New since (roughly) WW2

Food for thought. Suspect most people think most of these go a lot further back:

Random links

Ethan Mollick on Twitter
Pointer to a research paper - makes sense but seems potentially a bit dangerous in current political environment: "Tell students: “Your goal is to feel awkward and uncomfortable.” Giving an explicit goal of aiming to feel uncomfortable in order to grow makes folks persist in classes, write better, seek out more info & learn more from political opponents."
Woodward and Bernstein Didn’t Act Alone: If not for their competitors, Nixon would probably have survived Watergate
"Almost none of the first year’s revelations about Watergate came from 'real' political reporters, who for the most part trusted Nixon’s denials and mingled at swanky Georgetown cocktail parties." (HT: Paul Thacker, who point out its similarity media behaviour re: lab leak possibility)
Laurent Cordonier on Twitter
"1/ Our new preprint with @F_Cafiero on the link between #corruption and #conspiracy_beliefs. We show across 26 Western and non-Western countries that higher corruption levels are associated with greater belief in conspiracy theories. A thread" Phrased differently, conspiracy thinking is strongest where conspiracies are more likely?

On writing

Over time I fairly regularly bump into quotes like these (and agree with them), which is one reason that this site never got shut down despite remaining idle for quite some time.

In the meantime it wasn't that I stopped writing but that, rather than posting here, I wound up just using a private instance of Wackowiki instead. Will see if the return to posting here continues or just gradually (or abruptly) fades away again.

Random links

New 'liquid trees' divide the internet
A decent case for sticking tanks of algae in urban environments: "algae is also more efficient than trees at removing CO2 from the atmosphere, acting between 10 to 50 times faster. One species of algae, Chlorella vulgaris, is up to 400 times more effective at harvesting CO2 than trees" + "in some cities, the air pollution is so bad that trees actually struggle to grow, while algae tends to be more resilient"
Cate Cadell
"A thread here for those who don't understand why the China protests ... are so shockingly rare. Surveillance. In. China. Is. Extreme. Think you could evade Chinese police? Let's walk through it"
Losing the language of the Koran
"Though this was a gathering of young Emiratis, almost everyone was chatting in English. Nowadays it is becoming the dominant tongue of the Gulf. ... In 2017 the Arab Youth Survey, taken by a pollster in Dubai, found that Gulf Arabs already use it more than Arabic."

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