Roundtable

The Rest Is History

Town halls, Toadmen, and a new chapter.

By Jaime Fuller

Friday, August 03, 2018

The Church at Gloucester, by Childe Hassam, 1918. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1925.

• How does evil happen? (Aeon)

• Lost pages of The Autobiography of Malcolm X are now at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture: “It has a certain rhetoric that I think is of its time, but I think it’s going to be interesting to see how people see it in our day, because we’re always reading it through these lenses. In a way we’re always collaborating with Malcolm X and thinking about him, working through his language the way Alex Haley was.” (WNYC)

• The New England town and America’s political identity: “So how is it that this idiosyncratic form of spatial and political organization, in many ways an accident of the seventeenth century, and one which never served more than a fraction of the American population, came to be the geographic shorthand for a democratic landscape?” (Places Journal)

• Looking at cremated remains near Stonehenge that may date from the landmark’s construction. (Science)

• Netflix is making a series about Madam C.J. Walker. (Racked)

• Revisiting 1975–79 in The New York Review of Books archive.

• Tips on becoming a “ ‘Toadman,’ a kind of witch known for having a powerful affinity with horses.” (JSTOR Daily)

• The many names of Flann O’Brien. (Times Literary Supplement)

• This week in obituaries: the author of How to Get Happily Published, a woman who flew planes during World War II, the Soviet villain of professional wrestling—who also lost a legislative race in Maryland, and “Bohemian royalty.”