• “These films were two Hail Marys for the two fronts of an ailing twentieth-century mass culture: prestige drama and bubblegum ubiquity, the atom bomb and the plastic doll. I doubt that Universal and Mattel, or Nolan and Gerwig, coordinated this. But neither did the Little Boy bomb, dropped on Japan in 1945, and the Barbie ‘Teenage Fashion Model’ doll, manufactured for Mattel in Japan in 1959, have to coordinate with each other to give birth to a sublime and monstrous era. Barbenheimer promised to bring us all back to the origin story of the American century, that most fantastic of recent inventions.” (The Point)

• Memories of a hijacking: “Is there something ineffable about experience that cannot be captured by historical interrogation of the past?” (The New Republic)

• On the historians who created a “popular, synthetic, but high-end American history, guiding young and old into the twilight zone of the distant and the near pasts where everything was familiar yet weird.” (Boston Review)

• On Winsor McCay’s career, from vaudeville comics to early animation. (JSTOR Daily)

• Documenting some of the world’s last surviving internet cafés, which came out of “a post–Cold War moment full of techno-optimism.” (Rest of World)

• “The Czech Socialist Literature That Influenced Milan Kundera.” (Jacobin)

• Political theater and the “winemaking spectacle” at the Villa of the Quintilii, where “the super-rich play with the fantasy that they might be participating in the romantic life of agricultural production.” (The Washington Post)

• The deadly battles of Kentucky’s cavern tourism industry. (SmithsonianMag.com)

• A history of the bezoar. (The Paperclip)

• A history of hot pink. (The Juggernaut)

• Found in Vietnam: 2,000-year-old spice blend for a curry recipe that “hasn’t changed much in the intervening millennia.” (Cosmos)

• Returned to Italy: an original letter from Christopher Columbus to King Ferdinand. (Guardian)

• “Although he did not live long enough to see the 20th century, Luna’s dual cultural identity endowed his most ambitious works with a hybridity and cross-cultural tension that feel surprisingly modern. The rediscovery and exhibition of ‘Hymen, oh Hyménée!’ offer a fresh opportunity to contemplate the role Luna played in the early formation of Philippine politics and culture.” (Hyperallergic)

• This week in obituaries: Sinéad O’Connor, Josephine Chaplin, Charles Wurster, Bo Goldman, Catherine Burks-Brooks, Hugh Carter, Jr., Richard M. Barancik, James Zagel, Cheri Pies, Richard Simpson, Pamela Blair, Dorothy Goodman, Stu Silver, Randy Fullmer, Ray Price, Simpson Kalisher, Johnny Lujack, Reeves Callaway, Rocky Wirtz, Mark Lowery, Trevor Francis, and Seiichi Morimura.