• “The Maya—and the maize that sustained them—had surprising southern roots, ancient DNA suggests.” (Science)

• On Begum Rokeya’s “Sultana’s Dream.” (The MIT Press Reader)

• The impossible task of truth and reconciliation commissions. (Vox)

• “Britain wants its people to be proud of the country’s grand imperial past, but it doesn’t seem to want them to know much about it.” (The New York Review of Books)

• Meet Rose Levere. (JSTOR Daily)

• The story of Barbara Ann Richards, “one of the first Americans to successfully change her name on legal documents following a transition.” (Slate)

• Revisiting the Betty Crocker test kitchen. (Atlas Obscura)

• On the astronomers of ancient Babylonia. (Psyche)

• A new musical on American suffragettes is coming to Broadway. (New York Times)

• “The Kuindzhi Art Museum, devoted to the work of influential Ukrainian realist painter Arkhip Kuindzhi (1842–1910), was destroyed March 21 in a Russian airstrike on the Ukraine port city of Mariupol.” (Artforum)

•  And in much more recent history, the story behind Abercrombie & Fitch’s “Fierce”: “In 2001, I was a junior perfumer at International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF). My background was in fabric softeners. I helped formulate the scent of Tide for Procter & Gamble. But fine perfumes were a different world. And in it, I was a nobody.” (MEL)

• This week in obituaries: Madeleine Albright, Steve Wilhite, Don Young, Chris Madden, John Roach, Renny Cushing, Av Westin, Jeanette Wagner, Sumy Sadurni, Yvan Colonna, Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, Janet MacPherson, Liz Shore, John Korty, and Oksana Baulina.