Our picksRussia Targets Election Software | The QAnon Candidates Are Here | America’s Slowing Innovation Engine, and more

Election Officials Are Vulnerable to Email Attacks, Report Shows (Robert McMillan, Wall Street Journal)
Six jurisdictions used software that Russian spies have targeted in cyberattacks

America’s Innovation Engine Is Slowing (Caleb Watney, Defense One)
Universities are in trouble and the influx of brainpower from overseas is shrinking. The long-term consequences could be disastrous.

How the Defense Department Is Reorganizing for Information Warfare (Mark Pomerleau, C4ISRNet)
America’s adversaries have targeted the military’s weaknesses via information warfare in recent years and as a result the Department of Defense has made a series of moves to reorganize and better defend against such threats. While each service is undertaking a slightly different approach toward information warfare, Defense officials have said there is a broad buy-in to a larger vision of how to fuse capabilities and better prepare to fight. Collectively, they show the breadth of the movement.

The Everyday Decisions that Undermine Democracy (Sheri Berman, Washington Post)Reviewing Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Sheri Berman, the author of Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day, writes that Twilight of Democracy offers many lessons on the long-standing struggle between democracy and dictatorship. But perhaps the most important is how fragile democracy is: Its survival depends on choices made every day by elites and ordinary people. “There is no road map to a better society,” Applebaum writes, “no didactic ideology, no rule book. All we can do is choose our allies and our friends . . . with great care, for only with them, together, is it possible to avoid the temptations of the different forms of authoritarianism.”