• Meet Alice Thornton, the seventeenth-century Yorkshirewoman whose diaries chronicled domestic responsibilities, legal and financial tensions, and the Irish rebellion. (Guardian)

• “What about those connections that persist even when we think it’s over, after our ‘contract’ with someone has expired?” (Psyche)

• “During this evolutionary turning point, the area that is now the Grand Canyon was underwater and teeming with rapidly evolving sea organisms—including a so-called ‘penis worm’ that featured a spiky mouth for scraping up algae.” (History)

• How a grain from pre-Columbian Mexico made its way into paintings and plays in Venice. (Apollo)

• On the role of food during wartime. (Guernica)

• Remembering the downtown avant-garde scene in New York. (Los Angeles Review of Books)

• “Graeber’s argument is based, however, on a more fundamental and challenging idea. From Mauss and Pierre Clastres, he draws the insight that counterpower isn’t just something realised in special circumstances, when self-governing institutions face off against the state, but a ‘dialectical possibility’ in daily life. All societies maintain what, in Debt, he calls ‘baseline communism’: a free, non-commodified mutuality without which no society can exist.” (London Review of Books)

• Further reading: On Hannah Arendt’s “Civil Disobedience,” and The World in Time, Ep. 9: Interview with Roger Berkowitz.

• This week in obituaries: U Myint Swe, Brandon Blackstock, Kelley Mack, Song Young-kyu, Michael Lydon, Eddie Palmieri, Sallie Bingham, Linda Hodes, Terry Reid, Flaco Jiménez, Rahaman Ali, Ion Iliescu, Robert Wilson, Rodrigo Moya, Nicholas Clapp, Leonard Lopate, Allan Ahlberg, Stella Rimington, Jeannie Seely, Loni Anderson, Jonathan Kaplan, Erik Wunder, T.S. Ellis III, Suleiman al-Obeid, Alma Nasser, Tamer Shuhaibar, Ahmad Hijazi, Ahmad Abu Sahlol and family, Anas al-Jamal and family, Adel Khudair Abu Sarar and family, Rajab Abul-Enin and family, Muhammad Asfour, Atta Abu Toha, Jaleel Maye, Amira Youssef Saadi, Tahani Hani Abu Ghali, Habiba Ma’rouf, Tamer Sheheiber, Ashraf Suleiman Eid Yousef, Elin Al-Mahlawi, Olina Nizar Bakron, Suad al-Shaer, and Diala al-Wadi.