• The story of American imperialism, told through the daiquiri. (Perspectives on History)

• The history of the Hindutva-Zionist alliance. (The Nation)

• Remembering Octavia Butler’s Kindred: “To reckon with a past like slavery we must be willing like Dana to entertain blasphemous solidarities with the very thing that sought to destroy us and seeks to destroy us still.” (Boston Review)

• The treasures of copy #361 of the first editions of Ulysses: “All of that 20th-century history, bound in one completely original book. It’s something to behold.” (Library of Congress)

• How automation made its way into a seventeenth-century Mughal painting and became a picture of global empire. (Scroll.in)

• “The 150-Year-Old Comstock Act Could Transform the Abortion Debate.” (Smithsonian)

• Found: 42,000-year-old penis pendant in northern Mongolia, “likely the oldest known phallic artifact in the world.” (LiveScience)

• Now open: Largo di Torre Argentina, the public square in Rome where Julius Caesar is believed to have been murdered. (New York Times)

• “Stories are just as important to heirloom plants as the literal seed itself...Like seeds, narratives are dynamic. They grow and travel, sometimes unpredictably. New information can emerge. Stories drop and pick up details. They change in the telling, the listening, the recording and the erosion of time.” On Aunt Lou's Underground Railroad tomato, and the difficulty tracing heirloom plants discovered or grafted by enslaved people. (The Guardian)

• This week in obituaries: Daniel Ellsberg, Saskia Hamilton, Donald Triplett, Claude Sarraute, Julie Garwood, Carol Higgins Clark, Angela Thorne, Teresa Taylor, Max Morath, Big Pokey, Roger Squires, Henry Petroski, Haim Roet, Paxton Whitehead, Magda Saleh, George Gedda, Lisl Steiner, Janice Wainwright, Ben Helfgott, Gino Mäder, Jalna Hanmer, and Chef Ramzi Choueiri.