[Shirky.com]
When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

[Miller-McCune]
A leading political scientist finds that intolerance of opposing political views is stronger among people with the strongest religious views.

[newswise]
Abolishing patent and copyright law sounds radical, but two economists at Washington University in St. Louis say it's an idea whose time has come. Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine see innovation as a key to reviving the economy. They believe the current patent/copyright system discourages and prevents inventions from entering the marketplace.

[The Technium]
The Unabomber was right?

[Times Online]
The German city of Cologne woke up yesterday without a memory. As police used tracker dogs to try to unearth suvivors beneath the collapsed archives building, engineers were trying to work out how the 1971 institution—once regarded as a state-of-the-art documentation centre, copied across the world—could have simply collapsed, as if hit by a missile. Some of Germany's most valuable documentary treasures, dating back to 922 CE, may have been destroyed.

[MSNBC]
A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined, and more people say they have no religion at all.

[The Economist]
How to stop the drug wars: prohibition has failed; legalization is the least bad solution.

[Voice of the Shuttle]
Extensive humanities research tool.