Our lead piece is about how ugly buildings hold back development: not by turning locals against construction but by alienating people who live far away.
Print subscribers received the full edition a few weeks ago. The full issue is available online today, except for the print-exclusive letters, classifieds, games, and cocktail recipe. Beyond Beauty In My Backyard, the issue contains pieces on:
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Ugly buildings don’t actually cause NIMBYism. People oppose new buildings near them even if they look traditional, and restrictive zoning predates modernism by decades. Instead, explains Samuel Hughes, ugliness gives rise to NITBYism: Not In That Backyard – opposition to development from people who live nowhere near it. For centuries, Western cities demolished and rebuilt themselves with little resistance. Then, in the 1960s and 70s, just as modernist architecture became dominant, historic preservation spread almost everywhere. If people are to accept redevelopment, they need to believe that new buildings will be better than what they replace.
Humans collectively spend millions of hours each year diligently sorting their trash, separating bottles and fishing crumpled plastic out from soggy cardboard. They do this because they believe in recycling. This may be important to feel virtuous. But it doesn’t help the environment, argue Alex Chalmers and Rob Wiblin. Modern landfill is cheap and perfectly clean: well-run sites are sealed with clay and plastic, collect contaminated water, and capture the methane they produce. Meanwhile, a cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times before it becomes greener than a thin plastic one, and a ceramic mug takes around 1,000 uses to beat a disposable polystyrene cup.
There are many headlines like the following: ‘Scientists discover germ that can eat plastic.’ Headlines like this are written about bacteria that can detect landmines, and about microbes that can extract metals from ore. These discoveries sound remarkable. But after the initial burst of excitement, little seems to come of them, and often you never hear about the germs again. The reason, explains Niko McCarty, is an American regulatory decision from the 1980s that regulated engineered microbes as industrial chemicals. Since then, hundreds of proposed microbes have tried to get approval, and all but one have been rejected.
It is easy to underrate the astonishing success of modern medicine. A heart attack fifty years ago would almost certainly have killed you. So would Type 1 diabetes, and childhood leukemia. All are now manageable diseases. But for all its successes, there are many more diseases that could be treated but remain unsolved, writes Saloni Dattani. Malaria vaccines were developed in the 1990s but took decades to reach children. Clinical trials obstruct many promising cures. And as drug discovery accelerates, our regulatory infrastructure looks increasingly out of date. Medicine is much better than it once was, but much worse than it could be. This piece was based on Saloni’s TED talk.
As well as transporting people, American buses are expected to reduce emissions, provide jobs, improve public spaces, create demand for American manufacturers, look good, improve equality, and much else. Each of these goals might be worthwhile, but pursuing them comes with trade-offs, explains Miriam Pinski. Prioritizing all of them often means that the simple mission of getting people from one place to another is neglected.
The standard way to treat disease is to identify the protein causing it and then somehow block it. Unfortunately, most human proteins are undruggable: chemists cannot find molecules to bind to them. But what if, instead of trying to block the protein, we could tell the body to stop making it? Jacob Witten explains how small interfering RNA, or siRNA, allows us to do that. Scientists have already managed to switch off genes in the liver with drugs that often work for months after one injection. The challenge now is to do the same for the brain, kidneys, lungs, muscles, and other organs.
Every single country in Southeast Asia was eventually conquered by a European power except Thailand. France and England could have easily defeated it in a war. To resist colonization, writes Derek Hopper, its royals had to outwit the imperialists. The royal family set out on a deliberate effort to convince potential colonizers that the country was a civilized and sovereign state in no need of foreign government. King Mongkut spoke English and received British dignitaries with cigars and wine, while his son Chulalongkorn standardized the language, fixed the borders, and created schools. Thailand still lost around 40 percent of its territory, but thanks to smart retreats and brilliant diplomacy, it never lost its independence.
Daycare provokes extreme reactions. Politicians present it as an investment that raises earnings, reduces crime, and could transform a child’s life. Rightwing commentators make the opposite argument, calling it traumatic and harmful. The truth is probably much more mundane than either of those views, conclude Phoebe Arslanagic-Little and Ellen Pasternack. Children’s cortisol levels do rise, but that doesn’t show their brains are damaged. Studies do show small educational benefits, but nothing like what is claimed by the optimists. There are many reasons to support daycare or not, but it won’t make a big difference to the course of the child’s life either way.
