• On Marguerite Young: “Her essays from the 1940s heap scorn on the regionalist fiction that was then popular, Sinclair Lewis knockoffs rendered in Dick-and-Jane prose that were well-loved by ‘commonsense literary critics,’ as Young called them. ‘What is it that such anti-literary literary critics really want, when it comes right down to brass tacks?’ she asked in one essay. ‘They want literature to be simple, plain, sensible, healthy, unassuming, underwritten, comfortable.’ The problem was not merely with style, but with substance, the former being inseparable from the latter. It was this miserly literature that perpetuated the lie that the Midwest, often celebrated as the ‘true’ America, was simple, dull, and average. ‘America has been, if anything, the land of crazy unreason, where all kinds of people have done, as a matter of course, the most impossible things,’ she writes. ‘So why should American literature be falsely described as something less experimental than America is?’ ” (n+1)

• Learning through role play in Aelfric’s Colloquy. (History Today)

• Poker, opium, and noodles: a tour through America’s oldest Chinese restaurant. (Smithsonianmag.com)

• Remembering the Pennsylvania Dutch “funeral pie”: “A grocery list for an 1880 funeral called for eight pounds of beef, one ham, two pounds of cheese, two pounds of coffee, fourteen pies, seven cakes, and seven loaves of bread. A 1912 tab went even further, requiring thirty-five pounds of cheese, twenty-five pounds of prunes, fifteen pounds of dried peaches, fifteen pounds of dried apricots, and eleven pounds of honey.” (Atlas Obscura)

• An early twentieth-century painting may have been covered up by a disgruntled fellow artist “in a fit of pique.” (Artnet)

• On the “comedy of errors” with the East India Company and Qing officials in Beijing: “Historians have tended to attribute meaning to the speakers and not to their humble interpreters. But the evidence shows that it was the intermediaries—ambassadors, negotiators, translators—who delivered the meanings.” (London Review of Books)

• Cinema’s first nasty women: “Long before Wonder Woman and her Amazonian sisters charged the big screen, long before feminist scholars began calling out the film industry’s inequities and long before talking movies became the norm, women ran wild in movies…They riotously schemed, fought, and defied convention, racing and laughing their way to liberation.” (New York Times)

• Revisiting Rilke, who “gave, and still gives, a function for poetry to help any and all of us withstand the materialist–technological onslaught” and who “was possibly given to us to help us withstand Wittgenstein.” (Poetry Foundation)

• Found: Nadir, “the sister of the dinosaur killer” asteroid. (Science News)

• Possibly found: Cantre’r Gwaelod, the “Welsh Atlantis.” (The Guardian)

• This week in obituaries: Hanae Mori, Creed Taylor, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, Nafis Sadik, Tim Page, Latisha Chong, Ann McGuiness, Joanne Koch, Jerry Allison, David Kay, Michael Malone, Ana Luísa Amaral, Alexei Panshin, Gary Gaines, Dorli Rainey, Leon Vitali, Gerald Potterton, Virginia Patton Moss, Monette Sudler, Morgan Taylor, and jaimie branch.