Yesterday evening, the leaders of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol opened their public hearings—hearings that will show, in the words of vice chair Liz Cheney, that “Donald Trump oversaw a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”Or, as committee chair Bennie Thompson put it, “Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy.

This week, San Francisco voters recalled Chesa Boudin, the city’s district attorney and the face of the nationwide progressive-prosecutors movement. The election, widely described as a referendum on crime and disorder and a backlash against the Democratic Party’s leftmost edge, was a caustic local fight played out on a national stage. It was democracy at work, with the public ousting a leader they considered incompetent or unfitting.

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, as Clarissa Dalloway runs errands throughout London, the narration takes note of the sensory feast that she encounters: “the swing, tramp, and trudge” of urban life; “the bellow and the uproar” of music, yelling, cars, buses, and an airplane overhead. Clarissa famously revels in “life; London; this moment of June.

UFOs? After years of avoiding any serious discussion of such things, NASA is on it.The space agency announced yesterday that it will form a team dedicated to studying unidentified aerial phenomena “that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena.” Starting this fall, the team will examine existing data on these objects and brainstorm new ways to collect future data.

Last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen did something unusual for a Washington policy maker: She admitted that she’d made a mistake. In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the U.S.’s persistently high inflation rate, Yellen said, of her predictions last year that prices would stay under control, “I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take.”That she was.