Tony Phillips in Signature:

A big blue bus is parked in front of San Francisco’s City Hall. It is now branded with the familiar logos of a verdant sun, leaf and lightbulb certifying it an environmentally-friendly green, but other than its solar panels, sustainably forested wood and hybrid generator—and the fact that today it’s dispensing $16 cups of imported coffee—this is your bookmobile of yore, launched in 19th century England as a horse-drawn “perambulating library” and gaining traction in our own country as a pre-war, WPA project. But today, it’s been hijacked by bestselling author Dave Eggers and his latest subject, Yemeni coffee impresario Mokhtar Alkhanshali.

Alkhanshali is, in fact, standing on the steps of City Hall, mere blocks away from his free-range childhood in the rough and tumble Tenderloin district that plays in Eggers book like a Steven Spielberg-directed Oliver Twist. The City Supervisor, borrowing Eggers latest title, has proclaimed today Monk of Mokha Day and now Alkhanshali—I’m just going to start calling him Mokhtar because everyone else does—is at the mic. And knowing San Francisco’s head librarian Luis Herrera, who fought hard for and won his city’s impressive seven-day library week, is in the crowd, the fast-talking Mokhtar can’t resist a play for clemency. “I said I may or may not owe the library a few books,” he relays on a call the following week, “so I asked him to give me amnesty.”

It’s something the 29-year-old is quite used to – both chasing the American dream here at home to deliver a coffee from his homeland, ranked number one by industry bible Coffee Review, to being chased himself when a Houthi coup at the beginning of 2015 interrupts his bean-grading tour of coffee’s birthplace, which has unfortunately also birthed a civil war that seals all exit points. Guns? Sure, but that’s nothing new for Mokhtar, having seen his first gun in our country at the tender age of 11. And the aforementioned fast-talking? It’s a bitch to transcribe, but he’s able to put one of his $16 cups of coffee into play to jive his way out of a hypothetical parking ticket. It’s also handy when you’re mistaken for Houthi by opposing forces still loyal to ousted president Abdrabnuh Mansour Hadi, blindfolded, and tossed in the back of a pickup, then casually informed, “We plan to kill you.”

More here.

From the MIT Technology Review:

The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report last year concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to that of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people.

This seems to occur in all societies at all scales. It is a well-studied pattern called a power law that crops up in a wide range of social phenomena. But the distribution of wealth is among the most controversial because of the issues it raises about fairness and merit. Why should so few people have so much wealth?

The conventional answer is that we live in a meritocracy in which people are rewarded for their talent, intelligence, effort, and so on. Over time, many people think, this translates into the wealth distribution that we observe, although a healthy dose of luck can play a role.

But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.

The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.

And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of times more wealth than other people. What’s more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest people are generally not the most talented by other measures.

More here.

David P. Barash in Nautilus:

It is a bit of a stretch, but by no means impossible or even unlikely that a hybrid or a chimera combining a human being and a chimpanzee could be produced in a laboratory. After all, human and chimp (or bonobo) share, by most estimates, roughly 99 percent of their nuclear DNA. Granted this 1 percent difference presumably involves some key alleles, the new gene-editing tool CRISPR offers the prospect (for some, the nightmare) of adding and deleting targeted genes as desired. As a result, it is not unreasonable to foresee the possibility—eventually, perhaps, the likelihood—of producing “humanzees” or “chimphumans.” Such an individual would not be an exact equal-parts-of-each combination, but would be neither human nor chimp: rather, something in between.

If that prospect isn’t shocking enough, here is an even more controversial suggestion: Doing so would be a terrific idea.

The year 2018 is the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, subtitled the modern Prometheus. Haven’t we learned that Promethean hubris leads only to disaster, as did the efforts of the fictional Dr. Frankenstein? But there are also other disasters, currently ongoing, such as the grotesque abuse of nonhuman animals, facilitated by what might well be the most hurtful theologically-driven myth of all times: that human beings are discontinuous from the rest of the natural world, since we were specially created and endowed with souls, whereas “they”—all other creatures—were not.

More here.

