• Exploring Japan’s abandoned villages, “coming face to face with objects and structures that have been left to the ravages of time.” (Japan Times)

• On the nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants who became homesteaders in North Dakota. (The Forward)

• Examining the aftermath of Partition. (Hyperallergic)

• Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 Conference of Governors and the effort towards water management and a “common good.” (Zócalo Public Square)

• The lives and lore of Greenwich Village’s Spain Bar. (New York Review of Books)

• Mysterious and scandalous Victorian murders. (History Collection)

• “The Hidden Archaeologists of Athens.” (NewYorker.com)

• “A Special View of 1980s Hong Kong.” (Mubi Notebook)

• Interior design from Art Nouveau to the Bauhaus. (ArchDaily)

• On Ibn al-Muqaffa’s eighth-century Kalīlah wa-Dimnah: “It is a characteristic of traveling tales to change as they wander…Shedding elements and gaining others, the animal fables descended from the Panchatantra kept shapeshifting into various media.” (The Public Domain Review)

• Found in Alaska: Dinosaur track site the size of a football field. (Cosmos)

• Shut down in South Dakota: Natural history museum with detectable levels of chemicals from its taxidermy process. (Associated Press)

• This week in obituaries: Betty Tyson, Carol Robles-Román, Jiri Cerny, Warren Hoge, Garth Craven, Jean-Louis Georgelin, Jeromy Hauer, Bob Jones, Gary Young, Bobby Eli, Rosemary S. Pooler, Gus Solomons, Jr., Thierry Despont, Inga Swenson, Johaar Mosaval, Ron Cephas Jones, Howard S. Becker, Toto Cutugno, Robert Paulson, Al Quie, Cave Rock, John Warnock, James Buckley, and Donny Ubiera, the eighth man (after Marvin Pines, Rubu Zhao, Joshua Valles, Felix Taveras, Ricky Howell, William Johnstone, and Curtis Davis) acknowledged by the New York City Department of Correction to have died this year while held at or immediately following release from Rikers Island.