I also noticed this, but do not have explanation. Fortuneately for my use case I need only small amount of cities (for now) so I can fall back to plain list of cities with center coordinates, and use euclidian distance to get best match.
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.