• Found: what could be the world’s oldest imaginative art. (New York Times)

• Also found: A thousand-year-old limestone table inscribed with hieroglyphs and mysterious human figures at the Temple of the Snails at Chichen Itza. (The Yucatán Times)

• The National Public Housing Museum hopes to open in Chicago in 2021. (CityLab)

• Philip Pullman reads Paradise Lost aloud: “It’s like suddenly discovering that you can play the organ. Rolling swells and peals of sound, powerful rhythms and rich harmonies are at your command; and as you utter them you begin to realize that the sound you’re releasing from the words as you speak is part of the reason they’re there.” (Public Domain Review)

• On George Washington and slavery. (London Review of Books)

• The Victorian obsession with cavemen capturing wives. (JSTOR Daily)

• On trying to rebuild the minaret at the Great Mosque of Aleppo, which is currently is broken into thousands of pieces. (Atlas Obscura)

• The ups and downs of monuments in the past decade. (GEN)

• Joking about Stalin. (Aeon)

• “ ‘What were dinosaurs for?’ It’s a ridiculous question, and I wondered why I was wondering it. After all, dinosaurs were ‘for’ exactly what we are ‘for,’ what every organism has been ‘for’ since life began.” (The New York Review of Books)

• “A storehouse of ancient treasures, including precious jewels and gold beads, has been uncovered by archaeologists on an island near Crete devoted to making a precious purple dye from sea snails thousands of years ago.” (LiveScience)

• This week in obituaries: a pioneering psychoanalyst, a man who played Roy Cohn, the man who played Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, the man who played Constable Odo, a writer, a theologian, a former Federal Reserve chair, the inventor of the modern bar code, and the first black woman to earn a pilot’s license in the U.S.