Good morning, Monday round-up!

This really is brilliant. Remove Garfield from the Garfield comic, and you get a strip of almost Samuel Beckett-like minimalism. The pared-away humor, the pointless action, the blank meaninglessness: It’s the Endgame of newspaper comic strips. Thanks to Sarah Weinman for the post.

Monday, March 3rd, is Read Across America Day, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. Students in Dallas — and across the country — will stop classroom activities to read silently for 10 minutes. In Dallas, it’ll happen at 9 a.m. — and at 9:10, there will be special reading presentations over the schools’ PA systems.

The exhibition, Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1960s, which closed last week at SMU’s Meadows Museum of Art, is opening soon at the Dulwich Gallery in London. The Telegraph has an advance and a slideshow (the button is under “Modernist Manhattan”).

It’s not just American newspapers that seem to be getting thinner and dumber, chasing any celebrity trend, any political yelling match. British newspapers, too. John Lanchester reviews Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News:

His book starts at the point at which he got interested in the story of what he calls ‘flat earth news’: ‘A story appears to be true. It is widely accepted as true. It becomes a heresy to suggest that it is not true – even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda.’ That’s flat earth news, and Davies became interested in the phenomenon, via the story of the millennium bug. How on earth did so many papers get sucked into producing so many millions of words of, it turns out, total nonsense … ?

The 18th century peasant may actually have been one stylin’ dude.

A 170-lb. stainless steel sculpture was stolen from outside a Chicago public library. Art thieves? No, Chicago police think they stole it to sell as scrap.