• “When Frederick Law Olmsted began designing Eastern Parkway in 1870, he imagined it as a tree-lined ‘pleasure road’ where people could walk, ride horses, and drive carriages to get fresh air.” (Curbed)

• The erstwhile celebrity of Rod McEwan. (Decoder Ring)

• “But quietly sitting on the books, where it’s been for nearly three decades, is a law that explicitly makes it a crime to discuss abortion online. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first major attempt by Congress to define what would be lawful on the internet. The act includes a provision that criminalizes discussing abortion, with potential punishment of up to five years in jail, $250,000 in fines, or both. No one has ever been charged with violating this provision of the law.” (The New Republic)

• Danielle Steel and the recent history of publishing. (Los Angeles Review of Books)

• “The bones of a mammoth and calf recently uncovered in New Mexico show signs of butchering, an exciting find that could help refine estimates of when humans first populated the Americas.” (Gizmodo)

• “Did shark attacks eat into Woodrow Wilson’s votes in 1916?” (Vox)

• “It is a story told in every Creole family I know in Mauritius. It is often narrated during a long drive: a window rolls down and a hand gestures to stanzas upon stanzas of sugarcane, or bungalows on the coast, or valleys now privately owned. ‘This used to be ours,’ says a parent. ‘They took it. We lost it.’ ” (The White Review)

• On “the Mexican Revolution as U.S. History.” (Boston Review)

• “A group of Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn is reviving the golden age of cantorial music.” (Morning Edition)

• “The Surprising History of the Slur Beyoncé and Lizzo Both Cut from Their New Albums.” (Slate)

• This week in obituaries: Bill Russell, Nichelle Nichols, Vin Scully, Pat Carroll, Samuel Sandoval, Eli Evans, Tim Giago, Alastair Little, Richard Tait, Ronald Allison, Mary Alice, Larry Josephson, Stuart Woods, Fidel Ramos, Mick Moloney, Alan Grant, Charlotte Pomerantz, Mo Ostin, and Ayman al-Zawahiri.