To read if you want.  Better than arguing with people on Twitter or Facebook, anyway, where no one's a winner. 

How Oumuamua—the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, in 2017—might have been formed.  

“Long before Fabergé, ornate ostrich eggs were highly prized by the elites of Mediterranean civilisations during the Bronze and Iron Ages, but to date little has been known about the complex supply chain behind these luxury goods.” A fascinating study of how complicated the “decorated ostrich egg” trade was in antiquity.  As another piece put it:

Archaeologists have found them mostly in elite burials and temples across a vast region: from Egypt to Mesopotamia, as well Minoan and Mycenean sites in Greece, Etruscan tombs in Italy and Punic colonies in Spain. 

Stimulating piece on how the city of Venice has been shaped by the plague.  

A good picture of why Putin’s spring is turning out so terrible for him.  Short story: The pandemic, of course, but not only its epidemiological effects on the population, but also its effects on the price of oil.  

This seems like a fair critique (not a dismissal) of Rebecca Solnit.  

A few years ago, Viviane Fairbank of The Walrus wrote a piece titled “Why I Don’t Read Rebecca Solnit,” that articulated some of the same anxieties I hold about Solnit’s relatively unquestioned status as an important voice in contemporary feminism. For Fairbank, Solnit’s writing embodies a new, watered-down ethos of feminist solidarity, “call it ‘pop feminism,’—that addresses only topics we can safely agree on.” Fairbank traces Solnit’s belief in the power of women’s stories to the consciousness-raising work of 1960s feminists, reminding us that these stories were meant to lead to “debate that triggers policy change, social reform, or even popular demonstrations. Solnit never makes it past anecdotal evidence.” Likewise, I kept waiting for this book to spin out more, to think, for instance, about how nonexistence functions under capitalism through the erasure of women’s labor, or what it means when women become not invisible but indeed hypervisible as justifications for military intervention (i.e., the U.S. government’s insistence that its invasion would “liberate” Afghan women).

Read it and decide for yourself.

I hope you all have a good Sunday.