They keep coming.

This is an interesting, and especially at 7 AM pretty alarming, account of how the narrow genetic basis of almost all the world's coffee makes us especially fragile and vulnerable to a disease that would destroy this particular species. Among the other interesting facts, is the information that there are 150 kinds of wild coffee as well.

A provocative, if somewhat one-sided, account of happiness and its history, and why so many of us seem to have become obsessed with it in the past several decades.

A nice piece that makes what I think is a mistake:

There was a massive shift in Roman residents' ancestry, the researchers found, but that ancestry came primarily from the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, possibly because of denser populations there relative to the Roman Empire's western reaches in Europe and Africa.

It was not because of “denser populations”. It was because the Romans enslaved hundreds of thousands of people, and brought many of them to Italy, and many of those to Rome. The genetic diversity of the city is based in important part upon an economy fundamentally premised upon slavery.

Some good information about student debt here.  As ever, one of the most remarkable facts about this is how much of the "student debt crisis" is actually a crisis for students--let's call them "victims"--of the FOR-PROFIT higher education sector.  

Forty percent of borrowers from for-profit two-year programs default on their loans within five years of entering repayment, and 32 percent of those who went to for-profit four-year programs defaulted in this same time frame.… 

Among for-profit schools, nearly half of all borrowers owed more than $40,000, but only 12 percent of those who attended four-year public colleges owed the same amount.

Grrr...

To what degree is global perception of American "gun culture" driving international students away from enrolling in US higher ed?  It's an interesting, even an alarming, question.

A piece about how "meditation apps" are part of the problem, not helping to address it.

The college that Mary went to after she became blind in the Little House on the Prairie books still stands!  But it is about to be sold for $1.  Here is an interesting piece on what this tells us about higher education.