Cow, c. 1880. Photograph by Charles Reid. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
• “In a paper last year cataloging the ‘many nonphysical but very significant social harms that guns can inflict,’ the law professors Joseph Blocher and Reva B. Siegel note that armed riders were banned from market and fairs back in fourteenth-century England. Most U.S. states adopted laws against ‘brandishing’ in the nineteenth century, and in 1874 the Georgia Supreme Court, in a typical piece of reasoning about the limited scope of the Second Amendment, wrote, ‘The practice of carrying arms at courts, elections, and places of worship, etc., is a thing so improper in itself, so shocking to all sense of propriety’ that the Framers could never have intended it.” (Slate)
• “Alito rationalizes that the late arrival of civil rights for women makes those rights less real than if they had arrived earlier. He argues that the right to abortion, because it was enshrined only in the seventies, is not ‘deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.’ He seems unworried that this might actually only serve to emphasize the profound misogyny endemic throughout American history; women did not even gain the right to vote until well into the twentieth century.” (NewYorker.com)
• When America hated coal. (Smithsonian)
• “The longest-running natural-history TV series is Nature, which has aired weekly on PBS since 1982. The photography and scoring of the early episodes were basic by today’s standards, and watching them now feels like looking at safari footage while being read the best passages from relevant Wikipedia pages: a recitation of the habits, diet, and physiology of the week’s chosen creature. This is not a criticism. The animals’ lives, relatively unembellished, are interesting.” (Dissent)
• “Germany hands over two Benin bronzes to Nigeria.” (The Guardian)
• “A newfound dinosaur had tiny arms before T. rex made them cool.” (Science News)
• The history of wheat politics. (The New York Review of Books)
• This week in obituaries: Shinzo Abe, James Caan, Willie Lee Morrow, Ni Kuang, Joe Turkel, Zhang Sizhi, Robert Curl, Kazuki Takahashi, Yves Coppens, Mohammad Barkindo, Hunter Reynolds, H.T. Chen, Peter Brook, Bruce Katz, Clifford Alexander Jr., Bradford Freeman, Vladimir Zelenko, Miguel Etchecolatz, Mona Hammond, Richard Taruskin, and Kurt Markus.