The great fear of those in the business of promoting the
humanities is that people will realize we have nothing new to
say. It’s not actually true that we have nothing new to say, but
even if it were, well, that would be a problem only if the only
things worth saying were new. And that is not the case. Many old
things bear repeating, just as some new things may not be worth
saying in the first place. But, as an editor, what I like most
of all is when an important old story takes a new turn. Take the
letter Anna Maria Gillis writes about in this issue: It’s from
the famed explorer and humanitarian Dr. David Livingstone to
Horace Waller, his friend and later biographer in England, and
has just been made legible 139 years after the fact. Written in
the margins and across the text of magazine pages using homemade
ink, because Livingstone had run out of both paper and ink, the
letter has been subjected to spectral imaging and mathematical
analysis to extract the words from these previously muted pages.
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