Shadi Hamid in The American Interest:

There are seemingly two types of Trump laments being published these days: end of democracy books and end of liberalism books. Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy is the latest entrant in the former category, and probably the most ambitious. It manages to avoid the overwrought alarmism, partisan attacks, and Hitler references that sullied Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die and Timothy Snyder’s occasionally silly pamphlet On Tyranny.Yet as with all books that speak to a present danger—its unsubtle subtitle is “Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It”—Mounk, like a good Paul Thomas Anderson film, struggles in the final third.

The problem with populists—or more precisely the problem with writing about them—isn’t that they’re anti-democratic but rather that they can be quite democratic, more democratic than their opponents, perhaps even too democratic. This is also one of the main reasons—besides racism or Russian meddling—that they seem to do quite well in elections. And not surprisingly, the better they do in elections, the more they seem to like democracy. Anyone who wishes to make sense of populist success, as well as learn from it, must start here. This is precisely what Mounk does, offering a much needed dose of conceptual clarity.

More here.

Siddhartha Deb in Columbia Journalism Review:

Last September, as the journalist Gauri Lankesh was returning to her home from work, a man approached her in the driveway, his face obscured by a motorcycle helmet. He fired a pistol as she ran toward her house, about 10 feet away. She collapsed before she made it inside. Autopsy reports suggested she had been shot twice in the chest and once in the back. A fourth shot had missed or misfired. The footage from security cameras showed only two men on a motorcycle, including the helmeted shooter, a man about five feet tall, but the police suggested that two other men had also been involved, following the first pair on a second motorcycle.

Lankesh, the editor and publisher of a Bangalore weekly, the Gauri Lankesh Patrike, was an outspoken left-wing journalist working in an India that, since the 2014 election of Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as prime minister, has become one of the world’s most dangerous countries to be a reporter. But the BJP is only the most overt face of a Hindu right that comprises more than 30 loosely affiliated organizations. Together, they all subscribe to the virulent brand of Hindu nationalism known as Hindutva, and they have in recent years been associated with activities ranging from lynchings, riots, and bomb blasts to threats of rape, dismemberment, incarceration, and hanging of people critical of them and their sectarian idea of India.

More here.

Alan Lightman in Harper's:

It is the end of June, and I am wandering about my small island in Maine. I’ve been thinking about the materiality of the world. Today, I just want to experience the fleshiness of this island. I run my hands along the bristly branches of a spruce tree. I could identify that prickle blindfolded. My bare feet sink into spongy moss. On the rocks lie mussel shells dropped from on high by crafty gulls seeking to break them apart and liberate the food within. The shells feel smooth and cool even in the sun. This tiny island in Casco Bay is shaped like a finger, half a mile long and a tenth of a mile wide. A high bony ridge runs down its spine, a hundred feet above sea level, and my house lies on the north end of the ridge. To the south, there are five other cottages, cloaked from one another by a dense growth of trees — mostly spruce, but also pine, cedar, and poplar, whose leaves in the wind sound like hands clapping.

As did Thoreau in Concord, I’ve traveled far and wide on this island. I know each cedar and poplar, each clump of beach rose, each patch of blueberry bush and raspberry bramble and the woody stems of the hydrangeas, all the soft mounds of moss, some of which I touch on my ramblings today. The tart scent of raspberries blends with the salty sea air. Early this morning, a fog enveloped the island so completely that I felt as if I were in a spaceship afloat in outer space — white space. But the surreal fog, made of water droplets too tiny to see, eventually evaporated and disappeared. It’s all material, even the magical fog, like the bioluminescence I first saw as a child. It’s all atoms and molecules.

More here.

Father, In a Drawer

Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him.
With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.
Also directives from our  DNA.
The nature of  his wound was the clock-cicada winding down.
He wound down.
July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes
Of   cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell.
Barges of coal bloomed in heat.
It was when the catfish were the only fish left living
In the Monongahela River.
Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in
The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in
By the slink from the strap
Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still
As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin.
The nature of  his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy
To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast.
In the old city of   Brod, most of the few Jews left
Living may have been still at supper while he died.
That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle
Tinsel color, washing
To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west,
Ohio-bound.
This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.

