This Week’s Highlights:
The best stories this week were about recovery — not the economic kind, the archival kind. Scientists read the complete text of a Herculaneum scroll for the first time, 2,000 years after Vesuvius carbonized it (Smithsonian Magazine). European film archivists, with Oja Kodar’s blessing, will finish Orson Welles’s Don Quixote, abandoned six decades ago (The Guardian). In Louisiana, an AI model trained on old nursery rhymes is pulling Cajun French back from the edge (The New York Times).
The scientific evidence that paper beats screens for comprehension keeps mounting (Time), and the case for “rewilding” the reading brain treats deep attention as something you rebuild, not something you mourn (The Atlantic).
New forms, meanwhile, keep bubbling up: filmmakers are making the movies on smartphones that Hollywood overlooks (The Conversation), and the microdrama is now drawing stars and major studios (Seattle Times).
Then there’s Vijay Gupta’s argument that classical music doesn’t need a new audience so much as a new why (The Strad).
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
