• “Wagner’s Mutiny Has Century-Old Echoes of Another Russian Debacle.” (New York Times)

• A history of examining crime-scene dust. (JSTOR Daily)

• “If language can shape and limit thought, these cultural products suggest, it can also be the key to revolutionizing our minds and social systems. Unraveling the past is then a simple exercise in historical linguistics: bring the roots of our speech out into the light, and replace the flawed remnants of the linguistic with better alternatives.” (The New Inquiry)

• Sweet Valley High and the question of taste: “I would never ask a reader to sacrifice one bit of pleasure for the sake of shame.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

• Remembering Vicente Muñiz Arroyo, Mexico’s ambassador to Uruguay, who sheltered hundreds of Uruguayans seeking asylum. (EL PAÍS)

• A conversation with translator Nora Seligman Favorov about Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, “the greatest Russian writer fans of nineteenth-century literature have never heard of.” (Full Stop)

• Unearthed in Pompeii: two-thousand-year-old fresco featuring “a round focaccia bread on a silver tray” along with “a pomegranate and possibly a date”; a herb cheese spread used in ancient Rome; a goblet of wine; and “an item that looks suspiciously like a pineapple.” (The Guardian)

• New in Greenwich Village: A sculpture of “intimate interior space brought outdoors” honors New Yorkers lost to AIDS. (Hyperallergic)

• The long battle over affirmative action. (Wall Street Journal)

• This week in obituaries: Hamish Harding, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Stockton Rush, Peg Yorkin, Ruth Fitzpatrick, Sheldon Harnick, Julian Sands, Bobby Osborne, Frederic Forrest, Richard Ravitch, Robert Black, Jesse McReynolds, John B. Goodenough, Donnie McKethan, H. Lee Sarokin, Robin Wynne, Jim Crown, David Richards, Lowell Weicker, Harry Markowitz, Winnie Ewing, and Esteban Volkov.