* “The Ends of the World is page-turner about mass extinction.” Note: “The evidence suggests that every single time, mass extinction was the result of runaway alterations in the planet’s atmospheric composition.”

* “‘I’ve done nothing wrong’: Utah nurse’s arrest prompts police apology.” Incredibly vile behavior; one wonders how often such things happened, unrecorded, prior to the advent of police body cameras.

* “‘Cheap sex’ is making men give up on marriage,” which is based on Mark Regnerus’s book Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy.

* The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant by showing what the future of farming could look like.

* The case of Stephen Greenblatt:” “Thus did Greenblatt help initiate the long, slow destruction of the serious study of literature in the American academy.”

* Marie Kondo and the relentless war on stuff. See also Paul Graham’s “Stuff.”

* How Nakaya, a Japanese Pen Maker, Anticipated the Writing-Tool Renaissance. Personally I’ve been a fan of Sailor fountain pens, but more often these days I just use Pigma Micron pens that’re easier to carry around (and lose).

* École 42, a free, teacher-less university in France, is schooling thousands of future-proof programmers. Cool.

* “Republican Party Autopsy Author Goes Off On GOP As Trump’s DACA Decision Nears: ‘Those in Republican leadership who have enabled his behavior by standing silent or making excuses for him deserve the reckoning that will eventually come for the GOP,’ Sally Bradshaw, a longtime adviser to Jeb Bush, told BuzzFeed News.” One hopes, but this does seem awfully optimistic.

* “Undercover in North Korea: ‘All Paths Lead to Catastrophe.'” Maybe the best piece on this topic I’ve seen so far, and not just more of the usual.

* “College is the new High School and that should terrify everyone.” An overstated headline, but still a useful piece. That being said, “college” means such a wide array of institutions, experiences, and instruction that it’s almost meaningless to lump all of them together.

* “Why do entrepreneurs get such a bad rap?” In movies, anyway. I suspect that evil is more interesting than good, which is also why we get so many movies about robbers and gangsters and so few about, say, content, functional families.