Podcasts:

• A Planet Money episode that takes a peek inside the fake-news industry.
• A 99% Invisible episode on the surprising role the postal service played in early US history.
• Crimetown, a fascinating new series about corruption and mafia in Providence a few decades ago.

Cool stuff online:

• Two bizarre articles about automatism and sleepwalking as legal defenses. I learned about these from the book "The Power of Habit", by Charles Duhigg. From the same source I learned about Arbitron, a company with ingenious techniques for measuring the audience size of a radio or TV station. (These items of curiosity are only tangentially related to the topic of the book.)
• A New Yorker article about the Mosul dam in Iraq. If they stop pumping cement into the earth, the dam collapses. Talk about technical debt.
• Some incredible 3D printed heart gears, and an automated transmission model that includes a reverse gear.