• “Like Sophocles or Samuel Beckett or Toni Morrison—and yet unlike them—Caravaggio is an artist who goes there with us, to the painful places of reality. And when we are there with him, we sense that he’s no mere guide. We realize that he is in fact at home in that pain, that he lives there. There’s the unease.” (The New York Times Magazine)

• “Facial Reconstruction Reveals Egyptian ‘Mummy Portrait’ Was Accurate Except for One Detail.” (Live Science)

• “In the 1940s Dean Martin had a nose job, reportedly paid for by Lou Costello…Early in her career Marilyn Monroe received a chin graft, John Wayne received plastic surgery to remove crow’s feet in the 1960s, and Robert Mitchum lost out on being cast in the 1980 film Atlantic City, a role eventually taken by Burt Lancaster, after he had a face-lift.” (Jezebel)

• On the Famine of 1943: “One of Bengal’s greatest tragedies is overlooked in the West. It’s missing from cookbooks and food writing, too.” (Atlas Obscura)

• Reading indigenous Aztec accounts of plague: “On the first day of August [of 1576] the great sickness began here in Techamachalco. It was really strong; there was no resisting.” (JSTOR Daily)

• “Global trade, enslaved labor, and colonial warfare created demands for medicines that would work for anyone, anywhere. That pressure to view patients as interchangeable remains with us today.” (Boston Review)

• “Colonizers Stole Africa’s Art; This Man Is Taking It Back.” (Vice)

• “Who, besides the indigenous peoples from Asia who crossed the Alaskan land bridge in prehistory, arrived in the Americas before Columbus? The question has fascinated generations of scholars.” (Aeon)

• “Butler’s books resonate right now because the apocalypse they describe is not singular but a series of them. There’s no major event that wracks the United States, just an accumulation of serious problems (climate change, inequality), and second-order crises (hunger, war, an epidemic of abuse of dangerous designer drugs).” (Slate)

• A history of working at the post office, and of “going postal.” (The Mail)

• “The Jazz Age doesn’t end well in the novel that’s supposed to make it sound like so much fun. Yet it didn’t begin well, either. We should look anew at 1920 not because centenaries have magical properties but because Fitzgerald’s remarkably sensitive inner ear helped him register, before almost anyone else, when America started losing its balance.” (The New York Review of Books)

• Found: Michel de Montaigne. (Maybe?) (France 24)

• “As Southern historian J. Mills Thornton put it, Southern history—I would say U.S. history—displays an obsessive ‘fear of an imminent loss of freedom.’ Understanding the anxious and fearful grind produced by threats to the domination-as-freedom complex helps us understand what Richard Hofstadter called the ‘heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy’ of the ‘paranoid style’ in U.S. politics. The government is not just coming for your guns, it’s coming for your freedom—the freedom to dominate others.” (Boston Review)

• This week in obituaries: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Gale Sayers, Ed Bearss, Althea Braithwaite, Betty Bushman, Sam McBratney, Jackie Stallone, Harold Evans, Carter Williams, Edith Raymond Locke, Robert Graetz, Juliette Gréco, Arthur Wooster, Robert Gore, Henry van Ameringen, Moussa Traore, Robert Taylor, and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee.