Biologist injecting a horse with diphtheria bacteria at the New York City Department of Health serum and vaccine farm, c. 1944. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
• The long history of the vaccination selfie. (New York Times)
• And a brief history of the whiteboard. (Marker)
• “Seventeen tiny particles recovered from a flat-topped mountain in eastern Antarctica suggest that a space rock shattered low in the atmosphere over the ice-smothered continent about 430,000 years ago.” (Science News)
• “In the market for an illuminated manuscript? Got £8 million?” (Literary Hub)
• On Ivy Litvinov. (Aeon)
• How to reframe the film canon. (Refinery29)
• “How the twin histories of English and Esperanto—the first driven by global imperialism, the second invented by a Jewish ophthalmologist—offer competing visions of a universal language.” (The Believer)
• “A handful of coins unearthed from a pick-your-own-fruit orchard in the U.S. state of Rhode Island and other random corners of New England may help solve a centuries-old cold case.” (The Guardian)
• The history of tipping. (Throughline)
• This week in obituaries: Beverly Cleary, Larry McMurtry, Morris Dickstein, Frances Harris, Alvin Sykes, Bertrand Tavernier, Craig MuMs Grant, G. Gordon Liddy, Robert Hershon, Andrew Porter, Edith Prentiss, Sarah Onyango Obama, Buddy Deppenschmidt, Brian Rohan, Freddie Redd, and Kitty Cone.