Author: Andrew Sullivan

Nature details the agricultural challenges ahead. On the latest crisis:

The world currently has more than enough food, but some 1 billion people still go hungry because they cannot afford to pay for it. The 2008 food crisis, which pushed around 100 million people into hunger, was not so much a result of a food shortage as of a market volatility — with causes going far beyond supply and demand — that sent prices through the roof and sparked riots in several countries. Economics can hit food supply in other ways. The countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development pay subsidies to their farmers that total some US$1 billion a day. This makes it very difficult for farmers in developing nations to gain a foothold in world markets.

From local news (worth watching first) to autotune in a matter of hours:

Now, he's doing media interviews.

Texas In Africa gets into the history of the region:

The perception that anyone who speaks Kinyarwanda is not a legitimate Congolese citizen – and therefore not entitled to own land in the region – is widespread and hugely problematic. The 2006 constitution guarantees citizenship rights to ethnic groups that were in the country at the time of independence, which includes most Rwandaphones in the Kivus, but the constitution doesn't list the groups by name, which leaves them vulnerable.

It's critical to understand this context when thinking about the region, because these issues – not minerals – motivate much of the current fighting.

Exhibit A: Mike Pence.

A self-explanatory tumblr. The above entry reads:

Aww! Get it? ‘Cause when you hang a suit on it, it looks like a dog is wearing it. Then you go to your job and try to jump out the window cause the dog’s spirit haunts whatever it touches.

"Obama’s Chief Medicare Actuary Estimates That Obama’s Government Takeover Of Health Care Will Cut Medicare By $575 Billion," – GOP.com, celebrating the 45th anniversary of Medicare.

Jonah Lehrer provides a theory:

While kids exposed to preschool got an initial bump in general intelligence, this dissipated by second grade. Instead, preschool seemed to improve performance on a variety of “non-cognitive” abilities, such as self-control, persistence and grit. While society has long obsessed over raw smarts – just look at our fixation on IQ scores – Heckman and Cunha argue that these non-cognitive traits are often more important. They note, for instance, that dependability is the trait most valued by employers, while “perseverance, dependability and consistency are the most important predictors of grades in school.” Of course, these valuable skills have little or anything to do with general intelligence. And that’s probably a good thing, since our non-cognitive traits are much more malleable, at least when interventions occur at an early age, than IQ. Preschool might not make us smarter – our intelligence is strongly shaped by our genes – but it can make us a better person, and that’s even more important.

A guide.

David McRaney takes on the anchoring effect:

Even if you’ve done some research online, you don’t know for sure exactly what the car is worth, or what the dealer paid for it. The focus instead is the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, and no matter how unrealistic it is, you can’t help but be tethered to it.

When you haggle over the price, you are pulling away from the anchor, and both you and the dealer know this.