Happy New Year from the AI staff! Here’s what we’ve been reading this week:

1. MOOCs as sporting events.

2. Jobs of the future…or something.

3. A dangerous provocation.

4. Avoiding the picnic-table crisis.

5. Cigars go up in smoke.

6. New Year’s resolution: Stop lying to pollsters.

And, as always, readers are encouraged to let us know what you’re reading.

Attempts to legalize pot are fraught with tremendous complexities. The black market probably isn’t going away even with legalization, which means even the visible costs of punishing dealers probably aren’t going to go away either. There’s no better guide to the issues here than Mark Kleiman, perhaps our country’s foremost expert on drug policy and the person Washington state brought in to help set up their new market.

Here’s a column the academy hopes no-one will read: Glenn Reynolds’ insightfully advocating in the WSJ for deep reforms to the American college system. Reynolds argues that mounting college debt paired with stagnant wages will catalyze solutions that could drastically disrupt the academy. Any college president who isn’t taking Glenn’s concern seriously isn’t doing the job.

Looking back at 2013, some actors on the international scene, both state and non-state, notched up significant achievements and advances. Others didn’t do as well. In developing our list of the world’s biggest winners and losers in 2013, AI didn’t make moral judgments. This is a realist calculation, looking at who gained power during the year and who lost.

Even at the most basic level the distinction between GMOs and “natural” foods doesn’t make sense. When they’ve got scientific evidence on their side, green campaigners spew hate speech about the evil science deniers on the other side. But the moment a scientific consensus attacks some cherished green myth (organic good, GMO bad, for example), they spew hate speech against scientists as corporate shills.What the planet and the people who live on it badly need is a pro-environment, pro-people movement that actually cares about scientific evidence.

To get any insight at all into what Jesus’ childhood and upbringing were like, you have to do something that sometimes makes Protestants uncomfortable: study Mary.

New reports suggest that Hezbollah has been taking advantage of the chaos in Syria to smuggle advanced anti-aircraft and anti-ship weapons into Lebanon. As the WSJ notes, however, the key player is Iran, which backs Hezbollah and appears to be behind these shipments. For those in Western capitals making the case that Iran is ready for a real reconciliation and change of policy, life just got a little bit worse.

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, an octogenarian economist, announced he would be stepping down from his position after elections next year. It was the first news conference the notoriously aloof and mellow Singh has given in three years, and he used it to fire biting comments at an opposition rival who is widely seen as the man who will replace him.

The first generations of MOOCs have serious problems and critics are right to be concerned. But it’s far too early to count them out.

The US ended 2013 with a months-long spree of good news for the manufacturing sector. Total factory output hit a two-year high in November, a hot streak which continued in December where output grew nearly as fast. Manufacturing employment was going strong as well, hitting a high it hasn’t seen since 2011. We may never return to the mass employment in manufacturing of the type we saw in the mid-20th century, but America’s manufacturing sector looks well positioned to keep growing in the decades to come.