• “One could surmise that brutalism was born on a coffee high.” (Dwell)

• Meet Corita Kent, the nun and revolutionary pop artist in 1960s California. (Atlas Obscura)

Further reading: An excerpt from WHAT NAILS IT by Greil Marcus.

• “The Nineteen-Thirties Novel That’s Become a Surprise Hit in the U.K.” (New Yorker)

• On Bobby Kennedy’s life-changing meeting with James Baldwin. (Slate)

Further reading: REVOLUTIONS (Spring 2014)

• Under observation: Antarctic seabed mud, from which scientists will “extract genetic information from water, soil and even air, like a fingerprint of life left behind in the environment.” (BBC)

Further reading: The World in Time, Ep. 11: Matthew Hollis on his new translation of THE SEAFARER; and The Sheer Alone, an excerpt from THE SEAFARER.

• On display: A statue of “the king of evil spirits of the air” who inspired The Exorcist. (LiveScience)

• Out of storage: 2,000-year-old sun hat. (Smithsonian)

• “What Yeats foresaw as the Second Coming was never a promise of salvation. It was revelation—a monstrous birth in the dust, a moment when history folds in on itself and delivers not progress, but reckoning. Gaza is that reckoning. Here, the myths that once sustained the imagination of modern civilization—human rights, international law, moral values—shatter under the weight of their own contradictions. Their language fails to touch the ground. Their principles are too delicate to survive impact. They collapse where the bomb lands, where the children fall.” (Literary Hub)

• This week in obituaries: Islam al-Komi, Sonallah Ibrahim, Dan Tana, Brent Hinds, Tristan Rogers, Joe Caroff, Greg Iles, Frank Strang, Jules Witcover, James Dobson, Warren Brodey, John Cruikshank, Mike Castle, Frank Caprio, Ronnie Rondell, Jr., Bruce Slovin, Terence Stamp, and Kayle Barrington Bates, who was executed by lethal injection by the state of Florida.