Our picksSpreading flu pandemic; Chinese tech worries; nuke attack on Hawaii, and more

Flu season worst since 2009 swine flu pandemic (Rachel Alexander, Spokesman-Review)
Forty Washingtonians died from the flu in the past week, according to the Washington Department of Health, nearly doubling the total flu season count to 86 deaths.

What a nuclear missile attack on Hawaii would look like (Patrick Tucker, Defense One)
A blast over Honolulu would be catastrophic. That doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t help the public prepare for one.

Silicon Valley and the threat to democracy (Niall Ferguson, Daily Beast)
Forget Russian hacking—the real threat to democracies around the globe is social media’s inexorable and unavoidable destruction of common ground and shared perspective.

Nations seek the elusive cure for cyberattacks (David E. Sanger, New York Times)
Securing the world against cyberattacks — from nations, criminal groups, vandals and teenagers — will be on the agenda when many of the world’s top leaders gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week.

Security fears spark crackdown on Chinese tech (Ali Breland and Morgan Chalfant, The Hill)
The federal government is taking steps to reduce the presence of some Chinese technology firms in American markets.

We don’t need a bigger nuclear button (Nathan Kohlenberg, Defense One)
The plan outlined in a draft of the Nuclear Posture Review would cost trillions of dollars — and make Americans no safer.

Pentagon says confronting Iran now tops terrorism concerns (Jack Detsch, Al Monitor)
The new National Defense Strategy envisions America’s military focusing on combating authoritarian ideals rather than the protracted global war on terror.

Twitter and Facebook have very different ideas about “fake news.” One of them is terribly wrong. (Paris Martineau, The Outline)
Hint: It’s Facebook.

Why are American prisons so afraid of this book? (Jonah Engel Bromwich, New York Times)
In Texas, the state prisons have banned more than 10,000 titles. These books are not allowed in prisons’ libraries, and the relatives of prisoners cannot bring them to the prisons during family visits. The banned titles list includes “The Color Purple,” a compilation by the humor writer Dave Barry, the 1908 Sears, Roebuck catalog, and best sellers like “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “A Time to Kill.” “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler, and books by white nationalists, including David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, are allowed.

Jared Kushner is China’s Trump card (Adam Entous and Evan Osnos, New Yorker)
How the President’s son-in-law, despite his inexperience in diplomacy, became Beijing’s primary point of interest.