• Walt Whitman’s bodies: those electric, those embalmed, and those forgotten in a political haze. (The New York Review of Books)

• A history of Tex-Mex. (Eater)

• Classified ads from the San Francisco Oracle, in print from 1966 to 1969. (The Paris Review Daily)

• Stephen Hawking (1942–2018): “I was an assistant typesetter at Sky and Telescope magazine, hungry for action, when I first glimpsed Dr. Hawking whirring in his electric wheelchair through a ballroom in Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel in 1976. It struck me as the most dramatic moment I had experienced in science. I felt like I had somehow known him forever. The genius, the brilliant mind trapped in a wrecked body, are archetypes of literature and folklore. Of course, I didn’t know him at all.” (The New York Times)

• An interview with Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, on the Little House on the Prairie books: “Definitely—the experience of reading the books as an adult is very different, because you can, as you say, see where maybe things were glossed over or left out, and you can also see the peril that they were in much more clearly than a child would. What I recall from reading them as a kid was this sense that everything was working out, and at the close of each volume, you felt a happy sense that the family was in a good place and nothing too terrible was going to happen. Reading them now as an adult is very different. You see a lot of the darkness that was there and the struggle—you can kind of infer it or read it between the lines.” (Jezebel)

• Why Darwin’s beard mattered. (Public Books)

• Remembering a school walkout in 1968 East Los Angeles. (CityLab)