What the world is reading

“ ‘Whatever happened to inequality?’ someone asked in my van. ‘It kind of disappeared,’ said a woman from Montreal. ‘Oh, we talked about it a lot’,” said a young delegate from South Africa. Everyone else looked puzzled. Christopher Hickey observes that inequality was surely on the agenda for the World Economic Forum, “but once the conference was in full swing, few people talked, and even fewer seemed to care about it”. The conference opened with the organisers calling on the 2,500 people in attendance to address the explosive imbalance between the world’s astronomical rich and those who live in grinding poverty. A message from Pope Francis was blunt: “I ask you to ensure that humanity is served by wealth and not ruled by it,” he said. What made headlines included Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe comparing the tensions between China and Japan to the tensions in Europe before World War I, and a Middle Eastern marathon. “The consensus among rich guys I talked to was that Davos this year was just the way it should be: a place to make more deals face to face with more people much faster than they could anywhere else… ‘I like to improve my mind’, an American CEO told me,” Hickey says.

The New Yorker

Fan friction and Sherlock

Emily Nussbaum traces the origin of modern fan fiction: “when the author retreats, his fans step in, writing their own Sherlock mysteries”. This happens not just in the third season of Sherlock, which opens with a homage to its online fans, but in 1893, when Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed Sherlock Holmes, chucking him off Reichenbach Falls, “protesters wore black armbands in the streets. Later, Conan Doyle rolled back the rock.” Sherlock has also inspired slash fiction, “a genre which exploded once the Internet came long”. Which brings Nussbaum to “the central shift from the original: Sherlock is still a detective, there are episodic mysteries, there is still Baker Street, but the subject of the show is not so much Sherlock’s deductions as this relationship, which is itself a kind of mystery”. The show explores Holmes’s callousness towards those who care about him, capturing at times the semi-real ways people meet and connect today. “It’s a rare attempt to make visible something that we take for granted: a new kind of cognition, inflected by passion, that allows strangers to think loud, solving mysteries together,” Nussbaum writes.

The Guardian

Online gaming and science

A new generation of online games don’t just provide entertainment — they help scientists solve puzzles involving genes, conservation and the universe, according to Dara Mohammadi. A new wave of games lets players with little or no scientific knowledge tackle challenging problems. In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an AIDS-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks. A year later, people playing an astronomy game called Planet Hunters found a curious planet with four stars in its system, and to date, they’ve discovered 40 planets that could potentially support life. “The potential,” writes Mohammadi, “is huge. As a planet we spend 3 bn hours a week playing online games, and if even a fraction of that time can be harnessed for science, laboratories around the world would have access to some rather impressive cognitive machinery.”