• Meet Peter Orlando, who witnessed the Allies’ invasion of Normandy from his tugboat in 1944. (Washington Post)

• An architectural tour of Benito Mussolini’s Rome. (JSTOR Daily)

• “Dong Li’s poems introduce the reader to a way of seeing that is not unlike his own approach to history, a reconciliation of individual and collective scales.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

• “Queer memory culture began as a challenge to the exclusions of nationalist mythmaking but has now become a part of it…Queer history must stop being a contradiction and become an imperative.” (The Baffler)

• On Pope John Paul II’s friendship with Wanda Półtawska, who “frequently drew on her moral authority as a survivor of Nazi medical experiments to compare abortion with the mass murders of the Second World War and the Holocaust.” (Aeon)

• Making handmade replicas of centuries-old manuscripts from goatskin, bamboo, and local plants. (Al Jazeera)

• Recovered: twenty-one illegally excavated coins, including one from the reign of Antigonus the Hasmonean, the last Jewish monarch. (The Jerusalem Post)

• This week in obituaries: Françoise Gilot, Ama Ata Aidoo, Richard Snyder, Barry Newman, George Winston, Kaija Saariaho, Pat Cooper, Astrud Gilberto, Cynthia Weil, Anna Shay, Isaac “Redd” Holt, Robert Hanssen, Pat Robertson, Jim Hines, Roger Craig, Thomas Buergenthal, Bill Beck, Michael J. Sheehan, Geno Martini, Eusebius McKaiser, Amitai Etzioni, Mark Worth, Norma Hunt, Hossein Vaziri, Ed Stack, Sergio Calderón, Barry Reardon, and Andrew Bellucci.