• Remembering the immigrant origins of popular Independence Day cuisine. (National Geographic)

Further reading: MIGRATION (Spring 2022)

• Remembering Michael Stewart, the graffiti artist killed by police officers in 1984. “For years after Stewart’s death, Basquiat repeated the same refrain: ‘It could have been me.’” (The Nation)

• On the Cold War spies who communicated using a public toilet in a quiet English village. (Atlas Obscura)

Further reading: SPIES (Winter 2016)

• Tracing queer history through New York City’s public parks. (Hyperallergic)

• A timeline of the Iran-Israel conflict. (New York Times)

Further reading: Extracts, a new series on our Substack; this week from STATES OF WAR (Winter 2008)

• Meet Maria Gondola and Flora Zuzzori, whose friendship and solidarity marked “a radical departure from the hierarchical relationships typically depicted in Renaissance literature.” (Aeon)

• “A look at 15th-century India through the eyes of a Genoan merchant.” (Scroll.in)

Further reading: TRADE (Spring 2019)

• A history of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, or, a history of the atomic bomb. (The Atlantic)

• On what we save at a moment when “not in living memory have so many of us been in flight from fires and floods, wars and economic disasters.” (New York Review of Books)

Further reading: An excerpt from the diary of war correspondent Anastasia Stanko

• “Before Zohran Mamdani, there was Comrade La Guardia.” (Waleed Shahid)

• “There will be no returning to the way things were. Whether the end is good or bad, the before is dead and buried. But even in that before, there were signs on the road to Jerusalem.” (Parapraxis)

• This week in obituaries: Sandy Gall, Rebekah Del Rio, Michael Madsen, Alex Delvecchio, David Mabuza, Pat Williams, Luis Pascual Dri, Richard A. Boucher, Jimmy Swaggart, Dave Scott, Walter Scott, Joe Giordano, Lalo Schifrin, Diogo Jota, and Amna al-Salmi and Ismail Abu Hatab, who were among more than thirty Palestinians killed in the bombing of al-Baqa café in Gaza.