• COVID-19 context: Anti-Mask Leagues, smallpox in the Roman Empire, letter writing, The Plague, Venice, and the Clorox and Lysol wars.

• “The Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis is one of the best-known buildings of the ancient world. Yet, despite its renown, it turns out that for more than two thousand years, we may have been calling the temple by the wrong name.” (Archaeology)

• “Rhyming dictionaries have been around for millennia. The first is thought to be the Qieyun, a 601 Chinese rhyming dictionary that served as a guide to reading classical texts and aid composition. It would then take nearly a thousand years for the first Western rhyming dictionary to be introduced, a tome called the Manipulus Vocabulorum. It was written by English schoolteacher Peter Levins in 1570 as a reference for practicing poets.” (Prospect)

• “ ‘Get Fat, Don’t Die,’ the first cooking column for people with AIDS, ran in every issue of Diseased Pariah News, the AIDS humor zine that Beowulf Thorne started and edited from 1990 to 1999. Under the byline ‘Biffy Mae,’ he passed along reader recipes, mocked nutritional supplements marketed to people with AIDS, and leaned into Bisquick, his tastes alternately cosmopolitan and straight-from-the-box comforting.” (Hazlitt)

• On forgotten female cartoonists. (The Guardian)

• “One man’s quest to save the music of the Holocaust.” (The Atavist Magazine)

• A sixty-six-million-year-old gondwanatherian chimera. (Washington Post)

• On John Brown’s Body. (JSTOR Daily)

• “How a Pack of Topps Baseball Cards Inspired a Great American Road Trip.” (InsideHook)

• This week in obituaries: Iris Love, David Toren, Madeline Kripke, Corliss Henry, Samuel Hargress Jr., Terry Lenzner, Irrfan Khan, Betsy Wyeth, Eavan Boland, Rishi Kapoor, Sue Davies, Gillian Wise, and Jill Gascoine.