In these few short years, America's newly opening landscapes—residential, rural, and the fastest routes between them—were given a visual identity by the federal government. If olive drab and its ilk were the colors of Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation, then the hues of the first revision were those of America's well-branded internal expansion. Every mailbox, park sign, and highway mile-marker was another tiny flag planted by a growing nation, proclaiming its new success with the same methods and military sensibility that had recently secured it a starring role on the international stage. Though they're brighter and friendlier, the colors and rules that dictated the look of American infrastructure's mid-century boom are every bit as ordered as a dispatch from the Quartermaster Corps. from Americhrome [The Morning News]

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Readers respond to Barney Ronay’s account of touring Germany for Euro 2024 football games

Barney Ronay’s article resonated very strongly with me (‘On a journey through Germany, the horror of the past lurks close to the surface’, Sport, 22 June). He spoke with clarity on how past horror echoed in his encounters with places and spaces in everyday Germany, from mundane buildings to the seemingly innocent woodland clearing. I too am from a “Jewish enough” family displaced from Nazi Germany. Our family has those seemingly improbable stories of survival, and I sometimes wonder if I should have existed at all.

That Gestapo knock on the door has cast a long shadow and, throughout my “improbable” life, has caused me to ask how this terror arose. I wonder what its harbingers are, so we might not make such terror again. But right now we are witness to it. We can all see it raising its grotesquely mundane yet human head, with larger-than–life characters encouraging us to devalue and demean those who are different.

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© Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Calculating Empires: A "large-scale research visualization" by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler showing the evolution of communications technologies and how they have been used to advance projects of social control.