• Ghost stories and conflict zone trauma at a rural Afghan shrine: “This wreckage, like the debris from the abandoned outpost, is like an ancient midden of failed foreign invasions.” (Atlas Obscura)

• Remembering Miranda Parker Nichols and “her rightful place in the architectural history of the nation’s first capital.” (Artforum)

•  Considering the collective effects of the Cultural Revolution, generations later: “The past walked with all survivors…I sensed it in the rage and volatility of some I met, and in the fractured recall of others: trauma punches the holes that power must drill into language, memory, families. But, really, it was everywhere, a pain that ate people up and wore them out.” (Literary Hub)

• On the “combined attack of colonial and missionary moralism” that killed Punjab’s classical music tradition. (Scroll.in)

• “How the Murder of One CIA Officer Was Used to Silence the Agency’s Greatest Critic.” (The Intercept)

• Meet Ralph Bunche, the Black anti-colonialist diplomat behind the United Nation’s two-state proposal in Palestine. (Zócalo Public Square)

• A search for the legendary giant Palouse earthworm. (Mangoprism)

• Read love letters between new parents separated during World War II. (New-York Historical Society)

• Up for auction: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s handwritten notes and manuscript fragments from The Scarlet Letter. (Smithsonian.com)

• “Pathogenesis suggests that the course of history has less to do with our own volition and more to do with the ways in which different diseases fared in different climates…What the book reveals is the plain fact that humans are often not the only actors on the great stage of history that we assume we are, and that we may not even be the most important. We have used and been used by diseases so repeatedly that…one begins to wonder if we may exist primarily to spread and promulgate microscopic organisms and viruses.” (The New Republic)

• This week in obituaries: Newton Minow, Sam Gross, Bruce McCall, David Miranda, Rita Lee, Arman Soldin, Kemal Derviş, Rob Laakso, Chris Strachwitz, Grace Bumbry, Soňa Červená, Stanley Deser, Jacklyn Zeman, Ronald Steel, Heather Armstrong, Eric “Shoutin’ ” Sheridan, Don Sebesky, John Roland, Laura Pels, Terrence Hardiman, Adam Brace, Menahem Pressler, Stanton Samenow, Antonio Carbajal, Virginia Moore, Denny Krum, Vida Blue, Joe Kapp, Tom Hornbein, Fred Siegel, Thomas Kong, and Ranajit Guha.