The Sixth Joust of the Rooks: Bizhan Versus Ruyyin, from a c. 1530 edition of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, by Abd al-Vahhab. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Arthur A. Houghton Jr., 1970.
• Considering the filing cabinet. (Places Journal)
• “Even in our finance-obsessed present, it is difficult to understand just how fascinating, and how occasionally hilarious, nineteenth-century French society seemed to find debt.” (Public Domain Review)
• “In Bronze Age China, established cooking styles had a profound impact on the speed with which new domesticated crops were adopted into regional cuisines.” (Archaeology)
• The story of how a movie about medieval jousting acquired a dancing scene set to David Bowie. (Vulture)
• A slow reckoning at National Geographic. (Vox)
• The history of “child allowances.” (JSTOR Daily)
• And a brief history of the taste of njahi. (Serious Eats)
• The data behind the history of astrology. (London Review of Books)
• A history of complaints about the physical ailments caused by using a personal computer. (Vice)
• “On a hillside ages ago, people inscribed a naked man with a twenty-six-foot-long erect penis. Why did they do it?” (The New Yorker)
• On “Soviet perfume.” (Lux)
• This week in obituaries: Spencer Silver, Simon Keay, Mohammad Ashraf Sehrai, Norman Lloyd, Manzoor Ahtesham, Eugene Webb, Chandro Tomar, Curtis Fuller, Leigh H. Perkins, Pat Bond, Helmut Jahn, Pervis Staples, Bill McCreary, Faye Schulman, Mabel Williams, Tawny Kitaen, Cate Haste, George Jung, and Lloyd Price.