Because you deserve a mellow weekend.  Reading what I tell you to read.  Clear eyes, full brains, can't lose:

This is fascinating.  Has the pandemic revealed a problematic economic idolatry on the part of the medical community? For decades, consultants had taught the virtues of taut business practices. “Slack”—underutilized resources, inventory waiting to be put to use—was shunned. I spoke to David Simchi-Levi, an M.I.T. professor who studies supply-chain economics and how enterprises respond to disasters. “Cost is easy to measure,” he told me. “But resilience is much harder.” So we reward managers for efficiencies—and overlook any attendant fragilities. His view can be summarized simply: we’ve been overtaught to be overtaut.

“We’ve been teaching these finance guys how to squeeze,” Willy Shih, an operations expert at Harvard Business School, told me, emphasizing the word. “Squeeze more efficiency, squeeze cost, squeeze more products out at the same cost, squeeze out storage costs, squeeze out inventory. We really need to educate them about the value of slack.”

This is a smart piece about demographics and higher education in East Asia, where a dearth of young people is causing concern about universities in coming decades.  Very interesting.  

Why people should go to college but not go to campus this forthcoming academic year. 

Very cool—a mapping, using non-invasive magnetic and radar sensors, among others, of the full scale of Uruk-Warka, one of the very oldest of human cities, flourishing about 5000 years ago.  Uruk was also the setting for the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest (if not the earliest) epics we can still access today.  
After his journeys, Gilgamesh gazed on the walls of Uruk and was comforted, somewhat.

This is a good analysis of what the Floyd protests this summer meant. The scale of these eclipses even the Women's March of 2017 (which was huge). The level of impromptu organization and involvement is massive. It presages large impacts in the fall, and maybe beyond. Let us devoutly hope so.  

Not sure if this is as interesting as it seems on first glance, but it’s a clever way of recontextualizing authors who you might think you know: as “belongers.”   

The kind of research findings we need to be highlighting.  

Duck, everybody.