We all carry more than we realise. Songs we can’t remember learning, recipes in someone else’s handwriting, stories, rituals and habits handed down by people we never met. Whether or not we know where they come from, they shape what our lives mean. This week, #TheEdit is about noticing them, keeping the ones that matter, and putting down the rest.

• A 2,500-year-old ski? The melting alps release ancient secrets. As glaciers retreat, they’re giving up objects that have been lost for centuries, and archaeologists are racing to rescue them before they rot – The New York Times
• Awe-based change-making. Fear burns out the people trying to change the world. What if awe, that feeling of being small before something vast, kept them curious, creative and connected instead? – Awe Exchange
• In old cookbooks, I’ve found magic and inspiration far beyond the recipes. Pencilled-in tweaks, splattered pages, a pressed flower, a note left for Pop. Emily Heil on how handed-down cookbooks let you hold a conversation with lost loved ones – The Washington Post
• A place among fiddlers. Every August, thousands of musicians descend on a muddy Virginia fairground to keep a centuries-old tradition alive. A recently laid-off writer packs his banjo and finds out why, as one fiddler puts it, the music “seeps from the earth” – Longreads
• The case against wearing headphones in public. One writer kept losing her earbuds, so she stopped replacing them. A month later she was smiling at strangers, overhearing gloriously odd conversations and getting asked out on the Tube, and she no longer wanted them back – TIME  
• How to assemble science. The link between babies’ sleeping position and cot death showed up in the data 20 years before parents were warned. Helen Pearson on why the most life-saving work is often pulling together what we already know – Aeon
• Victor Strecher: Life on purpose. After his daughter’s sudden death, a behavioural scientist sat at his kitchen table and wrote down what mattered most. Everything on the list turned out to be a person – The Beautiful Truth