• “The letter W is a child of the fall of Rome.” (Literary Hub)

• On the first years of the HIV epidemic in New York City. (Mother Jones)

• A history of terrible World Cup video games. (Guardian)

• “How Hawai‘i Became the Most Unionized State.” (Current Affairs)

• On the origins of our relationship with fire. (ScienceNews)

• On our “longstanding practice of buying sovereignty.” (n+1)

• Removed: Artwork criticizing Winston Churchill’s role in the Bengal Famine. (The Art Newspaper)

• On display: Norman Rockwell’s World War II-era illustrations from the West Wing. (Morning Edition)

• “For Mariam, the fight against Israel is both a religious and a patriotic duty, carried out to defend the dignity of all Lebanese. But for another section of society it is a war imposed by a single party, Hizbullah – which, in the prime minister’s words, is ‘fighting other people’s wars on Lebanese soil’. This debate has run through the country since the 1960s – when the question was whether Palestinian fighters should be allowed to operate from Lebanese soil. Then, as now, Lebanese society was divided between those who saw armed resistance against Israel as a national duty and those who believed it would inevitably lead to the country’s destruction. Then, as now, Israel identified that split and widened it.” (London Review of Books)

• This week in obituaries: Alan Greenspan, Clive Davis, Jill Smokler, David Clayton-Thomas, James Burrows, Ramiro Valdez, Lorcan O’Herlihy, Frank Guarini, Margaret Kerry, Oliver Tree, Gene Shalit, Francisco Guterres, Sergei Ivanov, Shirley Lord, Tay Keith, David Sheiner, Jane Yolen, Slavenka Drakulić, and Ahmed Wishah, the twelfth Al Jazeera journalist killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023.