.
by Lucie Brock-Broido
from Poetry 12/2012

Natalie Haynes in The Guardian:

In Sophocles’s play Antigone a teenage girl is forced to choose between obeying the law of the land (her uncle, the king of Thebes, has forbidden the burial of a traitor) and religious law (the traitor is Antigone’s brother, Polynices, who has declared war on his city, and killed his own brother, Eteocles, along the way). Antigone’s “good” brother gets a funeral, the “bad” one is left to rot. Leaving a relative unburied is profoundly taboo in ancient Greece, so Antigone must decide: does she obey her conscience and bury Polynices – the punishment for which is the death penalty – or does she obey the law and leave her brother to be picked apart by dogs?

And this, essentially, is the dilemma faced by Aneeka, the beating heart of Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie’s Man Booker-longlisted loose contemporary reworking of Antigone. Her twin brother, Parvaiz, has left London to work for the media arm of Isis, after discovering that his absent father died en route to Guantánamo. Her sister Isma tells the police where he has gone and Aneeka is appalled: “You betrayed us, both of us. And then you tried to hide it from me. Don’t call, don’t text, don’t send the pictures, don’t fly across the ocean and expect me to ever agree to see your face again. We have no sister.” It is a beautifully Sophoclean touch that Aneeka is far angrier with her sister for betraying their brother than she is with her brother for betraying them both.

The build-up to disaster is told with an ever-increasing tension. We begin with Isma, the older sister to the twins, the voice of compromise and accommodation. Her wry cleverness is so compelling that it is difficult not to pine for her in the later stages of the novel, from which she is largely absent (Ismene, in Sophocles’s version of the myth, has only a paltry 60 lines). When Isma first meets Eamonn, the non-religious son of an authoritarian British home secretary who has sought to put his Muslim faith behind him, she is studying in the US and he is there on holiday. “Is that a style thing or a Muslim thing?” he asks, about the turban she wears. “You know,” she replies, “the only two people in Massachusetts who have ever asked me about it both wanted to know if it’s a style thing or a chemo thing.”

More here.

Victoria Gomes in Nautilus:

Part of Vittorio Sebastiano’s job is to babysit a few million stem cells. The research professor of reproductive biology at Stanford University keeps the cells warm and moist deep inside the Lorry I. Lokey Stem Cell Research Building, one of the nation’s largest stem cell facilities. He’s joined there by an army of researchers, each with their own goals. His own research program is nothing if not ambitious: He wants to reverse aging in humans. Stem cells are the Gary Oldman of cell types. They can reprogram themselves to carry out the function of virtually any other type of cell, and play a vital role in early development. This functional reprogramming is usually accompanied by an age reset, down to zero. Sebastiano figures that if he can separate these different kinds of reprogramming, he can open up a whole new kind of aging therapy. Nautilus caught up with him last month.

…Are germ cells immune to aging?

Yes and no. They definitely do age, but not to the same extent as other cell types. In males, spermatogenesis continues all the way from puberty to old life. If you take a 90-year-old man, there are still germ cells and spermatogonial stem cells. They do age, because it’s clear that the sperm of an older man is different from the sperm of a younger man, but they do not age as heavily as other cells. This is fascinating because we do not understand the process. Female cells do age, and the consensus is that there are no germ stem cells in the ovary so these cells lack a molecular program to stay young. But once you put together an egg and a sperm, then there is an aging erasure mechanism, which is embryonic-specific, that we also do not understand.

More here.

Pico Iyer in the New York Review of Books:

It was 1974 and I was a teenager on holiday from my English boarding school, meeting cousins, uncles, and my parents’ ancestral homeland for the first time. The monsoons were heavy that year, but I suddenly found myself rattling all around India—Bombay to Secunderabad, and thence to Bangalore and Madras and Ahmedabad, and finally to Delhi—on never-ending overnight trains. Vendors selling tea clamored around the compartment windows, eager to pass tiny clay cups to passengers; old men sat lecturing everyone on any topic under the sun; the waiter in the dining car assured us, not without obsequiousness, that there was no tea, no coffee, nothing to be had but Coca-Cola.

