• Examining the evolution of humanism: “The humanist tendency toward moderation has often turned out to be helpless against the anti-humanist forces of extermination…They risked both-sidesing themselves into oblivion.” (The New York Times)

• Remembering Bernadette Mayer: “There isn’t enough time within a single life to give a full account of one’s memory, much less to record it.” (The Yale Review)

• On Georgina Hogarth, friend, devotee, confidante, sister-in-law, and housekeeper to Charles Dickens. (History Today)

• A new history of slam poetry. (Poetry Foundation)

• Following Subhas Chandra Bose to Taiwan. (FiftyTwo)

• Celebrating sixty years of the Beatles. (The Hedgehog Review)

• The oil painting that inspired Vincent van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night. (The Art Newspaper)

• “Our histories have been one never-ending turn of this wheel: We create, they destroy, and we create something new out of the ashes of what was left behind, saving what we can, and creating new things from the memories of the old…You could say, and many people do, that the past five centuries have constituted one long period of destruction. It absolutely has been. Entire nations, cultures, and languages have been lost, and so much has been lost even among those of us whose traditions and cultures survived. At the same time, you might also see it as part of a cycle of destruction and re-creation, of Native people re-creating and facing the destruction of what we’d rebuilt, only to rebuild it again and again and again.” (Vox)

• This week in obituaries: Dubravka Ugresic, Bill Zehme, John Woods, Julie Anne Peters, D.M. Thomas, Yang Bing-Yi, Keith Reid, Wayne Swinny, Xavier “Chabelo” López, Bobbi Ercoline, Vivan Sunderam, Tony Coe, Randall Robinson, Emily Fisher Landau, Mark Russell, Mel King, Paul O’Grady, Nicholas Lloyd Webber, Jerry Green, Ann Wilson, Gordon Moore, Leroy Raffel, Gladys Kessler, and Darcelle XV.