February 2, 2015
- Mitt Romney declines to run in 2016; contenders Christie and Bush jockey for support of Romney's donors.
- Obama submits annual budget to Congress, proposes tax on overseas earnings to finance infrastructure investments.
- Al-Jazeera journalists freed after 400 days in Egyptian prison.
- Following the murder of two citizens by the Islamic State, Japan's policy of pacifism put to the test.
- Fascinating: "The Fire on the 57 Bus in Oakland."
- NASA launches satellite to improve global flood and drought forecasting.
- British Army plans to deploy 1,500 "Facebook Warriors" to "wage complex and covert information and subversion campaigns."
- Behavioral psychology regarding bathrooms is limited, but good advice is to leave smartphones alone.
- One of Sundance's top movies was filmed with an iPhone 5S, an $8 app, and "100 years worth of filmmaking."
- Drones are showing up in the traditional designs of Afghan weavers.
- With covert and unjust interventions over recent decades, the US has done far more than Islam to stoke jihadist fire.
- Today's uber-patriotic brand of Americanism is pro-military, pro-empire—something the founders would regard as deeply un-American.
- Patriots win Super Bowl with Brady's excellence and the Seahawks' "worst call in Super Bowl history."
- Neil deGrasse Tyson livetweeted the Super Bowl.
- Seattle Art Museum loses wager to New England’s Clark Art Institute and now must loan out a prized artwork.
- Receive a free limited-edition Tournament of Books Memo Book with any purchase from Field Notes.
- Charts and diagrams drawn by famous authors includes Faulkner's plotting “my apocryphal county.”
- Quotation marks originated in Ancient Greek literary criticism.