A human shield of Millennials.

The World Health Organization meets again to consider whether coronavirus—170 dead, 7,000 infected—is a global health emergency. 1/26

Related: Questions about the virus that scientists are struggling to answer. 2/26

Infectious disease mortality rates were declining long before vaccines or antibiotics, thanks to cleaning up the environment. 3/26

Hundreds of millions of desert locusts are swarming in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, in some of the biggest numbers in 25 years. 4/26

The Guardian becomes the first global news organization to ban ads from oil and gas companies. 5/26

Rolls-Royce plans to build a dozen mini nuclear reactors, each about 1.5 acres in size, over the next 10 years. 6/26

Hundreds of Amazon employees are putting their jobs on the line this week by speaking out against the company’s climate policies. 7/26

An array of data for all known English-language darknet markets from Silk Road 1 (ca. 2011) to Horizon (2016). 8/26

In impeachment news, wavering Republican senators appear to appreciate Trump’s latest legal gambit: that anything he does to win reelection is in the public interest. 9/26

YelloPain provides a music video counterargument to that link we posted the other day (saying your vote doesn’t count): your vote counts for a lot. 10/26

Related/unrelated: “The Bernie Campaign Is Fortified by a Human Shield of Millennials.” 11/26

Unrelated: Weird tweets from Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams. 12/26

Your weekly white paper: Elections are not only stressful on voters, they increase health care costs by as much as 19%. 13/26

"Working percentage goes down while food preparation goes up." From July, how we spent our time in 2018 compared to 2003. 13/26

One reason your car insurance is going up: the cost of new features designed to keep vehicles in their lanes and out of trouble. 14/26

For all its troubles, Facebook now has 2.5 billion customers (on a planet of 7.7 billion). 15/26

New York's Gov. Cuomo is willing to consider helmet mandates for car drivers, because the data on brain injuries is terrifying. 16/26

Unrelated: Which emoji scissors close and which do not. 17/26

The Economist’s Middle East correspondent reveals he was secretly detained in Iran this summer. 18/26

Scenes from a recent reenactment of an 1811 Louisiana slave revolt. 19/26

When architects take jobs from oppressive leaders, do their buildings automatically glorify fascism? 10/26

See also: An annotated case study from 1970 in McMansion design. 11/26

How to unharden your heart toward homeless people: try talking to them or simply listening. 12/26

Director Bong Joon Ho and his production designer explain how they built the layered set in Parasite. 13/26

Skateboarding, about to debut in the Tokyo Olympics, is still frowned upon in Japan, if not forbidden. 14/26

“It’s more like an appetizer than a bread." All hail lard bread.


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