• “Fossils reveal what may be the oldest known case of the dino sniffles.” (Science News)

• The work of Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov. (Notebook)

• Computer programmer solves a Dickens riddle: “After getting mostly C grades in literature, I never dreamed anything I’d ever do would be of interest to Dickens scholars!” (New York Times)

• Meet crime writer Donald Goines. (JSTOR Daily)

• “History is long, and life is short; it is remarkable not that we know so little but that, about certain things, we know so much. This is a consequence not just of what knowledge is available for us to acquire but also of what subjects motivate us to learn. More children have worshipped Tutankhamun during the past century than ever did in his lifetime; whatever his authority in the ancient world, he now rules over the kingdom populated by dinosaurs and pirates, horses and astronauts.” (The New Yorker)

• “Sherlock Holmes became (and remains) the nineteenth century’s most famous fictional user of cocaine.” (History Today)

• Putting together a museum exhibition in 1972. (Aeon)

• The legacy of redlining in 138 cities. (FiveThirtyEight)

• “Scholars have spent a century trying to decipher ancient Indus script. Machine learning may finally help make sense of it all.” (Rest of World)

• The future of the Electoral Count Act. (Grid)

• On Blood Meridian: “Well before this shift seeped into historical scholarship, Cormac McCarthy imagined a vast border region where colonial empires clashed, tribes went to war, and bounty hunters roamed.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

• This week in obituaries: Betty Davis, Lata Mangeshkar, Luc Montagnier, John Rice Irwin, Syl Johnson, James Wharram, Gloria Rojas, George Crumb, James Bidgood, Todd Gitlin, Douglas Trumbull, Kenneth H. Brown, Jimmy Johnson, Marie-Claire Chevalier, Jeremy Giambi, Trude Feldman, Ashley Bryan, Norma Waterson, Yale Kamisar, and Irwin Young.