As a young lawyer and trader in Manhattan in the 1990s, I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college. The world appears too big a place. Rather than fight the relentless indifference of the universe, many of my saner peers retreated to tending their small gardens. The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics — capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd. Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic drinking; the smartest libertarians, by contrast, had fewer hang-ups about positive law and escaped not only to alcohol but beyond it.

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How the 8086 processor handles power and clock internally (righto.com) One under-appreciated characteristic of early microprocessors is the difficulty of distributing power inside the integrated circuit. While a modern processor might have 15 layers of metal wiring, chips from the 1970s such as the 8086 had just a single layer of metal, making routing a challenge. Similarly, clock signals must be delivered to all parts of the chip to keep it in synchronization.

The Education of a Libertarian (cato-unbound.org) Peter Thiel shares the belief that politics is mostly futile, a conclusion he reached after years of activism. In particular, he believes that democratic politics is unlikely to bring about libertarian outcomes. Fortunately, politics is just one sphere of human life, and it’s possible, he argues, to create technologies that minimize its reach. Thiel describes a “deadly race” between politics and technology, in which human freedom is the prize. The goal of libertarian activism should not be to win in politics, he argues, but to escape it.