This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Bloom County — Berkeley Breathed is making an old man very nostalgic for simpler times when comics weren't free, but beer was very, very cheap and pubs weren't reading-unfriendly raucous mini casinos - I'm a Boinger!:
  
• Why be nonbinary? — Robin Dembroff in Aeon: For all the huffing about how gender is just body parts, no one in practice holds the identity view of gender. If gender is just reproductive features and nothing more, it makes no more sense to insist that people must look, love or act in particular ways on the basis of gender than it would to demand that people modify their behaviour on the basis of eye colour or height.
• Peter Mares on why falling house prices are a good thing — for the utterly unGoogleable folk at .id: When home-owners make a capital gain, or pass on that gain to their children, the windfall goes completely untaxed. What is more, the value of a private residence has almost zero impact on the owner’s entitlement to government benefits, like the aged pension. This encourages us to treat housing as a financial asset above its primary function in providing a home. It encourages us to over-invest in housing and, as a nation, take on dangerously high levels of household debt. It encourages us to use housing inefficiently. There are around 1.5 million more homes in Australia’s capital cities that have two spare bedrooms and 560,000 homes with three or more. Shifting from stamp duty to a broad-based property tax—as well as reforming negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount—could help ameliorate some of these problems. It could also help make housing fairer.
• The One Thing I Dislike About My Introversion — Sophia Dembling in Psychology Today: I often feel like I have nothing to say. Introverts are well-known for eschewing small talk. I am no different, but it’s not just that I dislike it. It’s that after about three exchanges, I’ve exhausted my capacity for it. Then, as the conversation awkwardly trails off, I feel foolish and inept. I'm not sure what to think about this. In deep discussions, I have plenty to say — I have to cut myself off sometimes for fear of dominating the conversation. But for whatever reason, I run out of small talk quickly, and the resulting silence is neither warm nor welcoming. It's just weird.