The ideology that is ‘species’. It’s a social constructivist argument, but of course, the distinctions between species are not particularly clear. Yet, this particular arbitration determines a great proportion of our conservation efforts. Are the extinctions of sub-species less important than the extinctions of species? There’s no good answer. It’s just ideologies at work.

The magnetic poles might flip. Another thing to worry about, alongside supervolcanoes, solar flares, and meteor strikes. Make a good apocalypse book. I told you I’m a bit of a prepper.

The populist phantom:

The emergence of populist parties as significant electoral players in many parts of the world has been a shock to the unusually stable party systems of the decades since the Second World War, but in the longer arc of democratic politics it should hardly be surprising. Across Europe, for example, the average vote share for right-wing populist parties has increased by less than half a percentage point per year since the turn of the century. The rise of social democratic parties in many of these same countries in the early twentieth century was far more dramatic.

I’ll also pull out:

In most of the places where populist parties have made significant electoral gains, the explanations have been similarly prosaic; the scandals and failures of mainstream parties were often paramount.

It’s long, but some people probably need a long, feed-good article.

Relaxed AI skepticism. Short but a nice counter to the swings and roundabouts elsewhere:

AI, like every other information technology, will end up creating complexity as well as processing it, that the robots will get in each other’s way just like we do, and that consequently we are going to systematically overestimate the benefits of the technology during the initial phase