It's a Friday.  I'm feeling generous!  Here, plebs, have some links.  (I sprinkle them to you, from my chariot, as I pass by.)

Helpful piece, for non-scientists, on how to read a scientific paper.

Basically, Gen X is still falling between the cracks here, but Millennials and Gen Z are doing a good deal of the work.  

This strikes me as a very smart piece.  The below is interesting to consider:

It would take some time to fully unravel the ways in which the right’s long-standing cultural resentments and anxieties began congealing into an open illiberalism and an untroubled enthusiasm for putting down progressives by state force. But it should be said that some of the groundwork has been laid by figures in the mainstream press, including voices at the Times and The Atlantic, who have worked hard to promulgate the idea that the progressive movement has been overtaken by a totalitarian horde of irrational and emotionally weak, if not psychologically disturbed, crusaders. Broad acceptance of the idea that progressives want to impose their virtues by “any means necessary” has been seeded, in part, by a discourse that regularly distorts pocket controversies on social media and on college campuses into atrocities comparable to the Spanish Inquisition. And there’s not much distance between Cotton’s line about “chic salons” and the insistence of centrist writers that many of the left’s concerns are decadent, frou-frou obsessions.…

The growth of illiberalism on the right has been fed, in large part, by the belief that progressives have already rendered liberalism a fiction.

Of course, everything Nwanevu says in the piece is _entirely_ congruent with the idea that there are a number of voluble illiberal voices on the left as well as the right.  That is not necessarily a _novel_ situation--it may be that, as at other times, people have a hard time agreeing on what's acceptable speech and what's beyond the pale.  

But this piece makes a good case for recognizing the links between a certain promoted picture of the left (which may have anecdotes behind it, but not numbers nor much in the way of power) and the genuinely powerful and quite numerous illiberalism and authoritarianism that has gripped the right in this country, and across the world as a whole. 

The terrifying story of NotPetya, the cyberwar technology that got out of control.

“This is the confounding geography of cyberwarfare: In ways that still defy human intuition, phantoms inside M.E.Doc’s server room in a gritty corner of Kiev spread chaos into the gilded conference rooms of the capital’s federal agencies, into ports dotting the globe, into the stately headquarters of Maersk on the Copenhagen harbor, and across the global economy. “Somehow the vulnerability of this Ukrainian accounting software affects the US national security supply of vaccines and global shipping?” asks Joshua Corman, a cybersecurity fellow at the Atlantic Council, as if still puzzling out the shape of the wormhole that made that cause-and-effect possible. “The physics of cyberspace are wholly different from every other war domain.”

In those physics, NotPetya reminds us, distance is no defense. Every barbarian is already at every gate. And the network of entanglements in that ether, which have unified and elevated the world for the past 25 years, can, over a few hours on a summer day, bring it to a crashing halt.”

It’s going to happen again. How will you be safe?   

Nice—a “micro-syllabus” to help you understand Black Lives Matter from a political science and African-American studies perspective.  Definitely worth your while.  

An interview with Bob Dylan!!  Enough said.

A study of all 235 of the loan-words (words originally from entirely different languages) in ancient Hebrew.  Very interesting.  Lots of cool info here—like most of the loan words are Egyptian or old Iranian, and 96% are for nouns.

Friday!  Have a fun and safe weekend, everyone!!