* Elena Ferrante’s master class in deceit? Good essay with a weak title.

* The demise of the second-hand bookshop.

* How China’s fishing fleet is depleting the world’s oceans.

* “That time we almost built 8 gigawatt-class floating nuclear power plants.” In other words, we’ve had lots of opportunities to ameliorate climate change, but we’ve consistently turned our backs on the solutions. Also, “Nuclear Reactor Development History.” Detailed, impressive.

* How Nespresso’s coffee revolution got ground down.

* “How you attach to people may explain a lot about your inner life.”

* “Silicon Valley and Wall Street Elites Pour Money Into Psychedelic Research: Donors raise $30 million for psychedelic nonprofit to complete clinical trials around drug-assisted psychotherapy for trauma.”

* “The Party of No Content.” We live in weird political times.

* “The Broken Algorithm That Poisoned American Transportation.” The awful ways we plan and execute cities explains why we get anomie, boredom, strip malls, and subdivisions. As if that weren’t enough, “Why Every City Feels the Same Now:” I too feel the aesthetic oppressions wrought by zoning laws: one could say that cities have been zoned into being low content and parking-centric.

* “Swiss explore renewal of ‘secret deal’ with China.” Wow.

* “A meta-analysis of procedures to change implicit measures” finds that implicit-bias training doesn’t appear to do what it’s supposed to do. Having been through a few rounds of it, I wonder if its foregrounding racial issues is counterproductive, although the meta-analysis doesn’t seem to find evidence for that thesis.

* JB Straubel, One of the Brains Behind Tesla, May Have a New Way to Make Electric Cars Cheaper Through Battery Recycling. Could be behind a paywall but very interesting; I’ve done some grant-writing work adjacent to this field.

* The gist of Cynical Theories: Arnold Kling on the new book by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay. Of interest for those of you who are online too much or interested in universities, and especially for the group at the intersection of those two.

* “The Secrets of Elite College Admissions: In the final ‘shaping’ of an incoming class, academic standards give way to other, more ambiguous factors.”