Screen Time Is Making Us Dumb.'

A 2014 unesco study noted that of the seven billion people on earth, six billion have access to a mobile phone. In far less abundant supply are books—but the ubiquity of cell phones now offers people in developing nations the chance to read digitally. Of more than 4,000 respondents surveyed in Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe, 62 percent said they are reading more, thanks to their phone.

- Laura Kiniry

The power grid. Voter databases. DNC email accounts. Our Facebook feeds. What haven’t Putin’s goons attacked? Yet former ambassador William Courtney, adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, and Angela Stent, director of Georgetown’s Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, aren’t fretting. Here’s why:

WE’RE NO LONGER IN THE DARK.

“Who would have thought in 2014 that Russia would interfere with our election in 2016?” asks Stent. “Now we have a good idea of what happened and how— so we can prepare, make our systems safer, begin to anticipate what comes next. People in the intelligence world are already thinking one or two steps ahead.”

THERE IS NO CENTRAL POWER GRID

“Our utility companies are run individually, on the regional level,” says Courtney. “To disrupt the entire country at once would require a huge coordination of effort, which is unlikely to happen given that each utility company maintains its own security— and all of them are making their systems more resilient.”

THE U.S. AND RUSSIA HAVE BEEN DOWN THIS ROAD BEFORE