• Moroccan identity and history at the World Cup. (Africa Is a Country)

• The story behind @GPCR50, a Twitter account live-tweeting the Cultural Revolution. (MIT Technology Review)

• On shadow libraries. (LRB Blog)

• “A great many Old English place names are toponyms, that is, names that refer to and describe landscape features…so the geography of the natural world was very clearly of interest and importance to early place-makers and place-namers. But so, too, were the plants and animals, and we find them everywhere in place names, connected with both ecological habitats and human habitations alike. Among this rich repository of names, birds rank in their many hundreds as vitalizing elements and markers of medieval places—more than any other class of wild animal in fact.” (Aeon)

• “For four decades Kerry James Marshall has been helping himself to the bounty of art history, extrapolating distinctive strengths of early Renaissance or French rococo and setting them to work in entirely novel ways to depict Black subjects and Black experience.” (NYR Online)

• “Two lead sarcophagi discovered buried under the nave at Notre-Dame Cathedral in what was described as an ‘extraordinary and emotional’ find have begun giving up their secrets.” (The Guardian)

• On Irene Dunne, “too special, my friend went on to say, too much of an acquired taste, and, worse, too good at too many things.” (Current)

• This week on obituaries: Angelo Badalamenti, Stephen “tWitch” Boss, Grant Wahl, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Billie Moore, Marijane Meaker, Herbert Deutsch, Don Lewis, Lee Lorenz, Paul Silas, Maureen Doherty, Joyce Bryant, Milton Viorst, Abigail Kawananakoa, Ashley Bickerton, Charlotte Mayer, Jay Goldberg, Joseph Kittinger, Daniel Brush, Robert Toth, Frances Hesselbein, Beryl Grey, Alain Sailhac, Victor Lewis-Smith, Eric Allison, Don Luce, Curt Simmons, Clare Marx, Stuart Margolin, Silver Saundors Friedman, David Young, Gaddis Smith, and Jet Black.