This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Elsevier threatens others for linking to Sci-Hub but does so itself — Martin Eve: Sci-Hub is a copyright-violating site that provides infringing access to scholarly publications that are behind paywalls. Its ethics are problematic but it’s also proving very difficult to stop. I learned this morning that the largest scholarly publisher in the world, Elsevier, sent a legal threat to Citationsy for linking to Sci-Hub. There are different jurisdictional views on whether linking to copyright material is or is not a copyright violation. That said, the more entertaining fact is that scholarly publishers frequently end up linking to Sci-Hub.
• 35 years ago today, one man saved us from world-ending nuclear war — Dylan Matthews in Vox: “Petrov had to make a decision: Would he report an incoming American strike?” my colleague Max Fisher explained. “If he did, Soviet nuclear doctrine called for a full nuclear retaliation; there would be no time to double-check the warning system, much less seek negotiations with the US.” Reporting it would have made a certain degree of sense. The Reagan administration had a far more hardline stance against the Soviets than the Carter, Ford, or Nixon administrations before it. Months earlier President Reagan had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (mockingly dubbed “Star Wars,” a plan to shoot down ballistic missiles before they reached the US), and his administration was in the process of deploying Pershing II nuclear-armed missiles to West Germany and Great Britain, which were capable of striking the Soviet Union. There were reasons for Petrov to think Reagan’s brinkmanship had escalated to an actual nuclear exchange. But Petrov did not report the incoming strike. He and others on his staff concluded that what they were seeing was a false alarm. And it was; the system mistook the sun’s reflection off clouds for a missile. Petrov prevented a nuclear war between the Soviets, who had 35,804 nuclear warheads in 1983, and the US, which had 23,305.
• What Connects Meghan Markle to a Philosopher of Totalitarianism? Donald Trump’s Lies. — Mehdi Hasan at the Intercept: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” wrote Arendt in her 1951 classic “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” In a later interview, she went further: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. And with such a people you can then do what you please.” Per Arendt then, Trump isn’t just bullshitting or deflecting; he isn’t just demented or defensive; he is actively and consciously borrowing from the authoritarian’s playbook. He lies because he can — and because it serves his purpose. To control, to bully, to degrade those under him and around him. To both command and demonstrate unbending loyalty from his cultish base. This is who he is — and who he has always been. “His aim is never accuracy,” observes Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump’s 1987 memoir “The Art of the Deal.” As he notes, “it’s domination.”
• Part-time work is humane and should be respected and encouraged — Livia Gershon in Aeon: As it happens, the economic case for more part-time work is pretty water-tight. Recent studies in Sweden and New Zealand have found that working fewer hours improves employee productivity. And in a six-hour workday experiment in Melbourne last year, workers wasted less time on long meetings and focused more on the tasks at hand. They also spent less work time on personal tasks since they had more non-work hours to get those done. Personally, I do think working fewer hours makes me more productive. But that’s not why I do it. The real reason is that I have other things I’d rather do. An hour that I don’t spend working (and I work hard, believe me, and like what I do), is an hour sitting on the couch with my kids, reading a science-fiction novel and pausing intermittently to chat about their video games or YouTube favourites. It’s an hour cooking a meal, going for a walk or doing volunteer work. It’s when I can act as one node in the lively neighbourhood web of parents, grandparents and afterschool programmes for kids, organising hangouts and snacks. It’s also when I pay bills, run errands, execute minor home repairs, and hire others to tackle major ones – so neither I nor my husband have to do that stuff on weekends.
• For MMT — Thomas Fazi and Bill Mitchell respond to criticism in Tribune: Ultimately, the ideology of scarcity of money is integral to the maintenance of our deeply unequal relations of power in society. If there’s anything the establishment fears more than the working classes seizing the means of production, it’s the working classes seizing the means of production of money (or more precisely, of currency). You would think that socialists would understand that. Labour should prioritise building a narrative that will advance the socialist cause for the decades to come. It should reject the ideology of ‘sound money’ outright and educate the public about the capacities of a currency-issuing government and the opportunities those capacities provide. It should explain to citizens that the purpose of fiscal policy is to advance broad welfare concerns, which pertain to wages, employment, equity, price stability, environmental sustainability and the like, not to achieve financial balance between revenue and outlays or to achieve a particular debt ratio.
• Too Much Coffee Man — Shannon Wheeler: