These are all worth your while, for sure.

Jill Lepore on the last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once.

Nice introduction to a collection of Julian Bond's writings.  I was privileged to have a glancing acquaintance with him at UVA, and he grew very fond of my son when he was a baby.  

Why do we knock on wood?

Somewhat opinionated (to put it mildly), but informative, view on the Homeric question.

A piece on some important recent research on social mobility and how it is related to your achievements in higher education.  And there's interesting research being done on graduate education for people not already in the upper-middle class.  

"I am struck by the fact that we often conceptualize human history in very simple terms," Akey says. "For example, we often imagine there was a single dispersal out of Africa that happened 60,000 to 80,000 years ago that led to the peopling of the world. However, our results show this history was much more interesting and there were many waves of dispersal out of Africa, some of which led to admixture between modern humans and Neanderthals that we see in the genomes of all living individuals today."  And another article explaining the research reported here. 

A fight about fonts is reported on in The Guardian.  But let's be honest, the right place to start is with some education on typography; for that, I recommend this site.  

And in these dark times, you may well benefit--as I do--from re-reading Randolph Bourne's brilliant, century-old essay "Trans-National America."  Seriously: if you've never read it, it will astound you; if you've read it before, you will be grateful for the refresher.  What a loss was his very young death.