This is not a bad James Patterson article, nor is it the latest part of the Bourne chronicles. This is a true story. Russian national Maria Butina has just been ordered to be held without bail after a range of lurid details came out in a court filing. The documents claim that Butina was in contact with the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency that replaced the KGB. Butina was also allegedly in a romantic relationship with an influential American who had close ties to the NRA and several media organizations. And the drama gets more absurd. From the document: ““For example, on at least one occasion, Butina offered an individual other than U.S. Person 1 sex in exchange for a position within a special interest organization.”

In the wake of World War II, as the Cold War was dawning, the American identity was certain. We were the defenders of freedom. We held values rooted in the Enlightenment, Protestant Christianity, and a clear racial and gender hierarchy. The civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s reacted against some of the injustices in those values and, as a result, shook the American identity to its core. Who is America, now? That’s what Sacha Baron Cohen’s new Showtime show asks, and he asks that question exactly as a comedian should: by pushing the limits of who we are and what we believe to the point of absurdity. 

Over the course of six years, Election Systems and Software sold voting machines with remote access software to “a small number of customers.” The company admitted this in a letter to a federal lawmaker, and the letter was obtained by Vice. Earlier this year, the company denied selling machines with remote access software. From the article: 

“ES&S is the top voting machine maker in the country, a position it held in the years 2000-2006 when it was installing pcAnywhere on its systems. The company’s machines were used statewide in a number of states, and at least 60 percent of ballots cast in the US in 2006 were tabulated on ES&S election-management systems. It’s not clear why ES&S would have only installed the software on the systems of “a small number of customers” and not all customers, unless other customers objected or had state laws preventing this.”

What’s the big deal with remote access systems? The lawmaker to whom the company sent its letter said that using such systems  “is the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.”

If you take a look at the season’s top movies or the most popular novels of the year, chances are you’ll see a few science fiction selections. The genre has become so established that we forget how relatively knew it is. The birth of the genre was the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and although it has developed a lot since then, there are still very clear roots back to this original novel. This video explains how the genre evolved.

Warren Buffett plans to give away most of his massive, eighty-one billion dollar fortune to charity. He made another big step recently when he donated a shocking $3.4 billion dollars in Berkshire Hathaway Inc stocks to five charities. The largest chunk went to Bill Gates’ charity, bringing the total amount of money he donated to the Gates Foundation to $24.5 billion dollars. The charities he donates to sell their shares, in line with Buffet’s desire that his money be put to good use and not hoarded. 

Because modern science has gotten so incredible, and because our understanding of the world has gotten so impressive, it is easy to forget that science is a process. Scientists build upon each others’ achievements, and what is wrong gets thrown out forever. As a result, we forget what has been disproven. This video looks at some of the most impressively wrong scientific ways of understanding the world and how those connect to what we now know.

The Fermi Paradox is this: if the universe is massive and aliens exist, and if aliens are all over the universe (once a common thought), then why aren’t aliens here? There are a lot of solutions to this paradox, ranging from aliens just don’t want to deal with us to we have been quarantined by aliens.  This video looks at some of the most unsettling answers to the Fermi Paradox. For example, it is conceivable that we live in a massive, alien-run simulation, and in this simulation there are no aliens. 

Let’s not bury the lede: “There is no evidence there has been any breach or fraud in voter registration or voting, election officials said.” That being said, it definitely does not look great that Maryland’s “voter registration system and other online systems operate on a software platform owned by a Russian-financed firm.” With the recent spate of Mueller indictments, it looks especially bad that a U.S. State would use anything linked to Russia in its voting systems. 

Everyone knows about data mining now, thanks largely to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook data was used to manipulate United States elections. That scandal has given data mining a bad name. This video teaches you how data mining works, what it is, and what benefit it has to you. For example, it helps pick the music that appears on your Spotify suggested playlists. It can even predict massacres in the Congo!

High culture is dead and the era of the public intellectual is over, Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa lamented in his Notes on the Death of Culture. Something strange has been quietly fomenting in the past few years, however, proving that Vargas Llosa was wrong. A psychology professor at the University of Toronto has gained mainstream success without resorting to shilling snake oil on daytime TV or otherwise compromising his integrity. Jordan Peterson’s fame has skyrocketed in the past year. His avuncular demeanor and hardline stances on social issues, his oratorical poise and his densely-layered lectures have endeared him to fans and perplexed critics. But who is Jordan Peterson? Is he the alt-right demagogue his critics claim? Or is he the champion of disaffected young men, unsure of their places in a politically correct world that has turned its back on them?

Peterson has become so controversial that I think it best to open with a disclaimer. I have been listening to Peterson’s lectures (via his podcast) for a year. At first, I thought he was verbose and obtuse. As a PhD in religious studies, however, I thought I should slog through his psychological interpretations of the Genesis stories. Once I adapted to his extemporaneous speaking and psychological jargon, I was hooked. I write this piece, therefore, as something of an apologia for Peterson and his saner fans, both of whom have been on the receiving end of vitriolic and, in my view, grossly inaccurate pop-journalism pieces. I am not asking any reader to become a Peterson fanatic or to adopt his way of thinking. Rather, my goal here is to explain why the Peterson phenomenon makes sense to those for whom it might appear baffling and to encourage cynics to take Peterson’s ideas more seriously in order to elevate the level of public debate.

Karma is the Hindu and Buddhist principle of cosmic momentum. Basically, if you tend to do bad things to people, you create bad momentum for yourself and bad things will happen. If you do good things, then good things will tend to happen. You often hear about it in the context of spirituality, but it’s quite logical. Take, for example, these thieves in Australia. They tried to steal gas from a bus, but immediately suffered retribution when they got a mouthful of poo-water. 

Vikings––you know, the guys with the big horned helmets who were all about raping and pillaging. Except they didn’t really wear those helmets, and instead wore helmets made of simple leather or metal. You’ll learn about how the viking used those helmets––and their swords, and their oared-ships––to spread terror around Europe and beyond. You’ll also learn how we know about the Vikings, which is through the writings of the poor monks who were often the victims of Viking raids.