• Arianne Shahvisi on building regulations that devalue human life: “A study published last January revealed the mechanism by which the concrete in the Pantheon is able to heal itself: when cracks form, lime clasts in the concrete—small white flecks formed from hot mixed quicklime—react with ambient moisture or precipitation to produce new crystals that can knit up the fracture within a couple of weeks. Given the many recipes for concrete on offer at the time, and the meticulous engineering of the temple, it is hard to believe that this property was accidental. It is harder to still to believe that two millennia later we’ve been putting children under roofs that fail after thirty years.” (LRB Blog)

• The mysterious history of the “nuclear-proof” AT&T building in Lower Manhattan. (Places Journal)

• Meet the first American couple to claim that they had been abducted by aliens. (Slate)

• “Dickens adapted the novel into a mode of social commentary, which transformed it into a political tool—and elevated the novelist to a new moral and political stature…But are novelists effective or reliable enough to be tasked with representing the political and social realities around them? Smith seems unsure.” (The Atlantic)

• Art “at the blurred edges of identity and culpability” explores Greenlandic mythology and identity in relation to Denmark. (Freize)

• On the calotype process, “from the Greek word ‘kalos,’ meaning beautiful,” that made it possible to create photographic negatives. (JSTOR Daily)

• The transformation of Taiwan from an agrarian economy to “Silicon Island.” (Throughline)

• Remembering the 1730 massacre of Rajasthani forest protectors, marking “not just the loss of life but also the loss of a unique environmental ethos.” (India Today)

• “A $6.9 million painting by Vincent van Gogh that was stolen in a 2020 smash-and-grab at a Laren, Netherlands museum, was handed over to a detective this past weekend in an Ikea bag.” (Artforum)

• “When the ‘Arab Revolts’ drove the British to discussions of partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews, the Zionists scrambled to establish ‘facts on the ground’ favorable to their aims. One particular concern was the Naqab desert to the south, which the British proposed allotting to the Palestinians in the Peel Commission, a plan presented in 1937. Though the plan was never enacted, it spurred a Zionist land rush in the south. The following years brought a campaign of rapid settlements, some of which appeared literally overnight.” (The Baffler)

• This week in obituaries: Peter C. Newman, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Bea Romer, Anatol Ugorski, Richard Moriarty, Len Chandler, Richard Davis, Larry Chance, Curtis Fowlkes, Marc Bohan, Nelia Sancho, Eva Fahidi-Pusztai, Charlie Robison, Ian Wilmut, Howard Safir, Max Gomez, Joseph Fiordaliso, Robert S. Bennett, Arleen Sorkin, Mike Williams, Stanley Von Nieda, and Jake Bloom.