Give the guy a little love.

• Poor Branwell Brontë. He had three brilliant, literary sisters. He had a way of courting misfortune. And, worst of all, he had a first name that sounds like an off-brand cereal from the health-food store. But now that Branwell’s siblings have ascended into the highest reaches of the canon, Emma Butcher argues that we’ve failed to give him his due: “We remember him as the failure of the family. Despite being a passionate poet, writer and artist, he failed to hold down conventional jobs, and repeatedly succumbed to vice. Finally, his world fell apart after the end of an affair with a married woman, Lydia Gisborne, which accelerated his dependence on opiates and alcohol. He died at the young age of thirty-one from the long-term effects of substance abuse … Life threw repeated punches at Branwell, but within this series of unfortunate events there was happiness and worth. We must not forget that the Brontë brother grew up in the same literature-charged environment as his three siblings … Although his influence was not always positive, Branwell remained a primary muse for his sisters, and we should remember him as a major cog in the Brontë writing machine—even if his own work was always ‘minor.’ And the story of a young, talented fantasist failing to make his way in the world resonates with our experiences of hardship and lost dreams.”

• Are you an unconventional male artist who intends to go to the grave with many illegitimate children just waiting to come out of the woodwork? Boy, do I have an idea for you: on your deathbed, make a big show out of preserving some of your DNA as your final artwork. Send it to a museum or something, I don’t know. Not only will this earn you plaudits for your striking comment on the artist’s body as the ultimate artwork—it will save your descendants a little trouble down the road. As Raphael Minder reports, a Spanish court has ordered the exhumation of Salvador Dalí’s corpse for DNA testing; a young woman claims to be his daughter. If he’d just taken the time to put a little of his DNA aside for safekeeping, they wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble, but … “Pilar Abel, a Tarot card reader, wants to be recognized as Dalí’s daughter, born as a result of what she has called a ‘clandestine love affair’ that her mother had with the painter in the late 1950s in Port Lligat, the fishing village where Dalí and his Russian-born wife, Gala, built a waterfront house … Dalí died in 1989, seven years after Gala, with whom he had had an unusual and childless relationship, which included Gala’s moving to a castle overlooking Púbol, another Catalan village, and only granting Dalí the right to visit her there by written invitation. In his will, Dalí left paintings worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Spanish state.”

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