Alessandro Acquisti (Carnegie Mellon), Curtis R. Taylor (Duke), and Liad Wagman (IIT): The Economics of Privacy. Alasdair S. Roberts (Suffolk): The Nation-State: Not Dead Yet. Can we imagine a state coming into being without name? Kawser Ahmed on the importance of “name” as an attribute of statehood. Joel Gillin on why the Cuban thaw is Obama’s finest foreign policy achievement to date. Thomas E. Doyle on how the Iranian nuclear controversy is also about saving face. Florida ex-senator Bob Graham pursues claims of Saudi ties to Sept. 11 attacks. Jamil Smith on how videos of police killings are numbing us to the spectacle of black death. Blame Irving Kristol and the neoconservatives: Craig Fehrman interviews Andrew Hartman, author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. Jonathan Chait on why Hillary Clinton is probably going to win the 2016 election. Judd Legum on the most important tweet about Hillary’s announcement and everyone pretty much ignored it. It takes a party: The 2016 election will be about ideologies, not individuals, despite much media attention to the latter. Bystander effect also found among five-year-olds: Little kids will help an adult, but if they’re in a group, they’ll wait to see if someone else volunteers first. The result of social media’s peer-to-peer pressure is emotional engineering on a grand scale — a silent but steady rewiring of the human psyche, from Homo economicus to Homo socialis.
