Links you should read

1. Spaceships are now older than aeroplanes were when we flew our first spaceships.

2. There are lots of fake miniatures showing Islamic science that never existed. "The irony is that these fake miniatures and objects are the product of a well-intentioned desire: a desire to integrate Muslims into a global political community through the universal narrative of science." Quite. But are these miniatures showing Muslims the history they wish they had, or showing unbelievers the history they wish Muslims had had?

3. John McCain and the POW cover-up.

4. Bruno Maçães on China. When China is top dog, "It will be a world where moral relations will be more important than they are now, where China will feel that it deserves gratitude from other countries, that other countries have to respect the power that China has. It will be very moralized. And finally, it will be very opaque. The ideas of the alignment of transparency, of public reason, public accountability — those won’t be central anymore. This will be a world very similar to the security-clearance levels of the Department of Defense in the United States. Some people will know everything that is happening; others will know only a bit; others will know nothing. It will not be talked about openly in the newspapers. That’s already true, by the way: Someone researching and writing on the Belt and Road has a hard time getting the information we need, and it will only get worse from that point of view." The United States has, by most comparative standards I can think of, a remarkably open political culture. Think of the stimulus that was passed in response to the global financial crisis. This was a huge domestic policy decision. And it was taken in public. You will recall quite how much of the argument about what to do was played out publicly at the time, and how many memoirs and retrospective accounts have been published since. The equivalent Chinese decisions will be far more opaque to the idle observer.

5. This is an unsympathetic review of The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett. "Her personal anecdotes take place in settings like Whole Foods and prenatal yoga class. Even more incriminating is her tendency to lapse into credulous catalogue-speak when describing the brands under analysis. For example, she claims that Marc by Marc Jacobs, the high-end designer’s more affordable diffusion line, “may not be made with the same tailoring or quality of materials as the flagship brand,” but it does “capture the bohemianism and subversiveness that has made the designer so celebrated and revered.” No one would use the word “revered” about a fashion designer who was not speaking for herself."

6. Lucy Kellaway bought a very silly house. But there is an endearingly romantic streak to the story: "When I rang the surveyor to remonstrate, she could not have been clearer: Do. Not. Buy. This. House." It's a nice contrast to her love of excessive tidiness.

7. Where lawyering and film-making intersect.

8. If you haven't been following the 'grievance studies' fake academic papers story, here is a good way in.

9. Why has the elite not adapted to Brexit? Part of the answer is this. Remain is a descendant of the open and outward-looking Britain that built the Empire. Remain is still where you find the people keenest on foreign military intervention. Indeed, I would suggest this as a good acid test for distinguishing among both left-wingers and right-wingers: find the ones who are willing to send in the troops (in a good cause of course, always in a good cause) and you'll find the Remainers. It is not the Leavers who want to go back to the Empire - they tend to want the country to stick to its knitting and sit quietly at home, leaving everyone else quietly in their homes too. It is the Remainers who want to keep a 'seat at the top table' or 'punching above our weight'. If you hear that Acheson quote about Great Britain having lost an empire and not yet having found a role, and it strikes you as profound, then you will be feeling the emotional pull of Remain for the British governing classes. But if it strikes you as a glib piece of nonsense that could apply to Romans, Athenians, Macedonians, Japanese, Khmer, Austrians ...

10. No progress in philosophy? Here is Agnes Callard: "We don’t demand progress in the fields of fashion or literature, because these things please us. Philosophy, by contrast, is bitter, and we want to know what good it will do us, and when, finally, it will be over. It is not pleasant to be told that maybe you don’t know who you are, or how to treat your friends, or how to be happy. It’s not pleasant to have it pointed out to you that maybe nothing you have ever done matters, or that, for all you know, there is nothing out there at all." Is it an empirical question whether it would be better not to do philosophy at all? Philosophers of psychology and psychologists of philosophers will have quite different takes on the matter.

11. Placebos. It is obvious once you think of it, but "virtually every clinical trial is a study of the placebo effect". "The placebo effect has been plaguing [the pharmaceutical] business for more than a half-century — since the placebo-controlled study became the clinical-trial gold standard, requiring a new drug to demonstrate a significant therapeutic benefit over placebo to gain F.D.A. approval. // That’s a bar that is becoming ever more difficult to surmount, because the placebo effect seems to be becoming stronger as time goes on. A 2015 study published in the journal Pain analyzed 84 clinical trials of pain medication conducted between 1990 and 2013 and found that in some cases the efficacy of placebo had grown sharply, narrowing the gap with the drugs’ effect from 27 percent on average to just 9 percent."

12. An article which - in the wokest way possible - argues that women and gay people are gullible idiots. "Gullible idiot"? Or "more likely to benefit from the placebo effect and less likely to suffer the unpleasantness of philosophy"?