Memory vessel with encased photograph, American, after 1933. Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill Jr. and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson, 1986.
• Considering the history of using conspiracies about overpopulation to make the world worse for everyone else. (The Atlantic)
• On civil war. (London Review of Books)
• “Museums and monuments, of course, commemorate the past. What I don’t know is if the museum of mass shooting memes suggests that we, also, have moved on to the task of just honoring the dead of the past, present, and inevitable future.” (New York Times)
• “We need more nuanced understandings of how to slot the past into our present stories, beyond mirroring round-number dates and straining the boundaries of novelty.” (Columbia Journalism Review)
• “The story of marriage in the United States is often told in lofty and heroic terms—the expansion of the institution and its attendant benefits to interracial and same-sex couples heralded as civil rights victories. Divorce is rarely celebrated in the same way, but the two are inextricable.” (Smithsonian)
• Revisiting Anton de Kom’s We Slaves of Suriname. (Africa Is a Country)
• The forgotten medical history and victims behind a small plaque at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center campus. (Nursing Clio)
• Curators at the Maidan Museum in Kyiv are adding objects to their collection from the ongoing war: “stuffed animals, books, children’s clothing, and other objects left behind by their Ukrainian owners.” (Hyperallergic)
• “Lasers reveal ancient urban sprawl hidden in the Amazon.” (Science News)
• “Exhibit A: sixty years later, the ’62 Mets still hold the modern-era record for most losses in a season. It’s honestly impressive to suck that monumentally. Give them an exhibit in the basement of the Baseball Hall of Fame, right next to the freight elevator.” (Bookforum)
• This week in obituaries: Roger Angell, Ray Liotta, Colin Cantwell, Hazel Henderson, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Robert J. Vlasic, Kwaku Ohene-Frempong, Elspeth Barker, Dervla Murphy, Kenneth Welsh, Joe Pignatano, Bob Neuwirth, Colin Forbes, Julie Beckett, Frank Gilbert, Jim Murphy, Morton L. Janklow, Ron Rice, and Kristine Gebbie.