The idyllic mansions destroyed by climate change

The week’s best long reads, including the fate of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, a world run by women, and people who could destroy the web.

Psychology | The art of agile leadership

Leaders rarely lead. They are helpless in the face of events like everybody else, but they handle it better. We need a word for that: “Leadering is the art of creating a self-serving account of whatever is already happening, and inserting yourself into it in a prominent role.” The worst thing in a leader is vision; it is probably wrong, and even if it is right, circumstances will change. The best is agility: go with the flow. (Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm, 3,525 words)

Feminism | A better world, run by women

The decline of male supremacy is good news for humanity, according to Melvin Konner, an anthropologist at Emory University. Women are superior to men in almost everything except brute strength, and a world run by women will be more peaceful, more rational, more honest – and all the more so when women no longer need to imitate men in order to gain power. The problem with men is testosterone, a biological aberration which primes them for “a lifetime of physical aggression”. (Melvin Konner, Wall Street Journal, 1,240 words)

Genetics | Engineering the perfect baby

Scientists can edit DNA – deleting bad genes and inserting good ones – with a technology called Crispr, which is used on animals and is making its way into human medicine. But Crispr can also edit the DNA of embryos, making changes inheritable by future generations. Laws and ethics have yet to catch up, but here are the means to bio-engineer new strains of human; indeed, it may already have been tried. (Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review, 5,050 words)

Climate change | Slip sliding away

Climate change scientists predict that within a century, rising sea levels will submerge most of the Outer Banks, an idyllic 200-mile-long chain of sandy islands off the coast of North Carolina. But there is no long-term planning under way for that catastrophe. Developers are still building mansions on the beaches. Rich people are still buying them. Few believe what the scientists say. And even if they did believe, what could they do? (Mac McClelland, Audubon, 4,550 words)

Cyber warfare | People who could really break the internet

You could not hope to hack the top-level DNS servers that hold the internet together; but if you controlled enough bandwidth you could mount a denial-of-service attack against one or two Internet Exchange Points, which would make the rest of the internet unusable. Who has access to that sort of bandwidth, and the expertise to point it all at one place? Some governments. At least a dozen corporations. And perhaps three individuals. (Andrew Conway, Cloudmark, 1,600 words)

Ethics | On killing virtual dogs

If I make a dog in Minecraft, and it shares my adventures, should I develop some attachment to it? On the one hand, obviously not: It is not a real dog. But on the other hand, should I not feel some degree of attachment to it, whatever it is, even if much less than to a real dog? If I take my faithful old virtual dog and chop him into pieces for no good reason, is that an action without any moral significance? (Charlie Huenemann, Huenemanniac, 1,540 words)

Neuroscience | The consciousness myth

Tom Stoppard’s latest play, The Hard Problem, questions the nature of consciousness. Things don’t think; yet the body is a thing: so how do people think? Recent developments in psychiatry and computing have spurred a new interest in consciousness. But it’s an old story, and if you want to hear the rest of it, ask a philosopher. Philosophers have been tackling the Hard Problem intensively since Descartes made a stab at it 400 years ago. (Galen Strawson, Times Literary Supplement, 4,000 words)