• A history of the leisure ethic, “flow states,” and the notion of a good life. (Hedgehog Review)

• Determining the longest-lasting civilization: “What most people mean by ‘civilization’ has to be understood as a high-level extrapolation that tends to lose focus when you look more closely…[but] unless history is to be seen as an almost infinite set of micro-events, people have a right to expect historians to attempt to divide history into more manageable chunks.” (LiveScience)

• Meet the women who conducted the first botanical survey of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. (Atlas Obscura)

• On the “oafish representatives of the ruling class” in Syd Hoff’s socialist cartoons. (Jacobin)

• Revisiting Sacagawea, whose life story has long been getting lost in translation. (New York Review of Books)

• New: Osip Mandelstam in exile. (Verso Blog)

• Found: Over four hundred preclassic Maya cities in Guatemala, connected by over a hundred miles of roads. (Hyperallergic)

• “How the U.S. Almost Became a Nation of Hippo Ranchers.” (Smithsonian.com)

• “To historicize an action, however, is inevitably to face the question: as part of what wider shape of historical development, and what phase within it? But what if one regards history as having no shape? What if one holds to the view that history, in the larger sense, is a piling up of accidents, just ‘one damn thing after another’?” (Sidecar)

• This week in obituaries: Ilya Kabakov, Paolo Portoghesi, Claudia Rosett, Jessie Maple, Marlene Clark, Juan Carlos Formell, Michael Viney, Ed Ames, Peter Simonischek, George Maharis, Robin Wagner, Ian Hacking, Brian Shul, Ingrid Haebler, Gary Kent, Gerald Castillo, John Beasley, Harald Zur Hausen, Theodoros Pangalos, and Don Bateman.