Ferguson Isn’t the Only Place Where Police Are Protected by a Broken System

The recent ruling by a St. Louis grand jury on Michael Brown’s shooting sheds light on just how difficult it is to indict a cop; the apocalypse may have something to do with indifference toward climate change; meanwhile, a teacher uses a scrap of paper to teach his students a valuable lesson about inequality and privilege. These discoveries and more below.

‘Putin Has No Option But To Stay In Power’ A lot of time has passed since Sergei Kolesnikov last saw Vladimir Putin face to face — six years, to be exact. But even then, he says, Russia’s most powerful man was showing signs of fatigue.

White People Rioting Over Stupid Shit Here are some pictures of white people rioting over stupid shit.

Leading Mideast Studies Group Allows Members to Support BDS Israeli academics present at Middle East Studies Association’s AGM in Washington call the move unprecedented and a game changer.

Why It’s Impossible to Indict a Cop It’s not just Ferguson—here’s how the system protects police.

Are Telepathy Experiments Stunts, or Science? Scientists have established direct communication between two human brains, but is it more than a stunt?

A Big Reason Climate Change Isn’t a Priority: The Apocalypse If you want to understand how little urgency there is among the American public about climate change, consider this.

This Teacher Taught His Class A Powerful Lesson About Privilege I once saw a high school teacher lead a simple, powerful exercise to teach his class about privilege and social mobility. He started by giving each student a scrap piece of paper and asked them to crumple it up.

Ken Doctor: Why The New York Times hired Kinsey Wilson The former chief content officer at NPR will be moving up I-95 to one of the most important digital positions at the Times.

Baghdadi vs. Zawahri: Battle for Global Jihad Since the rise of the Islamic State (IS) this year and its proclamation of a caliphate, there has been a battle underway in the global jihad movement for leadership and loyalty between Caliph Ibrahim, also known as IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahri.

Chronicle of a Riot Foretold For a hundred and eight days, through the suffocating heat that turned the city into a kiln, through summer thunderstorms and the onset of an early winter, through bureaucratic callousness and the barbs of cynics who held that the effort was of no use and the prickly fear that they might be right, a community in Ferguson, Missouri, held vigil nightly, driven by the need to validate a simple principle: black lives matter.

Physicists Solve Mystery of Why Cats Rule, Dogs Drool Popular web videos showing that “cats rule and dogs drool” have new scientific evidence to support that felinophilic sentiment, at least when it comes to drinking.

Do Online Death Threats Count as Free Speech? Exhibit 12 in the government’s case against Anthony Elonis is a screenshot of a Facebook post he wrote in October 2010, five months after his wife, Tara, left him.

Rent and Human Intervention It takes a lot of money to get people to vote against their own interests, and the real estate industry has plenty of money.

Dignity in Retirement Is Not Too Much to Ask How can we reinvent faculty retirement to benefit all parties?

By Studying Immigrants, Book Provides a New View on Social Media and Political Movements Nearly a decade ago, Sasha Costanza-Chock—now an assistant professor in MIT’s program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing—volunteered at the Garment Worker Center in Los Angeles, an organization that advocates for the rights of low-wage workers.