• Meet the Xerces blue butterfly, the first U.S. insect species to go extinct thanks to humans. (Science News)

• On the photographer Lora Webb Nichols. (NewYorker.com)

• The history of the C-section. (The New York Times Magazine)

• On Emmett Till: “Little about this murder feels safely in the past. Wheeler Parker is alive. So is Carolyn Bryant. Many of the children and grandchildren of the killers and the jurors and the defense attorneys still live in the area. The barn is still just a barn. One man claims that the truck used to kidnap Till is rusting right now on a Glendora plantation.” (The Atlantic)

• How early science fiction shaped how we think about climate change. (The MIT Press Reader)

• Historical context for the current state of the coronavirus pandemic. (The Brian Lehrer Show)

• “It might be more useful to think of the Olympics less as a quadrennial sporting event and more as an offshoot of the World’s Fair.” (Defector)

• Banning beards in Russia. (JSTOR Daily)

• Revisiting Google Reader. (The Ringer)

• The fragrant history of ambergris. (The Public Domain Review)

• This week in obituaries: Biz Markie, Lisa French, Shirley Fry Irvin, Barbara J. Litrell, Robby Steinhardt, Carol Easton, John McMeel, Andy Fordham, Kathy Andrade, Jerry Lewis, Marjorie Adams, Josef Silverstein, Erin Gilmer, Paul Auerbach, Gloria Richardson, Rick Laird, Tom O’Connor, William Regnery II, and Kurt Westergaard.