• Reckoning with guns and ghosts at the Winchester Mystery House: “Standing in Sarah’s bedroom, my guide speaks of her personal grief in hushed and reverent tones. ‘She sought out a Boston psychic to find out why she had suffered so much,’ he says. After a dramatic pause, he reveals how Llanada Villa came to be: the psychic told Sarah that the guns were to blame—she was responsible for the deaths of ‘100 million souls,’ and she was being punished. All the grief she had experienced was because of guns, she was told, so she decided build a house to atone for her sins.” (Curbed)

• Before turning to the myths of ancient Greece, Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire explored the legends of North America. (Atlas Obscura)

• When true-crime lovers try their hand at real detective work: “The dizzying pull of a real-life mystery is nothing new. Nineteenth-century newspapers trafficked in amazingly detailed accounts of murders and careful reporting of trials that invited readers to parse the evidence themselves. Pulp magazines like True Detective later sprung up to take their place. A lot of American fantasies are built around a life spent solving crime. When Truman Capote went with Harper Lee to Kansas to report ‘In Cold Blood,’ he was simply doing what many others had dreamed of.” (The New Yorker Page-Turner)

• Poetry: does it matter? (The New Republic)

• Judith Butler as pop-culture icon: “Theoryspeak, meanwhile, has infiltrated civilian vocabularies. Trope and problematic and heteronormative; even, in a not-quite-Butlerian sense, performative—the sort of words that rankled queer theory’s culture-wars critics—are right at home on Tumblr and Twitter. In a broad-stroke, vastly simplified version, the understanding of gender that Gender Trouble suggests is not only recognizable; it is pop.” (New York)

• The many headstones of Constance Wilde. (The Smart Set)