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UAE cabinet meeting room, via Camski . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at aluminum disruptions, the EV rust belt, the ongoing transformer shortage, SpaceX’s IPO, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.  War in Iran The world’s largest aluminum smelter in Bahrain was hit by an Iranian drone, bringing ...

Super Sport SS18 Glider yacht, via DesignBoom . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at plastic price jumps, crypto-backed mortgages, a proposed AI data center pause, US battery manufacturing, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran The disruption to oil and LNG supplies caused by the closure of the Strait of Horm...

Cargo ship Marine Angel navigating the Chicago River in 1953. Via History Calendar . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week: damage to the Ras Laffan LNG facility, housing bubble risks, North Korea’s naval production, Bezos’ $100 billion for manufacturing automation, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran Ras ...

Every day there’s some new story about the enormous amounts of investment in building AI data centers. The Wall Street Journal reports that, as a fraction of GDP, AI capital spending in 2026 alone will be more than was spent on the decade-long build-up of the national railroad system, federal expenditures to create the interstate highway system, or the entire Apollo program. Bloomberg reports that AI data center spending might reach as much as $3 trillion. The Electric Power Research Insti...

Port of Salalah in Oman on fire following an Iranian drone attack. Via OSINTdefender on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at 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. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access bec...

Chaoyang Park Plaza, Beijing. Via Lusca Fusca . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of what happened in infrastructure, buildings, and building things. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No newsletter this week, but I’m working on a longer essay about the history of Operation Breakthrough (a greatly expanded and more thorough version of an older essay ) that will be out next week. Housing Its obvious that getting housing ...

An upside-down model built by architect Antoni Gaudi, used to determine the shape of arches. Via Data Physicalization . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing A map of how home prices have shifted in the last year. Prices in the midwest and parts of the northeast are up, prices in the south are down. [ X ] ...

A theme running through my book is the idea that efficiency improvements, and the various methods for making products cheaper over time, have historically been dependent on some degree of repetition, on running your production process over and over again. Higher production volume means larger, more efficient factories. It means more opportunities to use dedicated, high-speed, continuous process production equipment, or to implement efficiency-improving methods like Design for Manufacturing or St...

The Chronicle of Georgia, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week: My book is a finalist for the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Book Prize . Housing The Atlantic has a piece on how difficult and user-unfriendly most smart home technology still is. This was true when Gizmo...

Books to be destructively scanned by Anthropic, via the Washington Post . Welcome to the reading list, a look at what happened this week in infrastructure, buildings, and building things. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items: No essay this week, but I’m working on a longer essay about US construction productivity that should be out next week. Sending the reading list a day early this week. Housing Goldman Sachs has...

Vertical boring machine, via Industrial History . Welcome to the Reading List, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Some housekeeping items: Continuing with the new reading list format this week, this time with a paywall ~1/3rd of the way down. I got some feedback that folks liked a little more analysis, so I’ve expanded that a bit more. As a reminder, this is intended to be a little bit more comprehensive than the older format...

A theory that has gained traction in the renewable energy space is that renewable energy sources like wind and solar are based on manufactured “technologies”, while fossil fuel energy sources like oil, coal, and natural gas are based on extracted “commodities”. Per this theory, technologies can take advantage of learning curves , and thus will continue to get cheaper as they’re deployed in larger and larger volumes; commodities , on the other hand, don’t have ...

Railcar launched ICBM, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Experimenting with a new format this week, with more links but with shorter descriptions. My intent here is to try and make the reading list somewhat more comprehensive : to make it closer to a survey of everything notable that happened in the world of buildings, infrastructure, and related topics, in addition to a list of interestin...

This American Enterprise Institute chart , which breaks down price changes for different types of goods and services in the consumer price index, has by now become very widely known. A high-level takeaway from this chart is that labor-intensive services (education, healthcare) get more expensive in inflation-adjusted terms over time, while manufactured goods ( TVs , toys, clothing) get less expensive over time. But there are many types of goods that aren’t shown on this chart. One example ...

Vertical farming operation in China, via Mao Ning on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at ALARA, OLED screens, bus stop frequency, Ozempic and airlines, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Is ALARA dead? Nuclear advocates have long railed against ALARA, the nuclear power safety requirement that demands radia...

The last several decades of technological progress have, in large part, been about finding more and more things we can do with semiconductors and the technology for producing them. Microchips have found their way into virtually every car, aircraft, appliance, and electronic device. Light-emitting diodes are steadily replacing older, less efficient methods of generating light (such as incandescent bulbs). Solar photovoltaic panels have become the most rapidly deployed energy source in history. Se...

Bubble chamber scanner, via Reddit . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at Waymos as kid shuttles, naval reactors for data centers, welder’s anthrax, flood buyouts, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. LA fridge law One annoying aspect of moving is that it’s often hard to coordinate your move to take place ex...