(Too)Long(didn’t)reads.com picks a best article every week, and once a year they list all of them from the past year. I probably won’t have time to really dig into many of these, but there are certainly interesting topics here and they provide a look back on the year.

• a look back at the January 6 attack on the US Congress by a fascist mob, just a few days after it happened
• the story of the Covid vaccine development, and on a much less happy note, the Covid carnage in US prisons, and the crisis in India as it was happening
• “Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State” – I think I may have actually read this. What is happening there meets the UN definition of genocide and must stop. A wrinkle is that its genesis came shortly after the 9/11 attacks and U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Almost anything could be justified as part of the Global War on Terror at the time. Xinjiang is next door to Afghanistan, and is home to a Muslim ethnic group, and within that ethnic group a resistance/terrorist group formed which perpetrated attacks on the imperial capital. The parallels are surprising when you think about it. The Chinese approach is not acceptable, but did that make the American approach in Afghanistan any more acceptable?
• Anti-Asian-American violence. I continue to be a bit puzzled by this. I am not questioning its reality, it just doesn’t seem to be happening in the places or to the Asian-Americans I cross paths with. I wonder if it is really new or something like shark attacks that happens periodically and the media suddenly picked up on and made a big deal of for awhile. People could also be reporting it more often now that they feel someone is listening and something might be done about it.
• Salem, Massachusetts witch tourism