• “The challenge: to retain a sense of agency in the midst of overlapping forms of déjà vu; to recognize that the momentum of a century of attempted erasure lies behind current events, and yet resist despair.” (The Baffler)

• “How Black support for Zionism morphed into support for Palestine.” (Vox)

• Ten films on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. (Al Jazeera)

• The life of Baba Farid, the Punjabi saint and poet who helped establish a Sufi lodge in Jerusalem. (Dawn)

• On the trap of “a clear hero and an inarguable villain” in historical fiction: “History has no fairy tales.” (Literary Hub)

• Meet Edith Hamilton, retired Latin schoolteacher, “one of the most influential ‘classicists’ of the twentieth century,” who “created an image of ancient Greece that was alien enough to sound romantic, but also familiar to a readership of white Americans eager to imagine themselves as the proud inhabitants of a land of freedom and superiority.” (The Nation)

• Revisiting the life and work of Lou Reed, quintessential “New York City man.” (The Yale Review)

• How the avocado, “NAFTA’s shining star,” has displaced pine forests, turned Michoacán into a desert, and “become the only live theater of what is often referred to as ‘California’s water wars.’ ” (Harper’s)

• The rise and fall of the slow dance, from the waltz to the teen zombie sway. (Decoder Ring)

• A short imagined monologue from Eliza Doolittle. (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)

• “As a social construction, the boundary is always the (temporary) outcome of power relations. There is a particular metric, almost inhuman in its abstraction, that can be used to measure the violence with which it is drawn…But as borders change, appear and disappear, the border as the founding institution of world geopolitics becomes more and more problematic.” (Sidecar)

• This week in obituaries: Wadea Al-Fayoume, Heba Zagout, Al-Shaima Akram Saidam, Ibrahim and Ahmed Al-Wadi, Samir Sabra, Muhammed Nidal Milhim, Yaniv Zohar, Ayman Nofal, Jamila Al-Shanti, Khaled Khalifa, Piper Laurie, Dariush Mehrjui and Vahideh Mohammadifar, Hoosen Coovadia, Laszlo Solyom, Phyllis Coates, Margot Polivy, Stephen Emery, Rudolph Isley, Rosemarie Myrdal, Martti Ahtisaari, Roland Griffiths, Colette Rossant, Mark Goddard, Bruce Moore, Steven Lutvak, David Shaffer, Stephen Rubin, Walt Garrison, Ryuzo Yanagimachi, Rudy Perez, Suzanne Somers, Andy Bean, Burt Young, Eve Bunting, Carla Bley, Louise Glück, and at least five hundred wounded or sheltering Palestinians killed in an explosion at Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza.