This week: How horses evolved / Spanish king does damage control / Humanity and Halley’s Comet / COVID’s sexual secrets / Kim Novak survived Hollywood’s abuses
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1. ‘What I Want Out of Life Is to Be Loved’: Kim Novak on Healing After Leaving Hollywood
By Scott Feinberg | The Hollywood Reporter | March 2021
“The icon of Vertigo — and Trump target at the 2014 Oscars — reveals what liberated her after years of studio system abuse, her bipolar diagnosis and the untold story behind her rumored romance with Sammy Davis Jr.”
2. A year on, what lessons have been learned from the pandemic?
Babbage :: The Economist | March 2021
“How past pandemics shaped society and can the ‘new normal’ be a better normal?”
3. 160 years later, Confederate constitution an ignoble relic
By Jay Reeves | Associated Press | March 2021
“Composed in faded ink on five large sheets of animal skin connected in a single scroll more than 12 feet (3.7 meters) long, the constitution is stored in a vault and rarely seen in public. By contrast, the U.S. Constitution is on display at the National Archives, visited by 1 million people in a typical year.”
4. In the Path of Halley’s Comet, Humanity Might Find Its Way Forward
By Henry DaCosta, Mitch Myers and Jeffery DelViscio | Scientific American | March 2021
“The work of decoding the cosmic traveler has surprising relevance right now”
5. A Year of Secrets
By Anna Silman | The Cut :: New York Magazine | March 2021
“COVID-era confessions, from ski trips to lovers to second jobs”
6. Spain’s King Felipe VI struggles to repair tarnished image of royal family
By Miguel Gonzalez | El Pais | March 2021
“The scandal over the alleged financial irregularities of his father, Juan Carlos I, has been compounded by his sisters’ decision to jump the Covid-19 vaccine line. Can the monarch fix the damage?”
7. Fences around the Capitol are a temporary fix. Here’s what we should do.
By Russel Honoré | Opinion :: The Washington Post | March 2021
“We don’t want to lose our democracy, but fences won’t protect it.”
8. Witch Hunting in Early Modern Europe
By Christopher Rose, Joan Neuberger and Henry Wiencek | 15 Minute History :: UT Department of History | 2014-2020
Also see: The Precolumbian Civilizations of Mesoamerica | Islam’s Enigmatic Origins | White Women of the Harlem Renaissance | The Harlem Renaissance
9. Why we need to take bad sex more seriously
By Katherine Angel | The Guardian | March 2021
“Consent has been portrayed as the cure for all the ills of our sexual culture. But what if the injunction to ‘know what you want’ is another form of coercion?”
10. Cave Art
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2020
Also see: The Trojan War | Marco Polo | Clausewitz and On War | The Evolution of Horses
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