I'm going to let you in on one of the most important lessons I learned early on, in my years of training to become a doctor: Absolutely anyone can drown, or lose a loved one to a drowning. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 3,900 people die from unintentional drowning in the US each year — with one in five under 14-years-old. And for each pediatric fatality, another five children require emergency care for nonfatal drownings that can cause irreversible organ damage.

Three years ago, a group of German libraries, universities, and research institutes teamed up to force the three largest scientific publishers to offer an entirely new type of contract. In exchange for an annual lump sum, they wanted a nationwide agreement making papers by German authors free to read around the world, while giving researchers in Germany access to all of the publishers’ online content.

There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it. What makes this paradoxical is that the vastly increased access to information and knowledge we have today does not empower us or make us more cognitively autonomous. Rather, it renders us more dependent on other people’s judgments and evaluations of the information with which we are faced.

Thomas Nagel reviews “As If: Idealization and Ideals” by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

The Open Internet rules make sure that everybody can participate in knowledge online and help prevent a new digital divide between those who can pay for access to information and those who cannot afford to, despite being connected to the internet.

Now why would touch bring us more certainty? This verdict is at odds with what cognitive science tells us. By Ophelia Deroy.

A young editor withstood a decade of online abuse. Now she’s fighting back — on Wikipedia itself. By Andrew McMillen.

The delightful story of how the Scripps National Spelling Bee found a home on a sports network. By Ann-Derrick Gaillot.

The benefits of looking directly at the sun might outweigh the costs. By Sam Kriss.

Discovering the infinite universe. By Lewis H. Lapham.

Fearful of digital decay, a ceramicist wants to return data storage to a more lasting medium: clay. By Richard Kemeny.

Crowds aren’t as smart as we thought, since some people know more than others. A simple trick can find the ones you want. By George Musser.

The benefits of a post-truth society. By Julia Shaw.

“What drove the political class of Abbasid society to support this enormous and difficult undertaking? Part of the explanation is no doubt the sheer utility of the scientific corpus: key texts in disciplines such as engineering and medicine had obvious practical application. But this doesn’t tell us why translators were paid handsomely…” Peter Adamson.

NASA is opening up its research library to the public in the newly launched web database PubSpace…and it’s absolutely free. NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan believes that this move will benefit fellow scientists and engineers and accelerate innovation. “Making our research data easier to access will greatly magnify the impact of our research,” she said. “As scientists and engineers, we work by building upon a foundation laid by others.”

This is the time to think big about designing the digital future. It is a rare moment when a new regime can realign the modes of communication so that they serve the public interest, as the Constitution originally intended. By Robert Darnton.

Why infinite libraries are treated skeptically in the annals of science fiction and fantasy. By Adrienne LaFrance. (June 3, 2016)

You might guess that the revered 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest of all modern reference works. You would be wrong. That honor, as Jack Lynch reminds us in “You Could Look It Up,” must go elsewhere. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”— in the words of Douglas Adams — “has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom...

The question irks many of the site's core members, even though this is how most nonprofits work. By Caitlin Dewey.

London conference discusses efforts by the online encyclopaedia to enlist the help of scientists. By Richard Hodson.