1. The $6 Million Drug Claim (healthcare, NYT) New treatments for rare diseases are changing the lives of patients, but the price can reach millions of dollars for a single person. 2. How Guilty Should You Feel About Your Vacation? (climate, NYT) 3. What Happens When War Is Outlawed by Louis Menand (politics, TNY) 4. Flora sapiens (can plants think?) by Emma Marris (science) 5. What U.S. Cities Facing Climate Disaster Risks Are Least Prepared? (climate, CityLab)
1. The Prince and the Figurehead by John Nerst (social studies) Just like it’s obvious that our selective stupidity is just that — selective — it’s equally obvious to me that we don’t do this with full-on intentionality. We aren’t all sociopaths. We don’t typically get a full range of possible interpretations listed in our mind, think about it and then decide to go with a dishonest pick. 2. Tackling climate change with blockchain by Peter […]
1. Seeking Big A.I. Advances, a Startup Turns to a Huge Computer Chip (AI innovation) also here: To Power A.I., Start-Up Creates a Giant Computer Chip 2. What if aging weren’t inevitable, but a curable disease? by David Adam (aging) 3. From Fringe to Core: The ‘Green’ Economy Grows Up $2.1 trillion: Aggregate financial impact of climate-related business opportunities recently identified by 225 of the world’s largest companies 4. Greta Thunberg’s attackers are morally bankrupt, […]
1. Outside Hong Kong, the Silence Is Deafening by Tyler Cowen (politics) 2. The Legal Clause That Makes Brexiteers Furious—And Why They Have a Point by Tom McTague (politics) 3. The Anthropocene Is a Joke. On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch by Peter Brannen (climate) 4. The History of the World: Every Year by Ollie Bye (history) 5. US health care is literally killing people by Tim Harford (healthcare)
The burning Arctic – Scientists are tracking an “unprecedented” number of fires burning north of the Arctic Circle in Greenland, Russia, Canada, and Alaska after a record summer heatwave. By one estimate, the fires released more carbon dioxide than Sweden’s entire annual emissions in June alone. It’s the kind of feedback loop that we’re likely to see more of as global temperatures continue to rise: a heat wave dries out tundra, then fires release huge amounts of CO2, further […]
1. Singapore’s Ambassador: ‘Our Laws Are for Us to Make’ (Singapore) 2. Content pricing in the age of the digital-native generation (publishing) We identify two optimal content-medium pricing strategies: (i) the publisher offers information goods or content only in the digital medium under some market conditions, and (ii) under other market conditions, the publisher offers a choice of a bundle of the digital and the physical mediums or only the digital medium. Interestingly, we find […]
Mercury is a big health hazard. I have recently posted on airborne mercury-containing nanoparticles. This article by Ed Yong is a good reminder that marine organisms we consume are still the main source of mercury. Released by coal-burning power plants and other industries, mercury—a toxic metal—circulates in the atmosphere, enters the ocean, worms up the food web and, via the seafood we eat, ends up in our bodies. For decades mercury in seafood has been […]
Climate 1. A Quarter of Humanity Faces Looming Water Crises 2. Humans versus Earth: the quest to define the Anthropocene 3. ‘Environmental Footprints’ Tend to Underestimate Resource Use 4. A Heatwave in Greenland (stunning photos)
1. How Climate Change Could Trigger the Next Global Financial Crisis 2. Tomorrow’s Gods: What is the future of religion? 3. The Invention of Money by John Lanchester 4. American Wealth Is Broken by Maura Cheeks 5. The Human Cost of Amber by Katharine Gammon 6. Imagining all the reasons you might not make time for your book by Grant Snider
1. AI and the intellectual debt: The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking by Jonathan Zittrain 2. China has more companies on Fortune Global 500 list than the US (if you include Taiwan). Chinese companies, however, underperformed when it came to profitability 3. When, exactly, did the astronaut set foot on the moon? No one knows 4. Moody’s Buys Climate Data Firm, Signaling New Scrutiny of Climate Risks 5. Pop culture has fixated on the Manson […]
Oragious 