New York from Greenwood Cemetery by William Henry Bartlett, c. 1809. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold.
• From the “infinite cycles” of the universe to the invention of the “timeline,” with “a single axis and a regular, measured distribution of dates.” (Aeon)
• “Does being backward-facing mean being conservative, at least with a lowercase ‘c’? Although no one would call him avant-garde, Heaney’s remarkable facility with language puts any distinction between experiment and tradition to the test.” (Poetry)
• “The American garbage strike is as old as organized garbage collection itself.” (Current Affairs)
• A history of the “gringo-powered Colombo-Israeli special relationship.” (The Baffler)
• “In Ayurveda, sadness and despondency weren’t necessarily understood as permanent, mental illnesses, but states of imbalance (viṣāda) that could be ‘balanced’ — particularly in contexts of exhaustion, sleep disturbance, and even postpartum recovery. A typical preparation involved consuming saffron in warm milk and honey. Colonial British officers, however, weren’t as impressed with saffron as they were with opium.” (The Juggernaut)
• “How to reboot this year’s crop of public domain books for 2026.” (Literary Hub)
• “Shelley wrote such that neither Victor nor the monster were redeemable; in the novel, both are zealots of hate, brokering shared vows of vengeance and pain, wrestling together in a screaming trajectory hellwards. … Narrative in Shelley’s novel is meant to terrify. In the movie, it rehabilitates.” (Cleveland Review of Books)
• On Audley Moore and reparations beyond compensation. (The Yale Review)
• “An obit, even as it takes the narrow shape of a coffin, tombstone, burial plot, or cemetery hedge, can only talk ‘around’ its subject … Even the tombstone isn’t the death itself. The white space around each letter and punctuation mark—and the larger white space around each tombstone of text—is where the actual death is.” (Electric Literature)
• This week in obituaries: Valentino Garavani, David Siegel, Gathie Falk, Ralph Towner, Stephen Hess, Mark Jones, Rhoda Levine, Tina Packer, Wilbur Wood, Barbara Aronstein Black, Georges Borchardt, Rifaat al-Assad, Tucker Zimmerman, Beatriz González, and Abed Shaat, Mohammad Qeshta, and Anas Ghnaim, journalists killed by an Israeli strike in Gaza.