This last few weeks, I have been mostly going mad, and reading:

• Ageing out of drugs — Stacey McKenna in Aeon: So, what have we learned so far from those who age out of drug use? When people talk about the life cycle leading to natural recovery, numerous factors are at play. For many, it’s a simple case of ‘being sick and tired of being sick and tired’. […] Though this is the path that’s most common among people who have tried or even become addicted to drugs, it’s the one least discussed. But careful scrutiny of ageing out – both why people do and why they don’t – tells us a lot about drug dependence and what to do about it. […] The so-called unbreakable cycle of addiction appears to result from inequity – from poverty, from discrimination, from social and economic oppression.
• Did Money Eat Our Brains? — Steve Roth at Evonomics: After growing rapidly for a couple of million years, doubling from roughly 750 to 1,500 cubic centimeters, human brains have shrunk by about ten percent over just ten or twenty millennia. (So they’ve been getting smaller maybe twenty times faster than they got bigger.) Imagine taking an ice cream scoop out of your brain. That’s about the size of it.
• Why America’s MOOC pioneers have abandoned ship — Jonathan Rees: The most obvious reason why everyone from the founders of MOOC companies to students who sign up for such course are abandoning MOOCs is because these kinds of courses have not lived up to their initial hype. MOOCs were supposed to transform education as we know it, but traditional education with its inefficiency derived from the close proximity between professors and their students has proved more resilient than its wannabe disruptors ever imagined.
• S&P warns on NZ house prices. What about Oz? — Leith van Onselen at MacroBusiness provides your terminally ill economy chart porn of the week:
• Podcast Out — David A. Banks in the New Inquiry is onto something: The invisible forces that control human behavior, as it turns out, are not sociological or even cultural; the answers to life’s most important questions are invariably cognitive, biological, or evolutionarily determined. Topics that might have once been subject to political debate or rhetorical argument–work demands, exposure to toxins, surveillance, the limits of love, even Marxian alienation–become apolitical subjects for scientific testing. But the results only lead to greater and greater complexity, prompting introspective thought rather than action. Thus, liberal infotainment is full of statements that sound like facts–what social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson calls “factiness”–that do nothing more than reinforce and rationalize the listeners’ already formed common sense, rather than transforming it: what you believed to be true before the show started was not wrong, it just lacked the veneer of factiness.