• “I like ‘People’s Pervert.’ I got it recently and it made me laugh. ‘The Pope of Trash”’ is worn out—but William Burroughs said it, so it’s a lifelong title. I used to call myself a ‘Filth Elder,’ which sounds vaguely religious, but ‘The People’s Pervert’ sounds very much up to the times.” An interview with legendary filmmaker John Waters explores the history of trash culture. (Guernica)

• An ancient Roman image featuring a disproportionately large penis, long-thought to represent the power of male virility, is actually, historians suggest, a depiction of priapus, an uncomfortable (and potentially dangerous) medical condition. (Discovery)

• “Emanuel AME isn’t just a church; it’s the oldest black congregation in the South (outside of Baltimore) and a historic symbol of black resistance to slavery and racism.” In the wake of a mass shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina church, a look at the importance of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal in the history of the abolition and civil rights movements. (Slate)

• Napoleon may have lost the Battle of Waterloo, but as we near the two-hundredth anniversary of that event, he’s still far more popular with reenactors than his foe, the Duke of Wellington. (New York Times)

• “Pore over photos of womanless weddings of the past, and you will usually see men in gowns and dresses playing the roles of everyone in a wedding party—including bridesmaids, flower girls and the mother of the bride—at the comic events. Brides sometimes had beards or moustaches; flower girls were portrayed by grown men.” In the early twentieth century, “womanless weddings” staged for comedy and for charity sought not to challenge traditional values, but to reaffirm them. (NPR)

• “Where now we look for the refuge of a Kindle to hide a trashy cover, they were, once upon a time, something of a bait and switch; lurid art could fool readers into cracking open a work of serious literature.” An argument for embracing the splashy book covers of pulp literature. (Paris Review Daily)

• Euchre is a card game that appears in the memoirs of Mark Twain, an account of an 1872 Arctic disaster, and virtually every novel from the nineteenth century that features a drawing room (and characters who sit in it). It has not, though, caught on with modern players. Will it soon vanish forever? (The Awl)

• We celebrated Bloomsday this week, but not by purchasing ourselves a $16,000 copy of Ulysses with original art by Henri Matisse. We sincerely regret this error. (Artlyst)