The Garden of Time is a 1962 short story by J. G. Ballard [archive] which was the theme of this year's Met Gala. Partly because of that incongruous fact, Thomas Jones, who wrote about Ballard back in 2008 [archive], and Edmund Gordon, whose piece on Ballard appeared last week [archive], had a discussion about Ballard on the London Review of Books podcast.

Here's Why Jalapeño Peppers Are Less Spicy Than Ever is an investigation by food writer Brian Reinhart as to why jalapeño peppers are milder than they used to be. Willa Paskin of Slate turned the article into an episode of her podcast The Decoder Ring and went further.

Not All Propaganda Is Art is a nine episode series of the podcast Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything. In it, Walker tells the story of the CIA's cultural Cold War propaganda operations in the 1950s as reflected in the lives of three men, cultural theorist Dwight Macdonald, theater critic Kenneth Tynan, and novelist Richard Wright. The show notes are also full of interesting links and images. If you're not sure you want spend nine hours in the paranoid fifties, Sarah Larson gives a very good overview in the New Yorker [archive].

A once-enslaved man's music was hidden for centuries is an article by Diane Orson about Sawney Freeman, who published a book of his violin compositions in 1801 in New Haven, Connecticut. That work is lost, but in 1817, Gurdon Trumbull copied down many of Freeman's tunes, and that manuscript survived. His music was arranged for a quintet by Anthony Padolfe Jr. and is available online. My favorite is the haunting New Death March, but all 15 compositions are lovely. Connecticut Public Television also made a video based on Orson's article, part of a series on Connecticut's history of slavery.

Alice Munro, master of short stories, wove intense tales of human drama from small-town life is the Globe and Mail obituary [archive] for the Canadian literary giant who passed away Monday night. She received the Nobel in literature in 2013 among countless other prizes. She also cofounded Munro's Books in Victoria, British Columbia, who posted a remembrance on Instagram. The New Yorker, where many of her stories first appeared, has a section with links to her short fiction, as well as personal essays, appraisals and an interview and an obituary [archive]. The 1978 classic Moons of Jupiter was recently featured on their fiction podcast, and it is also available as text.

Whenever I read claims about 'forgotten women', I want to ask: 'By whom?' Feminists? Society? The 'culture'? And why 'forgotten'? Forgetting presupposes something once known, but the general 'we' who have 'forgotten' these women are also the 'we' who were not taught them in the first place. Such generalisations risk shifting the focus, and the responsibility, away from the agents of our ignorance: the historians and philosophers who made a world in which certain texts were deemed unworthy of preservation and the history of women's thought was kept to the margins.

– A Comet that Bodes Mischief by Sophie Smith. She discussed women in philosophy on the LRB Podcast.