The Penn Inn, by Beatrix Potter, 1922. New York Public Library Digital Collections, the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs: Picture Collection, 1922.
• Revisiting James Baldwin in Turkey, where he experienced “one of the most prolific periods of his artistic life”: “What can we learn from exploring his time there? How does his self-imposed exile speak to our reluctance to relocate American literature within a transnational and internationalist context and to acknowledge the role of Black writers and artists in shaping that literature? And what does the warm, vulnerable, and playful Baldwin captured on film…tell us about his need to leave America time and again in search of safety?” (The Yale Review)
• “Toxic Boyfriends of Greek Mythology”—featuring Zeus and Ganymede, “originators of the divine Daddy-Twink dichotomy.” (Historical Homos)
• On Beatrix Potter, hustle culture, and “cottagecore,” the aesthetic drawn from “a nostalgia for someone else’s past.” (Vox)
• A tour through the fountains, gardens, hedge mazes, and statues of Amsterdam’s seventeenth-century Oude Doolhof, a “wandering courtyard” that “mingled pagan, protestant, and imperial desires.” (The Public Domain Review)
• “The Aftermath of Guatemala’s 1976 Earthquake—in Photos.” (Huck)
• “Lots of people who aren’t vestal virgins, or indeed virgins of any kind, are buried alive all the time. One reads about it. Thucydides, for example. In his Peloponnesian War, he talks about how during the Corfu rebellion some were even walled up alive in the temple of Dionysus…But you wouldn’t believe how many people seem unable to resist the urge to crack a little wise as soon as they hear what I do for a living. ‘A Vestal Virgin?’ they say (you can hear the capitalization when they say it). ‘Aren't you afraid of getting buried alive?’” (The Stopgap)
• New: Alba de Céspedes’s 1943 war diary, documenting her weeks in hiding in Abruzzo. (The Paris Review)
• Found: a bejeweled prayer book belonging to Thomas Cromwell, possibly “the sole remaining object from any 16th-century portrait surviving today.” (Artnet)
• Coming soon: a final record from the Beatles, featuring John Lennon’s vocals touched up by AI. (The Verge)
• This week in obituaries: Robert Gottlieb, William Spriggs, Silvio Berlusconi, Ted Kaczynski, Roger Payne, Glenda Jackson, Jim Turner, John Romita Sr., Jacques Rozier, Treat Williams, Franz Leichter, Eve Tetaz, Gordon McQueen, Patrick Gasienica, John Fru Ndi, and Cormac McCarthy.