Saturday Links
The Lower East Side in the 1980s, “Enter the Dragon” at 50, British Museum artifacts on eBay, a new translation of Camus, and more.
Good morning. Some sad news to start this Saturday edition: Christopher Carduff, the books editor at The Wall Street Journal and the editor of many Library of America books, has died. He was 66. May he rest in peace.
Do rewilding projects go too far? Katrina Gulliver reviews Gloria Dickie’s Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperilled Future: “The most endangered of the bears are those we hear least about. An attack by a grizzly in Yellowstone or a polar bear in Alaska makes the news; but the country with the most bear deaths is India, where the sloth bear attacks 150 people each year. The locals have no sentimental notions about this angry animal that will come at humans with claws and teeth, and revenge attacks are common. How much can we expect poor farmers to support conservation for something that regularly threatens their lives?”
The difficulty of deciphering the Rapa Nui of Easter Island: “Hidden away in a nondescript building on the outskirts of Rome, there is a wooden tablet from Easter Island, more remarkable and mysterious than any of its famous statues. Reputedly found by two missionaries in 1870, it is a fragment of a wooden oar, less than a metre in length, covered in strange hieroglyphs. On each side, there are eight lines of text, consisting of almost 2,000 glyphs; but where the inscription begins and ends is anyone’s guess.”
The Lower East Side in the 1980s: “Tria Giovan spent six years photographing the area of downtown Manhattan’s fights, feasts and family gatherings before gentrification changed it for good.”
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