Oh this is interesting.  In British politics, what makes an opposition leader effective?  The argument here is that they are all good teachers, judged to be "the essential qualification to be a successful leader in opposition": 

They were political teachers, constantly making accessible what they were trying to do. Above all, they answered the all-important “Why?” question, always explaining why they acted in the way they did. They framed an argument, and then made apparent sense of their objectives with a few carefully chosen policies.

"We reached out to five architecture professors and posed the following question: What’s one American structure you wish had been saved?"  

A cool piece on the "afterlife" of Augustine in the middle ages, and how the corpus of his works survived across centuries to get to us today, roughly 45 generations later.

This is wild, just wild:

The super-archaic and Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestor populations were more distantly related than any other pair of human populations previously known to interbreed. For example, modern humans and Neanderthals had been separated for about 750,000 years when they interbred. The super-archaics and Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestors were separated for well over a million years.

“I really wanted to like “Capital and Ideology,” but have to acknowledge that it’s something of a letdown.“  Paul Krugman on Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital and Ideology   

A nice piece by one of the founders and early presences in national public radio, about NPR’s first 50 years.  In these dark times, may it long continue.

And may you all continue as well, my friends.  Happy mid-week!