Editor’s note for Friday, February 26, 2021

My thoughts today:

Happy Lantern Festival — today is the final celebration of the Lunar New Year.

Two things worth your time:

• Inside Xinjiang’s prison state, an amazing interactive feature report from the New Yorker that The China Project’s Xinjiang columnist Darren Byler called “One of the best long form pieces on life in and out of detention in Northwest China to date.” He adds:

Exhaustively researched, in some cases corroborated by multiple accounts from the same facility, it tells the story of a society criminalized. Read to the end for a song from the camp.

• A conversation on Youtube about the African goal of transcontinental infrastructure between Liberia’s former Minister of Works, and now Senior Policy Fellow at the Center for Global Development Gyude Moore and Damien Ma, director of think tank MacroPolo.

Our word of the day is Lantern Festival (元宵节 yuán xiāo jié)

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief