Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles we enjoyed this week, good for consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots

Adam Serwer's exploration of America's history of white nationalism, and how it influenced and was adopted by Nazi Germany, is full of ugliness. It's tempting to call it "chilling," but that's a luxury we can't afford — things that are chilling are other than us, different from us, and this is, unfortunately, who America has been and for many people still is.

What's truly chilling is the thought that we might not choose, whenever we can, to be other than this.

Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.”

The Nazis reviewed the infamous “one-drop rule,” which defined anyone with any trace of African blood as black, and “found American law on mongrelization too harsh to be embraced by the Third Reich.”

On Kids and Comics

This is one of the most delicious weekends of the year to be downtown — our city is filled with superheroes and supervillains, antiheroes and anime, icons and iconoclasts. It's impossible not to catch a buzz from the very serious play of Emerald City Comic Con! In honor of the event, check out this great issue of "All the Books I'll Never Read," a newsletter from bookseller, blogger, podcaster, and sometime Seattle Review of Books reviewer Emma Nichols.

I think comics make difficult topics more approachable and understandable. And let’s be realistic, the world is full of injustice, terror, and bullies. We should prepare our kids, let them know that life isn’t fair, while simultaneously teaching them how to fight back.

W.S. Merwin, Poet of Life’s Evanescence, Dies at 91

As a student of poetry, many years ago, I could have written an appropriately precise and boring encomium to W. S. Merwin on the occasion of his death.

Fortunately, I'm no longer a student of poetry, and I can write instead, simply, that a beloved voice has gone quiet. Margalit Fox says the rest.

Most reviewers praised his relentless deployment of poetry as a talisman against the void; the emotional ferocity beneath the cool, polished surface of his lines; and his use of language so pure and immediate that it could attain translucence.