That curious mix of civility and cacophony came back to me joltingly as I watched the film that Satyajit Ray had made just eight years before my visit, Nayak, or The Hero. In it, Ray sends a handsome star of the silver screen from Calcutta to Delhi to receive a prize. As soon as he boards the train, the professional heartthrob, named Arindam Mukherjee (Uttam Kumar), finds himself, by turns, released from his public role and obliged to play it constantly. Everyone recognizes him, sighing over his legend, yet as soon as he’s alone, he’s overcome by memories and dreams that move him to ask himself whether he made the right choice in deciding to become a commercial icon.

For Ray, after a series of films widely acclaimed across the world—and as different as possible from the madcap escapism and song-and-dance routines of Bollywood—The Hero was a chance to meditate on the nature of role-playing, to reflect on the costs of make-believe, and to address perhaps the dominant theme of his middle period, the place of conscience.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Last November was a pivotal moment for the Democrats, who scored a surprisingly large slew of electoral victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere. But it was also somewhat of a victory for science, as at least 17 candidates with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) also won. Ralph Northam, who became Virginia’s governor, is a pediatric neurologist. Cheryl Turpin and Hala Ayala, who were both elected to the Virginia State House of Delegates, are respectively a science teacher and a cybersecurity expert. The so-called blue wave was also, at least partly, a nerdy one.

Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist by training and a former breast-cancer researcher, wants a similar wave to crest in this year’s midterms. A year ago, Naughton founded 314 Action—a political-action committee that supports scientists running for office by helping them to find staff, plan campaigns, and connect with potential donors.

When I first wrote about 314 Action in January 2017, more than 400 people had filled out their recruitment form. At the time Naughton predicted that they’d attract a thousand potential candidates. “In fact, we had over 7,000,” she now tells me. There was a spike in interest after Trump’s inauguration, and another when Trump decided to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. “There’s been one thing after another with this administration that’s engaged our community,” Naughton says.

Beyond stoking outrage, Trump may have motivated stem professionals in a different way. “For better or worse, Trump has changed the perceived necessities about running for office,” says the political consultant Kelly Gibson. “You don’t need to be elected at local or state levels, or even ‘understand’ how politics works, to be elected. It opened things up for people in education, the arts, and the sciences. That’s why there’s been this surge in nontraditional political candidates.”

More here.

Yascha Mounk in The Guardian:

There are long decades in which history seems to slow to a crawl. Elections are won and lost, laws adopted and repealed, new stars born and legends carried to their graves. But for all the ordinary business of time passing, the lodestars of culture, society and politics remain the same.

Then there are those short years in which everything changes all at once. Political newcomers storm the stage. Voters clamour for policies that were unthinkable until yesterday. Social tensions that had long simmered under the surface erupt into terrifying explosions. A system of government that had seemed immutable looks as though it might come apart.

This is the kind of moment in which we now find ourselves.

Until recently, liberal democracy reigned triumphant. For all its shortcomings, most citizens seemed deeply committed to their form of government. The economy was growing. Radical parties were insignificant. Political scientists thought that democracy in places like France or the United States had long ago been set in stone, and would change little in the years to come. Politically speaking, it seemed, the future would not be much different from the past.

Then the future came – and turned out to be very different indeed. Citizens have long been disillusioned with politics; now, they have grown restless, angry, even disdainful. Party systems have long seemed frozen; now, authoritarian populists are on the rise around the world, from America to Europe, and from Asia to Australia. Voters have long disliked particular parties, politicians or governments; now, many of them have become fed up with liberal democracy itself.

Donald Trump’s election to the White House has been the most striking manifestation of democracy’s crisis.

More here.

