• “Why Do Tennis Crowds Have to Be So Quiet?” (Atlas Obscura)

• “If you have ever questioned how you’d make a strategy game based on a war epic that’s mostly about violent, depressed narcissists standing around longship parking lots to argue about their violence and colossal egos, A Total War Saga: Troy isn’t a bad answer.” (Vice)

• Revisiting the life of Julian Bond. (The Nation)

• Meet Agnes B. Marshall, the nineteenth-century culinary mind who put meat and vegetables in her ice-cream concoctions. (The Hustle)

• “As is the case for so many during the pandemic, language activists, linguists, and others who work on revitalization campaigns are reimagining their work at a time when coronavirus has made in-person meetings impossible. It’s a transition that has taken on particular urgency given the fact that the speaker pool for the world’s threatened and endangered languages skews older—precisely the population most at risk from the pandemic.” (Slate)

• On the musical Senator Joe. (Vulture)

• Raphael’s face was reconstructed from a cast; scholars discover that “the 3D model shows the eyes and mouth (in the portraits) are his, but he has been kind to himself about his nose.” (AFP)

• “The biggest question, of course, is what made the Vikings so successful for so long.” (London Review of Books)

• “What if you survey African literature professors to find out which works and writers are most regularly taught? Only a few canonical ones continue to dominate curricula.” (Africa Is a Country)

• Found: “A key piece to the puzzle that is the movement of banana and horticulture prehistorically.” (Cosmos)

• This week in obituaries: Fay Chew Matsuda, Kurt Luedtke, Sumner Redstone, Carol Brock, Bernard Bailyn, Lincoln Crawford, Le Kha Phieu, Matt Herron, and Robert Ryland.