• The history of witch hunts around the globe. (Scientific American)

• “Archaeologists in the Peruvian Andes have discovered an Inca bathing complex built half a millennia ago, which they believe may have served the elite of the sprawling empire than once dominated large swathes of South America.” (Reuters)

• “How did a practice as absurd as drinking milk become such a sworn article of faith in the United States and beyond?” (NewYorker.com)

• “In 1873, the year the Comstock Act was enacted, the Supreme Court declared it constitutional for states to prohibit women from serving as lawyers; the next year, it ruled that it was constitutional for states to prohibit women from voting.” (Slate)

• Revisiting the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. (The New York Review of Books)

• “Medieval people also believed that uroscopy could reveal when an individual would die, allowing him to use his final days wisely. After William the Conqueror fell from his horse in 1087, he suffered agonising internal injuries. According to the chronicler William of Malmesbury, his physicians ‘inspected his urine and foretold certain death,’ which allowed him to receive the last rites and to put his affairs in order. In 1214, suspecting that he was fatally ill, Abbot John of St. Albans examined his own urine for ‘the small, hidden marks which he knew to be signs of death,’ and correctly predicted that he had only three days to live.” (The Public Domain Review)

• This week in obituaries: Michael Denneny, Hedda Kleinfeld Schachter, Jessica Burstein, Loren Cameron, Judith Miller, Irma Blank, Helen Barolini, Michael Lipton, Dubravka Ugrešić, Leon Levine, Steuart Padwick, Richard Riordan, Bernice Rose, Freddie Scappaticci, Blair Tindall, Todd Haimes, and Otis Redding III.