• “Microscopic bone residue on rocks possibly used to smash mastodon remains draws new scrutiny.” (Science News)

• “The Gentleman’s Directory may truly be one-of-a-kind: this 1870 guidebook was a Zagat-like guide to the city’s brothels at the time.” (Gothamist)

• The history of the family room. (Jezebel)

• Meet the mighty metaphor of the French Revolution: a king-eating Colossus. (Public Domain Review)

• This week marks the hundreth anniversary of Clarice Lispector’s birth. (Paris Review Daily)

• “Camus is a thinker for our age of pandemic and polarization. He sought to transcend the divides of his own epoch by warning against dogmatic ideologies on both the left and right, all while earnestly defending democracy and humanity. His writings have acquired an ageless quality. The Plague recounted how a deathly virus destabilized society. It embodied the legacy of an author who passionately explored how to live in an ‘absurd’ world where relentless injustice can test our hope.” (Boston Review)

• “A University of Saskatchewan graduate student is playing detective to better understand the use and function of a medieval Latin manuscript housed in the University Library—and she may be the first person in the world to have cracked the case.” (Medievalists.net)

• Bottling the fragrances of history. (New York Times)

• “Part of what makes the deep human past so alluring is the space it allows for amateur interest and amateur speculation. There is so much we don’t know that there are plenty of gaps. Which in turn means there is plenty of space to dream and wonder and imagine and—let’s face it—make stuff up.” (London Review of Books)

• “Archaeologists hadn’t realized that the societies they studied almost certainly contained many ‘foreign’ people, nor had they wondered what effect these people had on the groups they joined. Captive people provided a new explanation for cultural transmission.” (Aeon)

• A history of how Citizen Kane became the ultimate canonical film. (Vulture)

• Reconstructing the life of Gaétan Dugas. (JSTOR Daily)

• “In the winter of 1942, on the shores of a lake high in the Himalayas, a forest ranger came across hundreds of bones and skulls, some with flesh still on them. When the snow and ice melted that summer, many more were visible through the clear water, lying on the bottom…What had happened to all these people? Why were they in the mountains, and when and how had they died?” (The New Yorker)

• Igiaba Scego on her novel La linea del colore: “What mattered to me was to give historical coherence to what I was saying. When I jokingly call it a ‘historical fantasy,’ what I mean is that I tried to fill the gaps, the unsaid, the removed, and the unexplored with my imagination. It is obvious that a professional historian does not perform such an act of using imagination. But, thankfully, in literature, you can do it; you can fill the gap left unsaid by history textbooks.” (Public Books)

• This week in obituaries: Chuck Yeager, Irina Antonova, Suhaila Siddiq, Naomi Long Madgett, Tabaré Vázquez, Eddie Benton-Banai, Helen LaFrance, Doug Scott, Dick Allen, Alison Lurie, Otto Hutter, Natalie Desselle Reid, Walter E. Williams, Sara Leland, Cliff Joseph, and Harold Budd.