* “China Secretly Built A Vast New Infrastructure To Imprison Muslims: China rounded up so many Muslims in Xinjiang that there wasn’t enough space to hold them. Then the government started building.” If you’ve wondered what you might have done in the 1930s, you may now have an implicit answer.

* How to win an election: on issue salience, among other things. It’s based on this David Shor interview; he’s the guy who was fired for tweeting that, from what we can tell, empirically,

* The books we don’t understand, by Tim Parks, and much better than the title suggests.

* “The tyranny of chairs.” One partial answer is the sit-stand desk.

* Bezos and the Bell system: regulating “big tech” intelligently.

* “The Case for Adding 672 Million More Americans.” Most notably, “think of how much healthier our politics would be if there were really a debate about how to accomplish great things rather than a food fight over semi-imagined offenses to “real Americans” that serves as a mask for an endless procession of tax cuts for the rich.”

* “How SUVs conquered the world – at the expense of its climate.” A bit obvious but here it is. Relatedly, “Climate change may wreck economy unless we act soon, federal report warns: Fires and floods are expensive and disruptive and we’re not ready, report finds.” It’s almost as if we’ve been ignoring four decades of warnings.

* “Maigret’s room,” an excellent essay.

* Fire in the Sky, on UFOs, epistemology, belief, experts, and other topics.

* “Extreme heat is here, and it’s deadly.”

* “Can Italy Defeat Its Most Powerful Crime Syndicate?” The degree to which the Italian state and society is still enthralled to organized crime is depressing.

* UFOs and epistemology. But the “Where are they?” question remains: nothing we’ve come up with so far has shown us any evidence of non-natural phenomena in the universe, and we don’t seem to have found any alien radio signals.