Economist Redux #5: February

The past three weeks have been pretty wild for me, and so I'm falling a bit behind on my blogging goal and my goal of reading The Economist every week. I spent today catching up on the past few weeks, and here are some articles I enjoyed!

• Some interesting point/counter-points about teaching recruitment and how teacher's unions in the US make it difficult to attract really high-performing students. There was also a good follow-up piece about different methods of training teachers that focused on TFA specifically.
• Starting the piece about the alfalfa farmer in Catch 22, this piece about farm subsidies was a pretty good analysis of different ways in which the current programs are generally wasteful and inefficient. Nothing really new here, but a good piece.
• This article about crowdfunding was focused on a game called Star Citizen (Kickstarter here), that's raised over $72 million. Cool thoughts about how this could be an effective way to pay for blockbuster films, with a pithy quote about an example that's near and dear to my heart: "if Joss Whedon wanted to do another series of ‘Firefly’, I bet he could raise a hell of a lot of cash.”
• Gentrification is a huge part of the national dialogue about urbanization, with most people assuming that it's a hugely negative trend. This article talks a lot about the positives of gentrification, which, whether or not you agree with them, are worth considering.
• Totally agree with this article; shutting down the DHS is definitionally bad for national security and is a lame attempt at governance. 
• Generally good article about Apple's risky plan to enter the car market, but I think the line about how "the technology firms have no manufacturing culture" falls pretty flat in the face of any basic interrogation of the complex supply chains and manufacturing requirements of complex modern electronics.
• An awesome article about Kaspersky Labs, an organization that has time and time again been ahead in the digital arms race over cyber security
• In an article very close to my heart, the newspaper tackles the furious battle for talent in Silicon Valley. Nothing particularly novel here, but I will say that I was disappointed that they didn't mention anything about the way developers at tech firms are in the front office, not the back office. I think that's also a huge part of why it's so hard to attract tech talent in more traditional industries.
• Cool article about the Supreme Court, and how it's the final frontier of grey, distinguished politics where disagreement doesn't make anyone enemies. Having been listening to Amicus, a podcast from Slate, I think there's a lot that I have to learn about the court.
• I highly recommend this article about North Korea's economic policies and how they end up making their economy chug along (albeit terribly). There are a couple of really interesting discussions about the differences between the North and South and some good commentary on the damage that the nuclear arms program has on the North Korean economy.
• Not particularly interesting on its own, but this article about bottled water in China resonated with me after having just finished reading How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.
• This article, about how eyelashes actually create aerodynamic turbulence that prevents eye infection, was just a great reminder that science is always moving forward, and that very few things evolve for no reason. 
• My college roommate and I used to talk for hours about using viral methods to attack antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as well as a ton of other tactics, but it sounds like we might be getting closer to this actually becoming a reality.