• On the history of the Irish Jewish community: “When James Joyce was asked why he chose a Jew as his central character in Ulysses (which marked its centenary this year), he said: ‘because only a foreigner would do.’ ” (Literary Hub)

• Relishing early modern rude language: “To say something was codswallop, baloney, bollocks, they’d have gone with trumpery, baggage, rubbish, or the wonderful reduplicating terms that appear in the 1570s and ’80s: flim-flam, fiddle-faddle, or fible-fable.” (History Today)

• Found: remnants of ancient Greek and Roman board-game nights. (Heritage Daily)

• Stories from the Eugene V. Debs Collection: “Eugene Debs was the greatest friend I ever had, although I’ve never met him, nor he me. Yet through him I met my husband. It was this way: in 1894 I was on a steamship in San Francisco, going to Oregon. Mr. Gabriel, although I didn’t know him then, was setting out for Oregon by train. He had already bought his ticket when Mr. Debs pulled his railway strike, and Mr. Gabriel had to take the boat, the same one I was on…We were married soon after.” (JSTOR Daily)

• The history of chemical baths, “disinfecting,” and “racism in the name of public health” during the Mexican Revolution. (Perspectives on History)

• On efforts to save James Cook’s ship from the “termites of the ocean.” (The Guardian)

• Medieval European manuscripts as an ecological species that are 90 percent extinct. (Hyperallergic)

• From James Baldwin to Lorraine Hansberry, “a lyrical syllabus of Black American intellectual thought.” (The Nation)

• Considering an oral historian’s new book about the legacy of India’s Partition: “How are memories of Partition that have been suppressed for so long actually passed on? Do they even deserve to be passed on? How are they received by the subsequent generations? Are there more questions that emerge?” (Vice)

• This week in obituaries: Duggie Brown, Hanae Mori, Frederick Buechner, Cecile Pineda, Wolfgang Petersen, Nicholas Evans, Richard Wilson, Zofia Posmysz, John L. Eastman, Anne Heche, Elana Dykewomon, Bill Pitman, Rolf Eden, and Q Lazzarus.