• On India’s manual scavengers and the casteist sanitation industry: “Prime Minister Nehru promised to ‘improve health, education, and sanitation’ alongside building up ‘a big productive machine,’ but never turned these fine words into action. While the Congress claimed to represent all of India, the party was propped up by—and answered to—an elite coalition made up of the professional middle class, industrialists, and landlords, who, perversely, were extended subsidies and welfare measures that were largely denied to the rest of the population. When it came to sanitation, then, the colonial dichotomy held: ‘The middle class has been able to monopolize whatever basic sanitation services the state has provided,’ Chaplin notes. This meant that most Indians still used dry latrines, which were cleaned by Dalits.” (New York Review of Books)

• The revolutionary verses of Roque Dalton, which “transcend ideology in their appeal to collective action in defense of humanity and life itself.” (Poetry Foundation)

• The “systems novels” of Don DeLillo, full of “men buffeted by tides of history they can only strive to comprehend.” (Bookforum)

• Lessons from Antonio Gramsci for today’s organizers. (Dissent)

• Revisiting J.D. Salinger’s copyright battles. (CrimeReads)

• “A lot of monuments commemorate dead people…I think it's difficult to live, and when you think about war and conflict, the consequences also fall on the shoulders of the living.” (NPR)

• Ancient and vintage maps of Egypt. (Bayt Al Fann)

• An end-of-summer reading list “inspired by an ethos of my way and the highway.” (4Columns)

• Volcanic activity, Vikings, and magic: a tour of Ireland’s Copper Coast. (National Geographic)

• Learning about today’s sperm whales using a nineteenth-century whaling captain’s logbook. (Earth Island Journal)

• On “the emerging terrain of struggle”: “Is American liberalism exhausted or revitalized?” (The Dig)

• This week in obituaries: Zijie Yan, Yevgeny Progozhin, Dmitri Utkin, Wagner affiliates, Léa Garcia, Claude Ruiz Picasso, Isabel Crook, Talal Salman, Sliman Bensmaia, Tina Howe, William MacKaye, Douglas Feaver, Joan Lowy, Richard Ekstract, Alexine Clement Jackson, Nicholas Hitchon, David Rowland, Howard Hubbard, Samuel Wurzelbacher, Karol Bobko, G. Ogden Nutting, Alexandra Paul, Ray Hildebrand, Bob Barker, Don Sundquist, David Jacobs, Keith Spicer, Albert Qiue, Tony Roberts, Laszlo Birinyi, Bray Wyatt, Gil Brandt, Jan Jongbloed, Anthony Grech Sant, Sarava, and Brian McBride.