Open Here I Flung the Shutter, by Édouard Manet, 1875, illustration for “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924.
• On the ravens at the Tower of London: “At the Tower they play games of KerPlunk, pulling the straws free from the tube to retrieve a dead mouse as their prize. Yet, as that special raven edition of KerPlunk suggests, they’re also birds of gothic darkness and gore, the birds that followed Viking raiders in quest of fresh corpses and that feasted on executed bodies hung from roadside gibbets. You might visit Skaife’s charges in the Tower and watch, entranced, as they gently preen each other’s nape feathers, murmuring in their soft raven idiolect—but you might also see them gang up to ambush a pigeon and eat it alive.” (The Atlantic)
• If you want to buy paintings of Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, this is your year.
• In 1908, “before the FBI, the U.S. Post Office Inspection Service was the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country, and the only agency equipped to solve such a large-scale crime.” (Politico Magazine)
• The history of ranch dressing. (The New York Times)
• The few and forgotten women of the Bauhaus: “Fearful of the impact women might have on the school’s professional reputation with industry, not only did Gropius subsequently place restrictions on the number of women permitted entry, but the increasingly reduced few were directed towards what were deemed more suitably feminine subjects, such as fine art, ceramics and weaving.” (BBC)
• A vivid and terrifying account of a nineteenth-century masectomy. (Jezebel)
• When you’re rich and dumb enough to believe that drinking gold will give you youthful skin…a lesson from sixteenth-century France. (Atlas Obscura)
• Archaeologists might have found the HMS Endeavour just in time for the 250th anniversary of James Cook’s birth. (The Sydney Morning Herald)
• The friendship between Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin. (Buzzfeed)
• This week in obituaries: a hoaxer who had already had his New York Times obituary years ago, “the first black ballet dancer to achieve international stardom,” and a woman who “sabotaged bridges and rail lines with dynamite, shot Nazis while riding [a bike], and donned disguises to smuggle Jewish children across the country and sometimes out of concentration camps.”