[The National Interest]
"Experts" wrong again on terrorism.

[The Nation]
Capitalism vs. the Climate.

[Forbes]
Is a "free market" agenda the same thing as a "pro-business" agenda?

[Google]
Google's new Politics & Election hub.

[Bloomberg Businessweek]
Economist Hernando de Soto argues that the financial crisis wasn't just about finance—it was about a staggering lack of knowledge.

[The New York Times]
Four-star generals Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar decry the National Defense Authorization Act.

[The Atlantic]
A decade ago, the idea of giving the country that birthed the 9/11 hijackers 84 new Boeing F-15 fighter jets would get laughed out of Congress. So why are we selling Saudi Arabia $60 billion in arms?

[EFF]
2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark.

[Guardian.co.uk]
The prosecution of the whistleblower and alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning is an exercise in intimidation, not justice.

[Vanity Fair]
Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression—the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work—it seems the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the "real" economy, from industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago.

[Spiegel Online]
United States is determined to punish whistleblower Bradley Manning.

[The Atlantic]
The U.S./Iraq war is finally officially over. More than 1.5 million U.S. soldiers have served in the country since combat began in March 2003, with around 4,500 of them losing their lives, out of more than 30,000 American casualties. More than 100,000 Iraqis were killed in the ensuing conflict, though exact totals are nearly impossible to calculate.

[Los Angeles Times]
Police employ Predator drone spy planes on home front.

[BBC]
U.N. climate talks have closed with an agreement that the chair said has "saved tomorrow, today."

[Forbes]
What if your doctor couldn't use scientific research about the drugs she was prescribing to you in order to ensure that you received the proper dosage of medication? What if a doctor had to navigate a complex thicket of procedural patents simply to treat her patients? The Supreme Court may be on the verge of making medical patents a reality, allowing drug companies to not only patent their drugs, but also the way doctors prescribe them to patients.

[Rolling Stone]
Indefinite detention of American citizens: coming soon to Battlefield U.S.A.

[Forbes]
Did the Obama administration throw the FDA under the bus?

[Mondo Weiss]
Israel isn't good for American Jews anymore.

[BBC]
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has won the right to petition the UK Supreme Court in his fight against extradition to Sweden.

[Polluter Watch]
Holding polluters—and their lobbyists and politicians—accountable.

[Spiegel Online]
The US Republican race is dominated by ignorance, lies and scandals. The current crop of candidates have shown such a basic lack of knowledge that they make George W. Bush look like Einstein. The Grand Old Party is ruining the entire country's reputation.

[The Dissenter]
In what appears to be his first television interview on the subject, Kamran Loghman, the developer of weapons-grade pepper spray and the policy for its use by US police departments, appeared on Democracy Now! to condemn how police forces have been using pepper spray on peaceful protesters in the country. He said he was "shocked" and bewildered to see UC Davis police pepper spraying students.

[Bloomberg Businessweek]
Some economists believe that today's grinding unemployment and slow growth are masking the transition to a vibrant digital economy.

[The Chronicle of Higher Education]
Scholars piece together the monumental job of creating the King James Bible—and reinterpret its legacy .

[Omniglot]
The online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages.

[Tottenville Review]
Understanding the "pattern junkie" in our brain.

[Guardian.co.uk]
To convert the business man into the profiteer is to strike a blow at capitalism.The business man is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.

[Poetry Foundation]
You can't see poetry; you can only see poems. Poems are poetry like raccoons are nature.

[Los Angeles Magazine]
A different perspective on city parking.

[The New England Journal of Medicine]
Is copyright negatively affecting health care?

[Forbes]
The Dumbest Idea in the World: Maximizing Shareholder Value.

[3 Quarks Daily]
A Boomer's Progress: Reflections on the Films of Pixar.

[Discover]
Top online "longreads" of 2011.

[Vanity Fair]
As you stand in endless lines this holiday season, here's a comforting thought: all those security measures accomplish nothing, at enormous cost.

[Lapham's Quarterly]
The nuclear family is a recent invention. As an arrangement that, ideally, isolates a man, woman, and a few children within a single, economically autonomous domestic unit, with only casual or symbolic ties to friends and extended family, it does not seem to predate the Industrial Revolution and the rapid urbanization that followed it. Indeed, the expectation that everyone should find a place in such an arrangement appears to be Fordist in origin: the same vision of the future that caused us to believe that everyone might have a place in a system of production, might commute to it in an automobile, and might return home at the end of the day to a freestanding domicile with a family inside. Gay marriage, accompanied in the developed world by the shining new apparatus of reproductive technology, is but the latest tweaking of this new development.

