Here are a few pieces from around the web that I've been enjoying this week:

A nice piece reflecting on the Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic of Iran.  What has it accomplished, and how is it doing?  (Added bonus for me is that it quotes one of UVA's most respected now deceased faculty, Ruhi Ramazani.)  I'd love to see a piece like this on the US these days.

A Piece from the FT on how the "age of the expert policymaker is coming to an end."  It's a bit ironic that the Financial Times is arguing this.  But it makes some interesting points, such as this: "Where the conflation of the expert and the policymaker did real damage was not to policy but to expertdom itself. It compromised the experts’ most prized asset — their independence."

This piece from Our World in Data (a cool site, check it out) touches on one of the most interesting facts about our world, one just a bit larger than the individual human's timescale, namely that the human population has massively boomed over the past two centuries, but is now very quickly going to stabilize, and perhaps begin a slow decline.  There's a lot to say here and I'd recommend this book as a way of getting into it, too.  Suffice to say, we're at a strange time in human history.  This is a theme we should all be paying a great deal more attention to.

Fun piece on the ancient demographics of Europe--worth attending to as well.  Short story?  The population of the place that is known as the birthplace of the ideas of racial purity and ethnonationalism was never racially pure nor ethnically coherent.  Or perhaps it's just better to say those categories are ridiculous from the get-go.

Anyway, that's all for today.