Politics
- What Could Possibly Motivate a Chemical-Weapons Attack? and U.S. strikes Syrian military airfield in first direct assault on Bashar al-Assad’s government and Trump Saw Syria Gas Attack as Test of Mettle Before Globe and A Tale of Two Air Strikes and This Isn’t the Foreign Policy Trump Campaigned On and Why U.S. Troops May Fight Alongside al-Qaeda in Yemen
- Mega-donor urged Bannon not to resign
- How China’s President Could Bully Trump and I read Trump’s trade adviser’s anti-China book. It’s wilder than you can imagine.
- Singer: Boycott America?
- What the EU27 wants from Brexit and Berlin embraces its own hard Brexit
- Europe’s Reform Opportunity and EU Jobs Carve Up Starts Again With Dijsselbloem Under Threat
- Why Le Pen is cheering for Macron
- Migrants (still) welcome in Germany: survey (and Are Migrants a Burden or Boon to the German Economy? It Could Depend on the Skills Gap)
- What are South Korea’s strategic options?
- Colombia Tries to Tame FARC Guerillas
- The Troubling Legacy of World War I
- We Analyzed Every Meme on the Internet and It’s now illegal in Russia to share an image of Putin as a possibly gay clown
Economics & Finance
- Big Data jigsaws for Central Banks – the impact of the Swiss franc de-pegging
- Fed Leak Probe Dooms Lacker But Leaves Key Question: Who Leaked?
- From VoxEU:
- Productivity and bad bosses
- Services Exports Open a New Path to Prosperity
- Interim EU trade deal to hit UK services hard and Sick Of Watching Britain Figure Out How To Revolt Politely, Ex-Pat Bankers In London Are Offering To Just Brexit Themselves
- China’s Confusing Trade and Current Account Numbers
- Stakes are high as Abe looks to labour reform in bid to boost economy
- Trump’s Administration Just Made It Harder to Get Work Visas
- How Do People Find Jobs?
- Young Americans Are Killing Marriage
- The Unintended Consequences of Blockchain Are Not Unpredictable: Respond Now Rather Than Repent Later
- Cohn Backs Wall Street Split of Lending, Investment Banks and Guest post: Why regulators should focus on bankers’ incentives
- BlackRock’s big funds cut commission rates for Wall Street research and Morgan Stanley made an error analysing Snapchat, and it shines a light on some big flaws in Wall Street research
- ETFs Are the New Bond Kings
- Should You Get the Guacamole on Your Burrito? A Price Analysis of Your Favorite Foods (the answer is always ‘yes’, I don’t care what the number say)
Science & Tech
- Astronomers just turned on a planet-size telescope to take a picture of a black hole (and for more on event horizons: How Time Becomes Space Inside a Black Hole (PBS Space Time on youtube))
- Can Many-Worlds Theory Rescue Us From Boltzmann Brains?
- Is Matter Conscious?
- Our Planet’s Eye in the Sky Finally Closes and How to Mourn a Space Robot
- Octopuses Do Something Really Strange to Their Genes
- The Scientist Who Stumbled Upon a Tick Full of 20-Million-Year-Old Blood
- When Globalization Brings Brain-Invading Worms
- How artificial life spawned a billion-dollar industry
- FDA Opens Genetic Floodgates with 23andMe Decision
- When Apps Secretly Team Up to Steal Your Data
- How Hackers Hijacked A Bank’s Entire Online Operation
- America’s Space Commanders Rattle Their Lightsabers and Goldman Sachs says space-mining for platinum with asteroid-grabbing spacecraft is ‘more realistic than perceived’
- Ben Horowitz worries about who will debug artificial intelligence and Unsupervised sentiment neuron and It Begins: “Chinese engineer ‘marries’ robot after failing to find a human wife”
Misc
- Japan’s cherry blossoms are emerging increasingly early
- Why Cops Shoot
- Crimetown USA
- The Patriarchy Hates the Moon
- What Would Jesus Disrupt?
- How many Japanese are a bit of something else?
- The Handbag’s Tale
- The Matchmaker Who Flirts on Dating Apps for You
- Shia LaBeouf Thriller ‘Man Down’ Sells Just One Ticket at U.K. Box Office
- Seems like there were a few long reads covering some darker themes this week… so fair warning for the following:
illiquid ideas 