less clear that you should be allowed to conduct business activity with the express purpose of raising money for a terrorist group. The books should be allowed to be sold, but the royalties should be withheld. I would not allow people to fundraise for violent Neo-Nazi or Islamist groups either. You could argue that Palestine Action should not be proscribed, but that is not the argument being made in this letter.

The Romans were a lot less sexually permissive than I used to think. Free men were permitted to rape slaves, including children, but extramarital sex between free men was punished, as was female infidelity. worksinprogress.co/issue/wer…

“The Simpsons” was a beloved animated sitcom that ran for ten legendary seasons and concluded in 1999. The show was celebrated for what was widely perceived as a near perfect run that wrapped before it wore out its concept and overstayed its welcome. Creator Matt Groening and showrunner James L. Brooks famously decided to bring the show to a conclusion after experiencing the negative audience reaction to the season 9 episode “The Principal and the Pauper,” in which it was revealed that the school’s principal was actually an impostor who had stolen the real Seymour Skinner’s identity. Brooks did not want to sully the show’s legacy by doing a bunch of weird episodes as the franchise slid into mediocrity and cultural irrelevance, so the writers and cast decided instead to go out on top and end things on a high note. However, because of its centrality in 90s pop culture, a long-running Internet joke is to pretend “The Simpsons” is still on the air, a premise that gets more absurd and deranged with each passing year. If this show were still producing new episodes, it would be in its 38th season now, and most of the voice cast would be in their 80s. The joke is to imagine how distorted this charming show would have become if it had been stretched out to more than 800 episodes. Comedy posters on “weird Twitter” used to try to top each other by making up terrible ideas for what modern episodes of the show might be like. For example, a viral 2012 tweet imagined an episode where Lady Gaga helps Lisa Simpson with her self esteem. In 2019, popular shitposter Megan Amram originated the premise of Bart Simpson becoming a men’s rights activist to protest a gender-swapped reboot of “Itchy and Scratchy.” But perhaps the most elaborate Internet “Simpsons” joke was a 2017 YouTube mockumentary “The Problem With Apu,” in which the comedian Hari Kondabolu ironically pretended to be offended by the charming and innocuous convenience store owner character Apu. Everyone thought this was hilarious, especially since the show had been off the air for nearly two decades when the mockumentary was released. So, Twitter ran with the joke by pretending to “cancel” Apu, and the viral gag memorably resulted in the character’s voice actor, Hank Azaria, recognizing the meme by promising never to perform the character again, which everybody thought was really funny since Azaria had been retired for years. Now, nearly a decade later, fans are pretending that the show — which has now been off the air longer than most people tweeting about it have been alive— has brought back the “cancelled” character with a new racially-appropriate voice actor. I actually don’t think this is that funny, and I kind of think the gag of pretending “The Simpsons” is still airing new episodes has overstayed its welcome, a mistake the actual show “The Simpsons” would never have made. If you haven’t seen this 1990s classic, which — and I cannot emphasize this enough — ended after 10 seasons in 1999, you can watch all the episodes on Disney+ (except the one with Michael Jackson that got pulled from streaming).

I am now a single-issue voter.

"the Tribunal determined the open market rent was" ...

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.