Seven links, all worth a read

1. Woody Allen is very lazy.

2. This is the story of the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of Kim Jong-un. Fascinating and sad - perhaps too implausible to be a film.

3. This is an article by someone with Asperger's talking about neurodiversity. "Aspies don’t mince their words. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen thinks this is a sign of low empathy and he is not alone. Baron-Cohen thinks “empathizing is about effortlessly putting yourself into another’s shoes, sensitively negotiating an interaction with another person so as not to hurt or offend them in any way, caring about another’s feelings.” Baron-Cohen is one of the pioneers in the field of autism research. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that what Aspies have is a failure of introspection, not empathy. // Aspies have a blunt style of speech, because they mean well. [...] Neurotypicals always think it’s about them. Tell them social media is not good for children, and they will say, “Don’t tell me how to raise my child.” Tell them intelligence is heritable, and they assume you just called them stupid. Tell them you disagree, and they think you just don’t like them. Tell them the gender salary gap is not because of patriarchy, and they will remove you from their Facebook friend list. Why do neurotypicals make a torture rack for themselves, and us, with their poor self-esteem? And they still think we don’t have empathy."

4. "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" Dr Johnson asked. This article is a well-judged attempt to answer that question.

5. Ross Douthat gives Hugh Hefner both barrels.

6. "Soon an intelligent terrorist with a cruise missile and some off-the-shelf kit will be able to sink [an aircraft] carrier using their iPhone ... [Our leaders] should also study summer 1914 and ponder how those responsible for war and peace still make these decisions in much the same way as then, while the crises are 1,000 times faster and a million times more potentially destructive." The ever-readable Dominic Cummings, of course. The headline is "Review of Allison’s book on US/China & nuclear destruction, and some connected thoughts on technology, the EU, and space": that covers most of it, although there is more Bismarck in it than you would guess from that. Oh, and also: "When the UK leaves the EU, the EU will have zero universities in the global top 20."

7. Are you scared about software? If not, you should be. "The stakes keep rising, but programmers aren’t stepping up—they haven’t developed the chops required to handle increasingly complex problems. “In the 15th century,” he said, “people used to build cathedrals without knowing calculus, and nowadays I don’t think you’d allow anyone to build a cathedral without knowing calculus. And I would hope that after some suitably long period of time, people won’t be allowed to write programs if they don’t understand these simple things.”"