“I’ll die soon, said / the boy to the bird.”

Many feared the permanent loss of thousands of precious manuscripts and relics after insurgents razed Timbuktu’s Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research. The Institute was home to over 30,000 manuscripts dating back to the 13th century. Or was it? In a fascinating report, Rukmini Callimachi details the extraordinary efforts of the some passionate locals that wound up saving much of the collection.

Is it unethical to read J.D. Salinger’s leaked short stories? Chuck Klosterman answers this question in the Ethicist and concludes that you can read without worry. “You can’t put smoke back into a cigarette. These stories exist on the Internet, and they won’t disappear.”

Authors photos “defeat the purpose of imaginative literature, in general, and of much poetry, in particular, because they invite us to get to know an author by something other than her creations in words,” poet Stephen Burt argues. Pair with our own Edan Lepucki’s musings on the topic.