• “Ingrained presumptions can be hard for even self-described ‘revisionist’ historians of empire to shake off, and one such presumption involves the division of intellectual labor.” (The New Yorker)

• “Toward​ the end of the nineteenth century an existential crisis hit China. How could the hanzi script—the system of characters used for millennia across China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—survive into the modern era, with its global communications networks enabled by those transformative Western inventions, the telegraph and the typewriter?” (London Review of Books)

• On dictionaries. (Los Angeles Review of Books)

• “In 1885 John Montgomery Ward, an outstanding pitcher, organized the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, the first labor union in sports.” (Dissent)

• On the hair industry in South Korea post-1953: “At its height, wigs made up 9.3 percent of South Korea’s exports and was the country’s number two export.” (Atlas Obscura)

• “A man with a hole in his forehead, who was interred in what’s now northwest Alabama between around three thousand and five thousand years ago, represents North America’s oldest known case of skull surgery.” (Science News)

• “The rediscovery of the sex lives of the Victorians has become a regular feature in the historical calendar. It comes around like the seasons, reminding us that the average Victorian subject, like the queen herself, had a pulse, a libido, a healthy range of sexual desires, and quite possibly a secret stash of erotica.” (History Today)

• “The public school system has always made it hard to teach controversial subjects.” (The New Republic)

• On Pauline E. Hopkins, “perhaps The Colored American Magazine’s most famous—and most controversial—editor.” (The Believer)

• “Robot dog called in to help manage Pompeii.” (The Guardian)

• This week in obituaries: Nancy Milford, Shinji Aoyama, Joan Joyce, Taylor Hawkins, John Stahl, Richard Lipez, Paul Herman, Tony Wrigley, Sara Suleri Goodyear, Dirck Halstead, Christopher Alexander, Marina Goldovskaya, Ashton Hawkins, Jimmy Lydon, Dagny Carlsson, and Tom Parker.