Hi, Ducks! Happy New Year!  I’m back after a semester wandering across northern India.  Did you miss me?  Well, here are your links anyway…

• Professor Ole Wæver argues for “open science to fight big threats.”
• Senator Bernie Sanders has asked the NSA a simple question that may finally make a difference.  (Okay, probably not.)
• This year will mark the 100th anniversary of World War I.  The New Yorker’s archive has an excellent review of recent historical interpretations of the causes and consequences of that great cataclysm.  It is worth a read.
• The Broadsword blog notes that global defense spending has fallen.  The decline is linked in part to the implementation of the US Budget Control Act in 2013.
• Farha Ghannam, who wrote the excellent book Remaking the Modern, has a blog post at Jadaliyya on “The Promise of the Wall: Reflections on Desire and Gated Communities in Cairo.”
• Hollywood has made a film about Ibn Sina.  (Please don’t let it suck.)
• Finally, Fabrizio Foschini at the AAN blog provides a social history of the pakol, a rolled-up hat worn by leaders from Alexander the Great to the Lion of Panjshir to Osama bin Laden.

(Thanks to Megan and Adrienne for managing the Monday Morning Links while I was away.)