Most things are continuously improving. Horses aren’t one of them. Secretariat, the greatest horse ever to run, peaked over fifty years ago, when he won the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths. The reason horses don’t improve, writes Sophie Fessl, is the same reason why they are as good as they are: centuries of selecting a group of astonishing stallions from a tiny pool has dramatically reduced genetic variation, making racehorses far more vulnerable to harmful mutations. At least in the case of horses, we may have reached the upper limits of biology.
Some things get worse as countries get richer: pollution, deforestation, workplace safety. But many of these problems then disappear again once a further threshold of wealth is passed, a phenomenon known as Kuznets curves. Martin Gould and Koji Flynn-Do investigate whether the same thing will happen to farm animals. In some of the world’s richest countries, meat consumption has already started falling; in others it has not. But perhaps the amount of meat we eat is the wrong way to measure it. Wealthier countries adopt better standards, like pre-slaughter stunning and bans on gestation crates. If riches don’t make us eat less meat, at least they may make us eat it differently.
Before World of Warcraft, Roblox, or the metaverse, there was Habitat, the world’s first Massively Multiplayer Online game, built for the Commodore 64 in 1986, explains Virginia Postrel. It introduced many of the things we associate with video games today, like avatars and in-game purchases. It did this on a device that had 64 KB of memory and connections that could transmit just a few dozen characters per second.
A common objection when we write about beautiful buildings is: ‘beautiful for whom?’ And architectural tastes do differ from person to person. But they vary far less than people think, writes Robert Kwolek. The budding field of visual preference surveys tests people’s preferences for various architectural styles. In every survey ever conducted, 60 percent of respondents prefer traditional architecture, and often over 85 percent do. This preference holds across age, gender, politics, income, and nationality. Visual preference surveys show conclusively that almost everyone prefers certain styles over others. The question is why architects wholly disagree with them.
Events
We ran Invisible College, a week-long summer school in Cambridge for 18–22 year olds which included talks on spatial economics, beautiful data visualization, the origins of the Industrial Revolution, scientific fraud and bias, and robotic dexterity. If you want to be notified when we open applications for Invisible College 2027, you can register your interest now.
We celebrated the launch of Issue 24 with a party in Cambridge; had drinks with our subscribers in Sydney; and visited Brussels, where Simon Grimm gave a lecture about how Europe can catch up on AI.
Coming up: we’ll be in London on Saturday 3rd October for a Stripe Press pop-up. Join us for coffee, conversation, and to buy Stripe Press books – as well as picking up some limited-edition merch. RSVP here if you can make it.
We have subscriber-only events coming up in San Francisco, Washington, DC, and London. Sign up to the print magazine to get the details!
What we’ve been up to
Aria gave a lecture at Freedom Week about falling birth rates and will be advocating for monogamous marriage at Slutcon.
Ben wrote a summary of Samuel Hughes’ thought for his Substack and was on EconTalk to discuss the Glorious Revolution.
Dan moved onto a narrowboat currently moored in Little Venice.
Pieter wrote about how the Dutch are filling their gas wells with cement.
Rachel and Aria walked all the bridges in London from Hammersmith to Tower Bridge.
Ruxandra published an essay in the New York Times on why Phase I clinical trials are so difficult to start in the US. On her Substack she argued that the biggest barriers to AI transforming medicine are institutional and that the data center backlash is about a fear of a loss of agency. She’s also had her O-1 visa approved and will be moving to San Francisco.
Saloni released a podcast episode about GLP1s, Viagra, minoxidil and other drugs that have multiple benefits and whether there are many more of these hiding in plain sight. She also wrote a round up of what’s new in biology with Niko McCarty. In April, she did a TED talk which you can now watch online.
Sam discussed how economic growth and technological progress support human virtue and flourishing on The Sacred podcast.
Samuel gave talks at the Edington Fellowship, the Scrutopia Summer School, the Create Streets Summer School, and the Architecture of Home conference.
Simon was selected as a Rhine Group Fellow. He appeared on MTS and ETN to discuss European AI issues, and wrote about why AI front-runners are hard to catch up with.
Good perspective on engineering discipline. Moving fast only works when your feedback loops actually catch errors early. We explore systems architecture and modeling limits in our English section: https://gzambrano.substack.com/s/english
The NITBYism framing is the useful correction — the block often comes from people nowhere near the site, who just don't trust the replacement will beat what's there. The other half worth adding: winning that trust clears the political barrier, but the money, the builders and the 300k-a-year target are still waiting on the far side of consent. Beauty unlocks permission; it doesn't pour the foundations.