[Boston Review]
It seems to be close to a historical universal that conformist intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own societies, and the value-oriented punished in one or another way. The pattern goes back to the earliest records. It was the man accused of corrupting the youth of Athens who drank the hemlock...

[USA Today]
Nearly one in three people will be arrested by the time they are 23, contends a study published in Pediatrics. The new data show a sharp increase from a previous study that stunned the American public when it was published 44 years ago.

[3 Quarks Daily]
Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core.

[Vanity Fair]
For most of the last century, America's cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.

[largehearted boy]
Compilation of "Best of 2011" book lists.

[A Brief History of the Apocalypse]
When will the world come to an end?

[The Christian Science Monitor]
Mexico drug war casualty: citizenry suffers post-traumatic stress.

[Mercer]
2011 quality of living worldwide city rankings.

[Yahoo!]
The best cities in the world to live in.

[Wired]
IBM researchers have found a way to put a single bit of data on a 12-atom surface, creating the world's smallest magnetic storage device.

[The Atlantic]
The Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Foods: New research shows that when we eat we're consuming more than just vitamins and protein. Our bodies are absorbing information, or microRNA.

[MIT Technology Review]
Researchers have discovered a natural hormone that acts like exercise on muscle tissue—burning calories, improving insulin processing, and perhaps boosting strength. The scientists hope it could eventually be used as a treatment for obesity, diabetes, and, potentially, neuromuscular diseases like muscular dystrophy.

[boingboing]
The coming war on general-purpose computing.

[National Geographic]
Tiny microbes that live inside termites may one day help cure the world's energy woes.

[PhysOrg.com]
An insect's internal chemicals can be converted to electricity, potentially providing power for sensors, recording devices or to control the bug, a group of researchers at Case Western Reserve University report.

[PhysOrg.com]
Cornell scientists have created a new invisibility technique that doesn't just cloak an object—like in Harry Potter books and movies—but masks an entire event. It is a time masker that works by briefly bending the speed of light around an event.

[Wired]
Is science failing us?

[BBC]
Computer hackers plan to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.

[The Huffington Post]
China plans to launch space labs and manned ships and to prepare to build space stations over the next five years, according to a newly-released plan that shows the country's space program is gathering momentum.

[Pharyngula]
Why, from an evolutionary standpoint, do women menstruate?

[Technology Bits]
"Touchless" smartphones and TVs could be on sale in 2012.

[Harper's Magazine]
Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world's premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe's features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

[The Atlantic]
Tooth decay may finally have met its match. A small study of a new mouthwash found that it kills virtually all of the bacteria that cause tooth decay, but leaves other, beneficial oral bacteria alone. Its inventor likens it to a smart bomb. And he thinks it could wipe out tooth decay in our lifetime.

[NPR]
Calling it "the next important milestone in the ultimate search for planets like Earth," NASA has announced the discovery of "the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system."

[Medical Xpress]
Overeating may cause brain aging, while eating less turns on a molecule that helps the brain stay young.

[Scientific American]
Highly creative people often seem weirder than the rest of us. Now researchers think they know why.

[Science Daily]
Engineers at Brown University have developed a system that cleanly and efficiently removes trace heavy metals from water. In experiments, the researchers showed the system reduced cadmium, copper, and nickel concentrations, returning contaminated water to near or below federally acceptable standards. The technique is scalable and has viable commercial applications, especially in the environmental remediation and metal recovery fields.

[Science Daily]
Neuroscientists boost memory in mice using genetics and a new memory-enhancing drug.

[PhysOrg.com]
Could dark matter not matter?

[PhysOrg.com]
A smartphone security researcher is shining light on a hidden program, Control IQ, that tracks activity on Android, BlackBerry and Nokia handsets.

[Medical Xpress]
UChicago researchers showed children images and voices of a child and two adults, and asked "Which adult will the child grow up to be?" White children chose an English-speaking African-American man rather than a French-speaking white man, showing that their sense of identity was more dependent on language than on race.

[PhysOrg.com]
Established human embryonic cell lines, including those approved for federal research funding under George W. Bush, are different than newly derived human embryonic stem cell lines, according to a study by UCLA stem cell researchers. The finding points to the importance of continuing to derive new stem cell lines so researchers can better understand pluripotency, the ability of these cells to make every cell in the human body.

[Discovery News]
Google Maps to provide indoor maps for malls, airports, etc.