Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo by Henri Rousseau, 1908. Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund.
• “American Psycho’s dark hold on modern masculinity.” (Guardian)
• On Agatha Christie, the game of detective fiction, and the novel that broke all the rules. [Warning: Contains spoilers.] (CrimeReads)
• On Henry Ford’s ambitious plan for a midwestern American town in the Amazon. (Atlas Obscura)
• A family’s escape from Nazi Europe to the Central Asian valley at the heart of the Silk Road. (Scroll)
• “Bolaño has staged a trial where the adversary is our own boredom—not as a thing to accept or extinguish, but a force to surmount. We may only achieve this feat through slow, careful reading. Fixed attention, and a steady gaze.” (The Point)
• “Albert Camus on How to Live Whole in a Broken World.” (The Marginalian)
• The “overlooked fragments” of India’s freedom movement, which “unfolded among the outlaws of Gujarat, widows smuggling pistols, and revolutionaries in Tokyo.” (The Hindu)
• “America, Beauvoir feared, was at risk of becoming ‘no different from the totalitarian regimes it claims to oppose’. On a bus in Texas, she saw a group of whites jeer at a pregnant Black woman; the woman fainted. America’s ‘democratic culture’ stopped at the colour line. Richard Wright took her to churches in Harlem and showed her that the North’s de facto segregation was just as oppressive, in its own way, as the de jure segregation in the South. By the end of her trip, Beauvoir had concluded that equality and freedom had been ‘emptied of their meaning’ in the United States. The only way to continue loving the country, she decided, was ‘to love it sorrowfully.’” (London Review of Books)
• This week in obituaries: Sly Dunbar, Peter Duesberg, Valentino Garavani, Barbara G. Walker, Shirley Raines, Marian Goodman, “Uncle Floyd” Vivino, John H. Beyer, Michael Beck, John Brodie, John Allen, David Siegel, Geoffrey Mason, William Foege, and Alex Pretti, the eighth person to die in ICE dealings in 2026, after Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Parady La, Renee Nicole Good, Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz, and Heber Sánchez Domínguez.