A new issue of First of the Month is out. Salar Ghahramani (Penn State): A Kenyan Birth? Still Natural Born. From Interface, a special issue on the season of revolution: the Arab Spring and European mobilizations. Ben Smith on a political users guide to the trolls of Twitter. Richard Posner on why there are too many patents in America. The antidepressant wars: Sandra J. Tanenbaum on how a fierce debate that ignores patients. A beautiful, dirty mind: Rick Rosner, the world’s smartest man — almost — is a TV joke writer and admitted pornoholic. From The New Yorker, will civil war hit Afghanistan when the U.S. leaves? Razib Kahn on how you offload the task of reasoning about issues which you are not familiar with, or do not understand in detail, to the collective with which you identify, and give weight to specialists if they exist within that collective. A review of Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present by Daniel Headrick (and more). A Brief History of Wrestling Fakery: How a century of pretend fighting led to the Reality Era.
