#FridayReads: May the great reads be with you, Padawans

Ashar with a goat on May 4 at Lancaster Farm Sanctuary in Elizabethtown.

Instead of putting them into some semblance of order, I'll just present this batch in the order in which they were put into the file. Make your own connections. Draw your own conclusions about the endlessly odd pathways of my mind.

• Atlas Obscura: "Remembering When Americans Picnicked in Cemeteries" by Jonathan Kendall
• The Atlantic: "Was Shakespeare a Woman?" by Elizabeth Winkler (The authorship controversy, almost as old as the works themselves, has yet to surface a compelling alternative to the man buried in Stratford. Perhaps that’s because, until recently, no one was looking in the right place. The case for Emilia Bassano.)
• The New York Times: "Why the Cool Kids Are Playing Dungeons & Dragons" by Annalee Newitz (Fighting the dragon queen Tiamat is a much more satisfying way to spend time with my friends than social media ever was.)
• Philadelphia Gay News: "Eastern State adds LGBTQ history to programming" by Larry Nichols. Here's an excerpt:
  

  One queer prisoner’s history particularly caught Anderson’s attention. This person’s name was Isaac Hall, and his story is now on the audio stop.
  
  “He was charged $100 and sentenced to eight years of solitary confinement for what records indicate was a consensual sex act with a male partner,” she said. “But next to every court document and prison record for Isaac Hall was the alias Lady Washington. The warden at the time wrote that Hall was known, in the locality that he resided, as Lady Washington. The specifics of Hall’s identity might be lost to us forever since this person lived 140 years ago, but it’s interesting to navigate Hall’s records, because it seems that if Hall were alive today, he might have identified as trans. And that’s one of the earliest documents I’ve ever seen of a trans or genderqueer person being incarcerated at the penitentiary, and that is the early 1880s.”

• HuffPost: "The Country Winning The Battle On Food Waste" by Max S. Kim. (Hint: It's not the United States.)
• The New York Times: "Hot Topic Is Still Hot" by Paula Mejía (How has an enclave for emo kids and mall goths resisted the retail apocalypse? With merch.)
• CityLab: "The Secret History of the Suburbs" by Amanda Kolson Hurley
• Foreign Affairs: "This Time Is Different: Why U.S. Foreign Policy Will Never Recover" by Daniel W. Drezner
• The Washington Post: "The failure of Reconstruction was a ruthless act of sabotage" by Michael Gerson
• We Are The Mutants: "Signs and Wonders: When We Were Built by Books." An excerpt:
  

  "Discussion of this risks becoming one of those privilege-spewing meditations on The Good Old Days©, and nobody wants that bollocks. But It’s the same thing plenty of people have said, I suppose: housing something physical like books necessitated these habitats that a generation was fortunate enough to grow up around, and the network of ley lines that connected them. Maybe they fostered an engagement with literature and culture — and by extension life — that was slightly less mediated, slightly less implicitly impersonal and results-oriented, slightly more meditative, before those habitats were hollowed out and destroyed?"

• Montgomery Advertiser: "A permanent wound: How the slave tax warped Alabama finances" by Brian Lyman
• Vice: "This City Builder Asks You to Rebuild the World After Climate Devastation" by Cameron Kunzelman ("Lichenia" is an alternative to SimCity that challenges you to experiment in the post-apocalyptic unknown.)
• The Washington Post: "A symbol of slavery — and survival" by DeNeen L. Brown. (Angela’s arrival in Jamestown in 1619 marked the beginning of a subjugation that left millions in chains.)
• The New Republic: "Down and Out in the Gig Economy" by Jacob Silverman (Journalism's dependence on part-time freelancers has been bad for the industry — not to mention writers like me.)
• Grist: "Lawns are the No. 1 irrigated ‘crop’ in America. They need to die." by Eric Holthaus
• Bloomberg: "The Aliens Among Us" by Tyler Cowen. (An uptick in UFO sightings by military pilots raises all sorts of interesting questions.)
• The New Yorker: "The Decline of Historical Thinking" by Eric Alterman. Excerpt:
  

  "Late last year, Benjamin M. Schmidt, a professor of history at Northeastern University, published a study demonstrating that, for the past decade, history has been declining more rapidly than any other major, even as more and more students attend college. ... The decline can be found in almost all ethnic and racial groups, and among both men and women. Geographically, it is most pronounced in the Midwest, but it is present virtually everywhere."

• IEEE Spectrum: "The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence" by Marty Perlmutter (Studios invested heavily in magnetic-tape storage for film archiving but now struggle to keep up with the technology.)
• Science: "Archaeologists find richest cache of ancient mind-altering drugs in South America" by Michael Price
• Longreads: "Critics: Endgame" by Soraya Roberts. (If there's no earth, there's no art. How do you engage in cultural criticism at the end of the world?)

From Lancaster Farm Sanctuary's Facebook page: "Shout out to Annie hen, who we think is the first of all the birds here to climb aboard and hang out on the chicken swing! A few years ago our founder Sarah Salluzzo made the swing for the Cornish Cross birds, for fun and exercise. We wanted to help them stay healthy, despite their genetic programming to be 'meat' birds with abnormal breast and body weight. But we’ve only ever seen them go around or under it like a limbo stick so far! Until last week!!! LFS volunteer Pauline Brown just caught this awesome shot of Annie not only swinging on it, but also snacking on leaves! Go, Annie!!!! Sooo interesting because Annie is usually the last to come in at night, and more likely off doing her own thing away from the flock. As usual, farm animal intelligence and sensitivity is just blowing our minds over here."