"For scientists, pain has long presented an intractable problem: it is a physiological process, just like breathing or digestion, and yet it is inherently, stubbornly subjective—only you feel your pain. It is also a notoriously hard experience to convey accurately to others. Virginia Woolf bemoaned the fact that 'the merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.'" So we're left with that seemingly arbitrary 0-10 pain scale or asked to select among a series of "cheerful and grimacing faces." But sadly, pain remains a mystery. I have no idea what you're feeling and you have no way to really describe it in a way I'll understand. That might be even more true for sufferers of chronic pain. "We may all be predisposed by our brain stems to feel pain more acutely or less, but that in chronic-pain patients it's as if the volume knob of pain were turned all the way up and jammed there permanently." But there's hope that this permanence may not be forever. The New Yorker's Nicola Twilley takes you to the cutting (and burning, and poking, and freezing, and pinching) edge of The Neuroscience of Pain.

The increased likelihood of an all-out trade war and "fresh rules on Chinese investment in technology companies" have met a market that has been running hot for a very long time. If your portfolio is plummeting, you're not alone. Bloomberg: U.S. Stocks Fall Most Since April on Trade Angst. (If we want to compete with China, we don't need tariffs. We need inspiration, investment, and to attract every immigrant with a dream to help build America's future...)

+ NPR: "Harley-Davidson says it plans to move production of motorcycles it sells in Europe overseas in response to growing trade friction between the United States and Europe." (That's not how this played out on the administration's white board...)

In some detention centers, asylum seekers are being offered a deal. You can reunite with your kids if you sign a voluntary deportation order first. From The Texas Tribune: Kids in exchange for deportation.

+ "It is clear that a rollout that was months in the making seemingly didn't include provisions for properly identifying and coordinating which children were removed from their families and how to reconnect them. It pains me to write these words, but it certainly seems that the administration truly had no intention of reunifying these families." Dahlia Lithwick: The Government Had No Intention of Reuniting Separated Families. There's also no plan to do so now.

+ NYT: "'We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country,' Mr. Trump tweeted while on the way to his golf course in Virginia. 'When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came.'" (Maybe we should adopt a similar model for cases involving collusion and obstruction of justice...)

+ "If our shared humanity isn't enough to care, let's examine the other reasons." Why care about illegal immigrants?

+ Go deep on the immigration issue with the excellent Reveal podcast: Ripped apart: Families separated at the border.

+ The misinformation campaign against immigrants goes way back. Here's an outtake from the NYT from last September: "Trump administration officials ... rejected a study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost."

"Everyone agrees the gang is bloodthirsty. Most of the other assertions I've heard from the Trump administration this year about MS-13 have almost no connection to what I'm seeing on the ground." In ProPublica, Hannah Dreier provides a reality check on what you've been hearing about the gang called MS-13.

Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, and Warren Buffett set out to find the right person to run their effort to disrupt healthcare. This is how (the surgeon and excellent writer) Atul Gawande landed perhaps the most extraordinary (or impossible) job in health care. Buffett's longtime right-hand man, Charlie Munger once thought a Gawande article was so socially important "that he blindly mailed Gawande a $20,000 check." (I wonder if Charlie Munger is in the market for a quick, entertaining look at the day's most fascinating news...)

"The invention of American industrialism, the creation of urban life, changing gender relations, public-health reform, suburbia and its hamburger-loving teens, better living through plastics, and the financialization of the economy: The straw was there for all these things—rolled out of extrusion machines, dispensed, pushed through lids, bent, dropped into the abyss. You can learn a lot about this country, and the dilemmas of contemporary capitalism, by taking a straw-eyed view." Alexis Madrigal: A history of modern capitalism from the perspective of the straw. Seriously.

"The court upheld three of four district maps in Texas that critics argued intentionally discriminated against minority voters, but struck down one. In North Carolina, it wiped away a lower court opinion that had invalidated congressional maps there as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander." CNN: Supreme Court allows most disputed maps in Texas, NC gerrymandering cases to be used.

+ Making a Murderer's Brendan Dassey Appeal Denied by the Supreme Court.

President Trump has weighed in on the story about the restaurant that refused service to Sarah Huckabee Sanders (did you think he could resist?). He described the outside of the restaurant as filthy (it's clean) and in bad need of paint job (it's not), and explained, "I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!" (Funny, I have a related rule about administrations...)

+ The owner of the Red Hen did a pretty good job of summarizing this moment in time in America: "I'm not a huge fan of confrontation. I have a business, and I want the business to thrive. This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals."

+ However one feels about a restaurant owner's decision to serve or not to serve administration officials, I think we can all agree it's a hell of a lot more loco that administration officials like Kirstjen Nielsen would choose this moment to satisfy a craving for Mexican food.

"Joe rescued whales first and foremost because he felt that he owed it to the ocean. He was driven by a desire to give back. But not unlike the whalers of old, he thrilled to the open ocean and the rush of adrenaline that comes with sidling up to a giant, some of the largest animals ever to have lived. For more than 1,000 years, humans have been climbing into tiny boats for the chance to slay a whale. Joe was a member of the first generation to do the same thing to save them." From The Deep: Joe and the Whale.

"Across the street from Edaleen is 5D Packages and its competitor Mail Boxes Plus. Turn onto H Street, which passes for a main drag, and before you hit the US Post Office, you'll spot 24/7 Parcel, Border Mailbox, and Security Mail services. Take a right at the post office and loop back around to Peace Portal, and you'll also find Blaine Enterprises, Pulse Packages, and Hagen's mail pickup." The Verge: Welcome To Blaine, The Town Amazon Prime Built.

+ Tennis player Nick Kyrgios got fined 15,000 Euros for pretending to pleasure himself with a water bottle. (Someone should pair this GIF with the sounds of John McEnroe yelling, "You cannot be serious!")

+ The folks at Cotton Bureau are giving away a ton of prizes this week. So it's the perfect time to stop by the the NextDraft Store and score a shirt, some stickers, or the brand new NextDraft hat.