• Stewardess, ballerina, surgeon, marine, business executive, presidential candidate: tracing the history of Barbie, career woman. (Harper’s Bazaar)

• Revisiting Oppenheimer’s atomic test: “They were too busy thinking about how to build the bomb to revisit the question of whether they should as the strategic situation changed.” (Vox)

• “What is lacking from the leveling-the-playing-field narrative about affirmative-action policies? The long, documented history of Black people competitively outperforming white people.” (Washington Post)

• Art appreciation in the age of tourism. (Literary Hub)

• Gustave Moreau’s mystical paintings. (The Collector)

• On inherited furniture. (Wall Street Journal)

• Meet Elizabeth Gould, the Victorian woman who traveled the world illustrating birds and “bridging Blake and Darwin with a single hairbrush.” (The Marginalian)

• Mircea Cărtărescu’s sprawling antinovel Solenoid, “where history moves only with the slowness of rust.” (n+1)

• “Fractured memories of Manipur”: tracing the state’s mythology, radical roots, and history of ethnic violence. (Countercurrents)

• Premiering this week: a five-part “biography of our planet.” (BBC Science Focus)

• Also premiering this week: “The Dark Side of the 2000s,” a new film featuring the witnesses of “all the train wrecks and triumphs” of the decade. (Vice TV)

• Personal stories from survivors of the Magdalene laundries: “She remembers the strikes if you didn’t get the cleaning of the dormitory right, the cleaning that had to be done at 6:30 in the morning, before breakfast, before the laundry, top to bottom, on your hands and knees, scrubbing the floors…and she remembers how it was even worse if you made a mistake with the laundry, if you forgot something, lost something, or if ever you slowed down…For more than 70 years, the Irish State wordlessly gave its blessing to the detention of the thousands of women, which must have given the nuns the impression they were doing something right. The record also shows that when the laundries were inspected, the discussions that ensued were about problems with the machinery (steam pressure vessels, hydro extractors, and the like), or observable contraventions of fire safety. Over tea and biscuits, the assessors went through these issues with the nuns. The women kept doing the laundry.” (The White Review)

This week in obituaries: Marga Minco, Tony Bennett, James Reston, Jr., Martha Saxton, Rolfe Neill, Beverly Moss Spatt, Jane Birkin, João Donato, Amer Alwan, Judith James, Jerry Bradley, David R. Lawrenz, Harry Frankfurt, Marie-Laure de Decker, Sally Kempton, Kevin Mitnick, Denise Bombardier, Melvin Wulf, André Watts, Evelyn Witkin, Dermot Doran, Stephen M. Silverman, Evelyn Boyd Granville, Judy Solomon, C.R. Roberts, DJ Deeon, Carlin Glynn, and Funny Cide.