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Welcome news for word nerds: the new Fiat Lex (“a podcast about dictionaries by people who write them”), featuring Kory Stamper (author of the immensely entertaining Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries) and Steve Kleinedler, whose book I haven’t read yet. See also: The great American word mapper, which lets you map usage in the US based on a harvest of billions of tweets.
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Doesn’t the legal system’s insistence in the face of any amount of evidence prove the problem? → One Test Could Exonerate Him. Why Won’t California Do It?
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“Of the roughly 230 men who flew mail for the Post Office Department between 1918 and 1927, 32 lost their lives in plane crashes. Six died during the first week of operation alone.” → Delivering the Mail Was Once One of the Riskiest Jobs in America. See also: A Chicago Man Filled Out a Single Postal Change of Address Form and Redirected UPS Corporate Mail to His Apartment. And, just for funsies (via Reader B.), Postal Service Unveils New Line Of Stamps Honoring Americans Who Still Use Postal Service.
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We need more voices like Wil’s. → My name is Wil Wheaton. I live with chronic Depression, and I am not ashamed.
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Chess boxing (yep, it’s a thing) as a path upward for poor Indian girls? You bet. → How an Obscure Sport is Transforming the Lives of Indian Girls. Via Mr. TH.INK, a newsletter everyone in the Katexic Clamor should subscribe to.
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Laughter climax (and conception): the structure of stand-up comedy. See also: Researchers uncovered 2 pages of ‘dirty jokes’ in Anne Frank’s diary.
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The secret languages of flight attendants, plants, ships, handheld fans and babies.
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This bot-written Modern Love column is one of the best and funniest pieces of its kind I’ve ever read. → My Marriage Was Just Dinner
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Think you can explain a hard idea using only the ten hundred most used words? Prove it!
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Today in 1992, the City Council of Chicago votes to ban the sale of spray paint claiming that “mindless ‘taggers'” were turning them into “weapons of terror.” The ban wouldn’t be enforced until 1994, when Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens turned down an emergency request by spray paint manufacturers and sellers to postpone the ban. While the city’s handgun ban was struck down in 2013, spray paint cans remain unavailable for sale in the city’s limits.
Coda
In ► Coda, “a lost soul stumbles drunken through the city. In a park, Death finds him and shows him many things.”
Constellation – art by Kuma Yamashita
Using thousands of nails and a single thread, Kumi Yamashita creates amazing, intricate portraits.
from “The Pool” (Daphne du Maurier)
The warm night claimed her. In a moment it was part of her. She walked on the grass, and her shoes were instantly soaked. She flung up her arms to the sky. Power ran to her fingertips. Excitement was communicated from the waiting trees, and the orchard, and the paddock; the intensity of their secret life caught at her and made her run. It was nothing like the excitement of ordinary looking forward, of birthday presents, of Christmas stockings, but the pull of a magnet — her grandfather had shown her once how it worked, little needles springing to the jaws — and now night and the sky above were a vast magnet, and the things that waited below were needles, caught up in the great demand.
—Daphne du Maurier
—from “The Pool”
—found in Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories
isthmus
isthmus /IS-thməs/. noun. A strip of land with water on both sides that connects two relatively larger land areas. In anatomy, a narrow part or organ connecting two larger parts. From Latin isthmus, from Greek isthmos (narrow land between two seas). Further history is unknown, though it could be from eimi (to go) and suffix -thmo (step, movement).
[Read more…]
Links: May 13, 2018
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Thanks to Reader K. for pointing out this compelling selection of photos of Russia from 100+ years ago. The photo of Tolstoy isn’t even the most interesting! See also: the rest of the more than 2600 photos in the Prokudin-Gorskii Collection at the Library of Congress, a link from last year that leads with one of my favorite century-old color photos and, not quite as ancient but still amazing, Scenes Unseen: The Summer of ’78 (in NYC).
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Some fascinating background—and some litt words—in this “analysis of nearly one billion Tweets” that “maps the emergence of new words across the USA in unprecedented detail”.
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This is the Surface of a Comet! Thanks, Reader B.
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James Somers gets a bit deep in the weeds at times in this piece on reverse engineering Google Docs but the general idea of the “archaeology of writing” is one of the more intriguing in this time of living documents. You might remember Somers as purveyor of one of the greatest pieces of word advice for Mac users ever, featured here a few years ago.
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Behold how 19 other U.S. states could be packed into the state of Alaska!
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Quite a moving story of a teen who serendipitously rediscovered a book and, through it, her dead mother and herself.
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Dollar Street documents the lives of 264 families in 50 countries through more than 30,000 photographs. That’s cool enough, but the sorting by income makes the photos even more interesting.
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MSG gets a bad rap. And I’m not the only one who thinks so: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami.
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Multiple people shared the provocatively titled article “One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.” Except the research actually shows no such thing as the article itself clearly shows. Do I really need to spell this out? #DeathToTheDoubleSpace
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Today in 1907, author and playwright Daphne de Maurier is born in London to a prominent family of actors and authors. Her most famous work, the novel Rebecca, was an instant best-seller, though initially panned by critics. In addition to being the basis of the Oscar-winning Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name, Rebecca was also used as by the Nazis as a code key during World War II and the monstrous housekeeper Mrs. Danvers has infiltrated popular culture.
Diffusion Choir
► Diffusion Choir, a kinetic sculpture that visualizes the organic movements of an invisible flock of Tyvek birds moving in harmony.
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