An excerpt from William Appleman Williams' 1961 The Contours of American History over at the Verso blog:

Relieved and exhilarated by their triumph over the Axis Powers in 1945, Americans seemed to have assumed that their traditional dream of becoming a world unto themselves was about to be realized. Far from having become disillusioned (or isolationist), they appeared casually confident that their earlier visions of Manifest Destiny were materializing as the reality of the present. Though vaguely uneasy about the full extent of its powers, most Americans looked upon the atom bomb as a self-starting magic lamp; even without being rubbed it would produce their long-sought City on the Hill in the form of a de facto American Century embracing the globe.

It was generally taken for granted that such benevolent Americanization of the world would bring peace and plenty without the moral embarrassments and administrative distractions of old-fashioned empires. And so, having created the most irrational weapon known to man, Americans proceeded with startling rationality to abandon the mass army as their principal strategic weapon. Armed only with their bomb, they then generously offered to help everyone become more like themselves. “We are willing to help people who believe the way we do,” explained Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “to continue to live the way they want to live.”

Had Americans applied their intelligence, humanitarianism, and power to the paradox of plenty without purpose within their own society and to the needs and aspirations of their fellow humans throughout the world, it is possible that their self-centered dream would have been transformed into a vision of brotherhood among men.

More here.

Chad Orzel in Forbes:

A couple of weeks ago, fellow Forbes blogger Ethan Siegel took to his keyboard with the goal of making me sigh heavily, writing a post about interpretations of quantum physics calling the idea that you need an interpretation "the biggest myth in quantum physics." Ethan's argument boils down to noting that all of the viable interpretations known at present make identical predictions about the probability of getting particular outcomes for any experiment we might do. Therefore, according to Ethan, there's no need for any interpretation, because it doesn't really matter which of them you choose.

As an experimentalist by training and inclination, I am not without sympathy for this point of view. In fact, when I give talks about quantum mechanics and get the inevitable questions about interpretations, I tend to say something in that general vein– that at present, nobody knows how to do an experiment that would distinguish between any of the viable interpretations. Given that, I say, the choice between interpretations is essentially an aesthetic one.

When, then, the heavy sigh on reading Ethan's post? There are two reasons why I had that reaction, and am writing this post in (belated) response.

The first reason is best explained via a historical analogy. For this, I would point to the infamous arguments between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr that culminated in the famous paper by Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen that introduced the world to the physics of quantum entanglement. Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen proposed a thought experiment involving a pair of particles prepared in such a way that their individual states were indeterminate but correlated– most modern treatments make it a two-state system, so that the measurement of an individual particle has a 50/50 chance of coming up with either outcome, but when you make the same measurement on both particles, you're guaranteed to get the same answer.

More here.

In Jadaliyya:

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Suzanne Schneider (SS): I’ve always been fascinated by the history of what are often assumed to be timeless constellations of religious belief or practice. There is a widespread tendency to project onto religions a stability and historical consistency that they lack, and I think the appropriate scholarly response is work that highlights religion as a site of change and contestation. However, I found that many histories of the Middle East took religion for granted as something that meant the same thing in, for example, the mid-nineteenth century, as it does now. Consequently, in Mandatory Separation I wanted to explore what exactly made something “religious” within Jewish and Islamic circles in late Ottoman and early twentieth century Palestine, and how that designation came to matter in material terms. In good dialectical fashion, I also wanted to attend to how material conditions—say, the need to rationalize Palestinian agriculture—contributed to the re-definition of what types of human behaviors and activities were counted among the religious. I found this all the more necessary in light of the common assumption that Zionist and Palestinian nationalist movements were largely secular in makeup. In fact, my research has shown that educators and leaders within these movements were interested in constructing new forms of political identity that consciously blurred the religious/secular divide.

What drew me to religious education in particular were the parallel lines of thinking about “old-fashioned” forms of religious learning I found within the writings of Jewish and Arab-Muslim reformers active in the Haskalah and Nahda, respectively. Jewish and Muslims educators in Palestine were heirs to these modernist traditions, though they did not accept their positions across the board.

More here.

Duet

…… Night time is the right time . . .
…… —Ray Charles and Margie Hendricks

She had me in the car. I came forward like a song.
We did it before temple, after temple, between prayers.
The windows echoed her mantras, our cries warmed the air.
Two peaks merged, then sank below the clouds.

