Reading List 07/11/26 • Adults living with their parents, Samsung’s profits, Native American data centers, Puerto Rico’s electricity grid, and more.

Reading List 07/04/26 • Households without homeowners insurance, crackdowns on AI chip smuggling, Japan’s two electrical frequencies, Meta’s AI compute business, and more.

The Fall and Rise of Screwworm

Reading List 06/27/26 • Trump refuses to sign a housing bill, the high cost of US-made doors, slow trucking, why we stopped making new land, and more.

US Subways Build Too Many Cross Passages

Reading List 06/20/26 • A new housing bill, General Motors joining the grid-scale battery game, skepticism about data center delays, solid-state air conditioning, and more.

Converting Coal Plants to Natural Gas

Reading List 06/13/2026 • Homes being built on top of libraries, Patriot missile manufacturing, an effort to construct new US coal plants, a tunnel between the US and Russia, and more.

Biological Evolution and Information Acquisition

Reading List 06/06/26 • Chatbots replacing realtors, Chinese synthetic diamonds, Australian batteries, Meta’s data center tents, and more

How Long Does It Take to Plan a Bridge?

Reading List 05/30/26 • A California chemical leak, weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear reactor startups, a startup that will clean your house to get robot training data, Blue Origin’s rocket explosion, and more.

Where Are the Economies of Scale in Homebuilding?

Reading List 05/23/26 • Squatter removal services, Apple finding uses for defective chips, process heat use in California, the brewing Colorado River crisis, and more.

Reading List 05/16/26 • Tokyo’s cheap housing and expensive land, the House response to the Senate housing bill, an IED near an Alabama dam, Fervo’s IPO, and more.

Reading List 05/09/2026 • Trapped buildings, in-home data centers, cardboard military drones, Brightline’s potential bankruptcy, and more.

How Long Do We Wait For New Inventions? • Mostly not very long

Reading List 05/02/2026 • Chilling effects in the build-to-rent sector, how fast could robot manufacturing scale up, PJM’s new interconnection queue, the backlash against battery storage, and more.

How an Oil Refinery Works

Reading List 04/25/26 • Transformer steel manufacturing, textile engineering, bringing power plants online quickly, infrasound, and more.

Construction Costs Rarely Fall

Reading List 04/18/2026 • A quadruped welding robot, the China Shock 2.0, transformer startups, China’s mysteriously moving satellites, and more.

Reading List 04/11/2026 • Is the Strait of Hormuz open yet, building code cost benefit analysis, Intel joining Terafab, sponge cities, and more.

Helium Is Hard to Replace

Reading List 04/04/2026 • Aluminum disruptions, the EV rust belt, the ongoing transformer shortage, SpaceX’s IPO, and more

Information and Technological Evolution

The Age of the Amplifier

Reading List 03/21/26 • Damage to the Ras Laffan LNG facility, housing bubble risks, North Korea’s naval production, Bezos’ $100 billion for manufacturing automation, and more.

How Much Computing Power is in a Data Center?

Reading List 03/14/26 • Closure of the Strait of Hormuz, banning build-to-rent homes in the US, Honda’s EV losses, Travis Kalanick’s new company, Corpus Christi’s water crisis, and more.

The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated Home

Reading List 03/07/2026 • Data centers disconnecting from the grid, solar PV efficiency records, repairs for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Ford’s EV missteps, former OpenAI CTO’s new startup.

A History of Operation Breakthrough

Reading List 02/28/26 • LA permitting costs, trickle-down housing, Panasonic stops making TVs, robotaxi remote operators, geothermal progress.

Reading List 02/21/26

Is the Future “AWS for Everything”?

Reading list 02/14/26

Trends in US Construction Productivity

Reading List 02/06/2026

Reading List for 01/31/2026

On Technologies vs. Commodities

Reading List 01/24/26

Do Commodities Get Cheaper Over Time?

Reading List 1/10/2026 • Waymos as kid shuttles, naval reactors for data centers, welder’s anthrax, flood buyouts, and more.

How Did TVs Get So Cheap?

Reading List 01/03/2026 • Automated code checkers, meranti wood, shifting snowfall patterns, launching spacecraft with bullwhips, and more.

Should US homebuilders emulate Sweden?

How Accurate Are Learning Curves?

Reading List 12/20/25 • Tesla’s robotaxi crash reports, a fusion startup merger, the decline of US injection molding, Wyoming’s snow fences, and more

How Bell Labs Won Its First Nobel Prize