As promised in my last post:

Interesting piece on how climate change may have affected the rise of the Assyrian Empire, and contributed to its collapse as well.  However, the scientists are so hyperventilating about these environmental factors causing the rise and decline that it's a bit embarassing, I think.  Natural scientists ought to work with historians to learn about the complexities of causality in human history.  Maybe one day they will.

A wide-ranging reflection on everything that has happened since 1989, and how that has affected not just Geopolitics, but US domestic politics as well.  

This is a good piece too, though I think it underplays the ingredient of ethno-nationalism, anti-semitism, and general racism among the populists. 

A bracing piece on some of the pieties of education--I confess to thinking there's a lot here, at least a lot that needs to be confronted by education reformers.  Too much testing, for starters. 

A book review about "golden rice," a kind of rice that was developed--using genetic modification techniques--to include b-carotine, "a vitamin A precursor that occurs in other parts of the rice plant, in the grain, would facilitate the delivery of the vitamin to children in Africa and Southeast Asia, whose main diet is rice." It was a complicated and turbulent roll-out.  It's still quite messy.  Overall, a really interesting small glimpse into the fraught world of how we develop new foods.  I recommend this review because while the reviewer clearly has a view on these matters, his view is clear enough to allow you to see it as a view.  Worth your consideration.

A year out from the 2020 election is a good time to educate yourself on polling and how it works, what it can do and cannot do, and how much trust to put in polls and how to see how they embed judgments that are reasonably contestable.  Nate Silver is doing good work on this stuff at 538, offering a kind of on-line tutorial and ongoing assessment of polling.  This piece is really helpful, or at least it seems so to me.  As an amateur, I learned a lot from it that will help me in coming months, and I bet you might as well.  

Enjoy!