• The sexiest street in all of Victorian London: “Situated on the cusp of Fleet Street, the nerve-centre of the biggest publishing industry in the world, Holywell Street was originally the terrain of radical pamphleteers and print-makers. But following a government crackdown on subversive print in the 1840s, maverick publishers diverted their revolutionary impulses from radical politics into lucrative pornography, and the street became a powerhouse of the dirty book trade.” (Public Domain Review)

• Mary Beard on the historical anxieties of Western democracy. (The Times Literary Supplement)

• Grandmas: more interesting than we are!“My teenage grandmother’s great genius was flirting. Those amazing boys! The ‘peachy,’ ‘dandy,’ ‘charming’ boys of Gloversville, anointed with adjectives now reserved for Yelp reviews of bed-and-breakfasts. I can barely keep up with her crushes, or their fluctuations in status.”​ (The New York Times Magazine)

• Elie Weisel files a report on Disneyland. (Tablet)

• As Oakland changes, preservationists and local activists contemplate the future of the city’s Black Panther School. (Curbed)

• A nineteenth-century French writer comes to understand seven distinct stages of love: “In 1818, Stendhal—then an unsuccessful writer in his mid-thirties named Henri Beyle—met one of the loves of his life, Méthilde, a ravishing and intelligent young woman who’d recently arrived in Milan, having fled her brutal, overbearing husband back in Switzerland. Stendhal immediately became smitten with her to the point of madness. But Méthilde kept Stendhal at arm’s length, and even limited their interactions, only allowing him to visit her once every two weeks, which, in turn, gave Stendhal time to develop and nurture his fantasy of her, to exaggerate his love and admiration to truly grandiose proportions.” (Literary Hub)