We did it before temple, after temple, between prayers.
Her stomach began to show and people asked us not to come.
Two peaks merged, then sank below the clouds.
Night and day, everything was changing.

. . . . .

Her stomach began to show and people asked her not to come.
My mother was all alone when I was born.
Night and day. Everything was changing.
The radio started playing rhythm and blues.

My mother was all alone when I was born—
The windows echoed her mantras, our cries warmed the air,
The radio started playing rhythm and blues.
She had me in a car. I came forward like a song.

by Duy Doan
from the Academy of American Poets

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A. O. Scott in the New York Times:

Martin Amis, for those who need an introduction, is a writer living in Brooklyn. He was also, for a period beginning in the mid-1980s and lasting well into the span covered by “The Rub of Time,” his new collection of nonfiction, a famous British novelist. That phrase, which may strike some young American ears as an archaism if not an oxymoron, is worth unpacking, and Amis provides readers with a pocket account of the historical preconditions of his extravagant fame. In the Thatcher years, he writes, “the newspapers had been getting fatter and fatter (first the Sundays, then the Saturdays, then all the days in between) and what filled these extra pages was not additional news but additional features. And the featurists were running out of people to write about — running out of alcoholic actors, ne’er-do-well royals, depressive comedians, jailed rock stars, defecting ballet dancers, reclusive film directors, hysterical fashion models, indigent marquises, adulterous golfers, wife-beating footballers and rapist boxers. The dragnet went on widening until journalists, often to their patent dismay, were writing about writers: literary writers.”

In other words, the gossip-hungry public of the 1990s was treated to news about Martin Amis’s dental work, his divorce and his preferences in agents and real estate because tabloid science had not yet discovered the Kardashians.

I’m not sure I buy the theory, or that it’s meant to be bought, but it is certain that Amis, who also happens to be the son of a famous British novelist (and thus “the only hereditary novelist in the Anglophone literary corpus”), has been subjected to the kind of attention that his fellow Brooklyn scribblers, hunched over their laptops and cortados from Bushwick to Red Hook, can hardly imagine. As any thrifty novelist would, he has sometimes turned that scrutiny into fuel for his work, fictional and otherwise. Some of the essays, reviews and reported articles collected in “The Rub of Time” — including two miniature anthologies of questions posed in The Independent by fans, gawkers and haters — take Amis’s household-name status as an occasion or a theme. But the deep subject of this book, what holds its disparate bits together and makes it worth your time even if you have only the vaguest idea of who its author is supposed to be, is not celebrity at all. It’s professionalism.

More here.

Faye Flam at Bloomberg:

It’s surprising how easy it is to brush off dire existential threats. We remain, for example, unprepared for the next pandemic flu, though experts warn it’s only a matter of time before a new strain capable of killing millions will emerge. As epidemiologist Michael Osterholm and writer Mark Olshaker wrote recently in the New York Times, we aren’t even prepared for this year’s seasonal flu. The outbreak has killed 37 children as of late January, according to the CDC.

Osterholm and Olshaker wrote that much more money must go into the development of a so-called universal flu vaccine — one that would protect against any of flu’s many strains, including any new versions of the virus that might jump from animals to humans, as happened in 1918. In that pandemic flu, between 50 and 100 million people died.

The argument makes sense, but it’s unlikely flu vaccine researchers will get a big boost. Why? One problem is that we citizens of the 21st century have also been warned about our “woeful” lack of preparedness for Ebola and similar disease outbreaks, a major earthquake, sea level rise, nuclear war, and a massive asteroid striking the earth. And if that isn’t enough, experts at MIT and Cambridge University are discussing how unprepared we are for threats of technology run amok, such as intelligent machines taking over the world.

In short, we’re all at risk of getting burned out on impending disasters. It can feel useless to get prepared for any one of these threats when all the others loom. We could try to rank and prioritize them in a rational way, though it’s not easy. Some of these risks, such as the major asteroid strike, aren’t likely to happen soon, but they will be very, very bad when they do happen. Others are more likely to occur in the coming decades and will kill lots of people, but they won’t end the world.

More here.