- China becoming a player in Israel-Palestine diplomacy?
- Via Fallows, a scathing take on modern China: 'It's becomes painfully obvious to me how something like the Great Leap Forward could happen in China where millions starved. When a society is built on so many layers of superficiality, bullshit and hypocrisy, and passing off responsibility to others, getting at the truth to solve real problems becomes impossible.'
- Prices for all major categories of renewable energy continue to fall.
- US historian and columnist Anne Applebaum is in Sydney, a city apparently witnessing a 'proliferation of Starbucks'.
- 'Quantitative urbanism', the mathematical study of cities.
- Empathy: if Syria had bombed an Israeli military base, how would the world have reacted?
- Jane Austen, game theorist:
