This week’s New Yorker magazine includes a “Talk of the Town” piece by Elizabeth Kolbert about a recent field trip to Mt. Greylock in western Mass. that recreates the July 1844 climb of Henry David Thoreau, described in “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.”

Today’s NYTimes has a brief report about efforts to preserve the scrapbooks of American composer, singer, and writer Woody Guthrie. The conservation work was funded by an $80,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (More dreaded federal spending, can you believe it?) to the Guthrie Foundation and Archives in New York. The contractor was the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass., a gem of an outfit that takes on some of the most important conservation work in the country.