Just some stuff I've found:

David Runciman interviewed by Joshua Cohen, a very sobering conversation.

Interesting: The most common kind of graduate students to study international he is a graduate student in business.  Once again, my friends in the business school, whom I am so eager to stigmatize and disdain, surprise me with the intelligence and thoughtfulness with which they educate people.  (I'm looking at you, Greg.)

"The United States has slid to 28th of 39 nations in government funding for university research as a share of GDP, with the 12 leading governments investing more than double the U.S. investment." Yes it has.

More on this: "Most Americans believe state spending for public universities and colleges has, in fact, increased or at least held steady over the last 10 years, according to a new survey by American Public Media.  They’re wrong. States have collectively scaled back their annual higher education funding by $9 billion during that time, when adjusted for inflation, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP, reports."

Rowan Williams on a book about why poetry matters, which "mischievously suggests that our passion to “understand” poetry may derive from “a middle-school confusion of literature and theology”, rooted in the abiding problem of making sense of an opaque scriptural text. But if there is a proper overlap between the two it is surely here, in the way poetry affirms the material, finite world but is always conscious of an unimaginable backdrop, never trying to occupy or contain that elusive perspective."

Researchers investigated the cooperative abilities of dolphins. Utilizing a simplified Hirata Task, the team found that dolphins coordinated their behavior to work together on a shared task. Specifically, the 'initiator' would wait on their partner and the 'follower' would coordinate their swimming speed to match the initiator's behavior.