William Zinsser taught writing at Yale, then wrote the book that has fixed more bad writing than every English class combined. Here are 10 cuts from "On Writing Well" that instantly make your writing twice as strong. 1) Delete every word doing no work

Now that everyone can see firsthand the success of congestion pricing in NYC, looking back on the environmental review process feels even more absurd. 4,000 pages and 3 years of review to study the environmental impact of… using cameras and prices to reduce traffic.

Dignity.

I’d rather teach my children to read all the amazing books in the world than write papers no one reads.

"So command exists but with obedience." -George Eliot, *Middlemarch*, p. 615.

All of these were reported over the past month: • A new pancreatic cancer drug, daraxonrasib, that roughly doubles survival in late-stage disease • A precision lung cancer drug, lorlatinib, that kept 55 percent of patients progression-free after 7 years, versus 3 percent on the old drug • A prostate cancer drug, talazoparib, that halves the risk of progression • An endometrial cancer drug, dostarlimab, where 58 percent of patients hadn't progressed after 4 years, versus 16 percent on chemo alone • An early-detection blood test, the NHS Galleri test, that quadrupled cancer detection but missed its main goal • An mRNA cancer vaccine that halved the risk of melanoma recurrence when added to Keytruda • The most effective weight loss drug so far, retatrutide, which cut body weight by about 28 percent • The first in vivo gene editing therapy, which cut hereditary angioedema attacks by 87 percent from a single injection • A one-time gene edit, VERVE-102, that lowered LDL cholesterol by 62 percent • A feat of pharmaceutical synthesis that raised enlicitide's manufacturing yield 14-fold using engineered enzymes • A functional cure for hepatitis B, bepirovirsen, that cleared the virus in about 20 percent of patients • The discovery that human cells can swap chromosome-sized DNA through nanotubes • An ancestor of CRISPR, VIPR, found in bacteriophages, that silences genes without cutting DNA • A preventive Covid-19 pill, ensitrelvir, that cut symptom risk by 67 percent after exposure • The first PROTAC drug, vepdegestrant, which destroys a disease-causing protein rather than blocking it Every month, Niko and I write a round up digging into the latest news in biotech and medicine, and this month's was astonishing. We share some thoughts on what's responsible for this progress and what it means for science in the future.

0.3% of the water consumed by US golf courses last year

"Vote blue (or red) no matter who" is a bad heuristic; it's good to have some standards, otherwise you tend to be the sucker in the bet over the long run.

Excellent new book from @iealondon on the morality of liberalism and markets. The PDF version is zero-price. HT @ismurray iea.org.uk/publications/on-m…

Tornado Warning including Downers Grove IL, Elmhurst IL and Lombard IL until 8:30 PM CDT

In 1999, Europeans could begin buying sunscreen with bemotrizinol, an effective and safe ingredient to protect from skin cancer. The FDA just got around to approving it on Tuesday. @PostOpinions washingtonpost.com/opinions/…

A dozen eggs is now 6.8% of the average hourly wage, close to the lowest ever

RT @JessicaBRiedl: A perk of being politically tribeless is being able to declare that Donald Trump, Ken Paxton, and Graham Platner are all…

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations turns 250 this year. CEI’s Ryan Young (@RegoftheDay) reflects on a recent National Association of Scholars panel on Smith’s economic ideas and his role as a communicator and political strategist. cei.org/blog/adam-smiths-wea…

Do the populist thing and cut the tariffs!

Hot take: The president should stop doing things (tariffs, wars) that make prices go up for everyone

This extended thread by @PhilWMagness is important in at least a couple of contexts. First, it shows how academic malpractice, this time from Quinn Slobodian, gets done (and one way to confront and debunk it). Second, it shares deep truths about the actual work of Ludwig von Mises, one of the great cosmopolitan liberals of the past century. Mises was so far ahead of his time in terms of race and gender it's still staggering--and particularly offensive to see him slandered as a racialist.

CEI is proud to announce economist Donald J. Boudreaux as the recipient of the 2026 Julian L. Simon Memorial Award. Join us September 23 at the Library of Congress as we celebrate American Treasures with keynote speaker @MickEbeling and emcee @lmchervinsky. cei.org/news_releases/cei-an…

Texas cops fired dozens of tear gas grenades into an innocent woman's home. They smashed windows, wrecked her fence and drove through her front door. Her daughter's dog went deaf & blind. Then the city left her with the bill. Six years later, her saga is finally over. A thread.

The impulse to demand that executive power get used to solve every single perceived problem is the number one thing eroding American democracy