marginal revolution read out: Sunday assorted links
Follow into
Save into
Follow into
This episode of marginal revolution read out covers Sunday assorted links.
The first link is New London play about Keynes. The author points to a new London production called The Standard Of Living, running as a strictly limited season from September twenty-first to December twelfth, 2026. As the title suggests, the play appears to center on the economist John Maynard Keynes and questions of material well-being, though the available text gives only the title and dates, so the plot details remain thin.
The second link is Aphantasia, and looking at buildings, a personal essay by Hollis Robbins. Robbins writes that she has profound aphantasia, a complete absence of voluntary visual imagery, and she examines what that means for aesthetic theories of architecture. She describes working at The New Yorker decades ago and looking up at the Chrysler Building every day, loving its steel crown, yet being unable to call it to mind. She only learned the name for her condition in 2019, after reading a piece by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull. The essay argues that theories of beauty should not require recollection or picturing. Robbins works through Addison, Ruskin, Lessing, Kant, Hume, Scruton, and Kevin Lynch, and she criticizes a 2020 federal architecture survey that used carefully controlled photographs to justify a preference for classical buildings. Her core point is that millions of people appreciate beauty without being able to summon images of it, and that duration, time, and direct encounter matter as much as any remembered picture. The author's link title frames it as a piece about aphantasia and looking at buildings, and that is exactly the ground it covers.
Next is AI and job growth in Africa. The author includes this link with no additional comment, and the title indicates a piece on how artificial intelligence may affect job creation on the continent. It sits between the architecture essay and the political theory review as a reminder that the post's assorted links are genuinely assorted.
The fourth link is On Nussbaum, opera, and liberalism. It points to a Law and Liberty review by Alberto Mingardi of Martha Nussbaum's book The Republic of Love. Nussbaum argues that opera does political thinking by summoning the emotions that hold political communities together, and she reads Mozart as a philosopher of a gentler, more reciprocal Enlightenment, with the women of The Marriage of Figaro cooperating where the men compete. Mingardi finds the book valuable when it sends readers back to familiar scores, but he argues that Nussbaum's reading is selective. He points to the Count's prominent musical role, the famous duet of female rivalry in Figaro, and the strain of explaining Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte as consistent with a proto-feminist Mozart. The review also questions whether an order that requires the right emotions to be cultivated from above is really liberal. Mingardi leans on Ernst Gombrich's view that eighteenth-century music depicts the passions rather than expresses them, which would leave listeners the work of judging the characters rather than receiving a political myth. The author's label frames it as being about Nussbaum, opera, and liberalism, and the review stays on exactly that triangle.
The fifth link is Congress seeks to speed up energy permitting, from The New York Times. Brad Plumer reports that Republican and Democratic senators have struck a bipartisan deal to vote on the largest overhaul of federal permitting rules since the 1970s. The 417-page bill aims to speed up power plants, transmission lines, pipelines, and other energy projects at a moment when electricity demand is surging, especially from AI data centers. Republicans pushed for changes that would limit environmental lawsuits and narrow the reach of laws like the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Democrats sought to make it easier to build large transmission lines for wind and solar power and to prevent a president from unilaterally blocking projects. The White House supports the deal, which could help it pass the House. The author flags this as Congress seeking to speed up energy permitting, and the piece shows that frustration with delay now spans both parties.
The sixth link carries the wry title Teenager jobs have not disappeared altogether. The underlying New York Times report, by Paulina Villegas and Adriana Zehbrauskas, is about American high school students in Arizona who are buying, stealing, and selling guns destined for Mexican cartels. The reporters describe four traffickers aged sixteen to nineteen in west Phoenix who spend weekends in the Sonoran Desert shooting AR-15s and AK-style rifles, then sell weapons to cartel operatives based in the United States. The teenagers say they are motivated by money, status, and a sense of belonging, and they are not loyal to any single criminal group. U.S. officials and trafficking experts describe a growing network of high school students and young adults arming some of Mexico's most powerful cartels. The author's title makes the point in a darkly humorous way: teenage employment has not vanished, but one form it has taken is arms trafficking for organized crime.
The final link is An Antikythera field trip and investigation. The author closes with a pointer to what the title suggests is a firsthand visit and inquiry into the ancient Antikythera mechanism, the Greek astronomical device often called the world's first analog computer. Beyond that title, no article text is included here, so the link stands as an invitation to a historical and technical field trip.
Taken together, the links move from economic and cultural history to present-day policy and crime. The through-lines are not obvious, but that is the point of a Sunday assorted links post: a play about Keynes, an essay on the mind's eye, a debate about liberalism and opera, a congressional fight over energy, and a glimpse of a very dark teenage labor market.