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“4. I realized that the feeling a man preserves longest is anger. There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent.” → from Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag [Thanks, Reader B.]
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Below the Surface is an amazing project documenting tens of thousands (of more than 700,000) artifacts uncovered during a systematic excavation of Amsterdam’s central River Amstel, a central artery in the city for millennia.
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RFID Machines in British Libraries Are Producing Charming Found Poetry [Thanks, Reader S.]
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“Swearing was a litmus test […] Swearing could unite people.” → “Damn your blood”: Swearing in early modern English
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“The arts of memory are among the arts of thinking, especially involved with fostering the qualities we now revere as ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity.'” → Mary Carruthers (and Alan Jacobs) on memorization
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Isochrone maps depict time on maps, such as this fascinating map by Francis Galton showing just how large the world was in 1881 (with the center being London, naturally).
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“How a meteorite hunter’s obsession took him from the mountains of Colorado, to the Bundy Ranch, and eventually landed him in jail” → How one man went from hunting meteorites to being hunted by the law
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Beautiful. → Daniel Mercadante’s long exposure light paintings
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Some happy news: After searching for years, Wisconsin woman learns her sister lives next door || Harrogate bookshop tweets about dismal sales and sets a sales record || Teenage Girl Helps a Blind and Deaf Passenger
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Today in 1916 is the first—and deadliest—day in the four-and-a-half-month long World War 1 Battle of the Somme. Ultimately the largest battle on the Western Front, with more than 70,000 casualties on this day alone—the Battle of the Somme would end only after more than one million wounded or killed, making it one of the bloodiest battles of all time. While undeniably the beginning of modern warfare, and the introduction of the British forces to this kind of combat, the strategic value of this most-costly battle remains in dispute to this day.
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Links, links, links…from a certain, uncertain mind.
Links: June 24, 2018
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“We think the next school shooter could be your son.” → Targeted: A Family and the Quest to Stop the Next School Shooter
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There may be no end to Mr. Rogers’ awesomeness, generally, but most definitely in his amazing ear for language. → Mr. Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children
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When linguistics and science and chart nerdery unite → Phonetic Periodic Table Poster
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Infantilizing? Maybe. Complicated? You bet. → Digital Wellness for Grown Ups
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Also…complicated. → The House Unanimously Passed a Bill to Make Child Sex Robots Illegal
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This one triggered some feels… → The Difference Between Being Broke and Being Poor
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Today in Twitterbots, LMAO edition → Tweets by Wheel Of Fortune Answers (@wofanswers) via the excellent Pop Loser, “a weekly newsletter of innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair.”
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The lavishly illustated story of the beautiful Reforma font. Three fully featured families of typeface goodness. Did I mention that it’s free?
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Today in 1849, poet, novelist and short story writer Sarah Orne Jewett is born in South Berwick, Maine. Jewett began publishing at just 19, with stories—like her later longer work—notable for a keen ear for local color and dialogue. Often compared to Flaubert, and a strong influence on later writers including Willa Cather, Jewett’s 1909 New York Times obituary observed that she was “regarded as one of the foremost women writers of America,” and her reputation has only increased in the intervening years. For your reading pleasure, a baker’s dozen of Jewett’s books free on Project Gutenberg.
Links: June 17, 2018
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An online, community reading of Willa Cather’s novel, “My Ántonia”… three page-spreads at a time. Beautiful. → The Slow Read [Thanks, Reader M!]
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Food for intentional technology thought. → Taking a photo of something impairs your memory of it, but the reasons remain largely mysterious.
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Don’t let the geeky name stop you, the Regex Dictionary lets you find words of all kinds based on their construction and their part(s) of speech. Surprisingly useful…for word nerds like myself anyway.
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Alexandra Bell’s Counternarratives revise, re-contextualize and re-write subtle (and sometimes none-too-subtle) racism on the New York Times front page, turning them into large pieces of public art. More and sometimes larger images can be seen in Art21 and on the Spencer Musefum of Art. Discovered via this (potentially paywalled) New Yorker profile of Bell.
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BotSpot: Sex And Sensibility: A horde of Jane Austen-quoting bots leads to Russian porn sites. Thanks, Reader B!
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“Speakers of anumeric, or numberless, languages offer a window into how the invention of numbers reshaped the human experience.” → How Do You Count Without Numbers?: Some human societies lack words for numbers. What does this say about the rest of us—and human evolution?
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“A recursive recipe is one where ingredients in the recipe can be replaced by another recipe. The more ingredients you replace, the more that the recipe is made truly from scratch.” For example: make that apple pie from scratch in just over 7.5 years.
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The Archive of Styles – From Gutenberg to the Moon – Reserve of Punches is an immensely browsable archive of physical typefaces, punches, experimental typography and much more that will entrance any type nerd. Clamorites might want to start with the curiosities, featuring manicules, coats of arms, bestiaries, lunar phases and more.
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And some memes and slang too! → Dictionary.com Has Officially Added Emoji
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Today is Father’s Day in the United States. Founded in 1910 in Vancouver, Washington by Sonora Smart Dodd as “Fathers’ Day” and celebrated by Presidents including Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and Lyndon B. Johnson, it would take 62 years for Father’s Day to become an official holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law. Father’s Day is the fourth-biggest sales day for the greeting card industry, though it trails far behind Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.
Links: May 27, 2018
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An amazing collection of Record Label Logos.
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I dropped “Jeroboam of wine” into a conversation the other day (because that’s what I do). Then I needed to know more. Now you will too. → Why Are Extremely Large Wine Bottles Named after Biblical Kings?
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Preaching to the Clamor Choir here, but a nice pair of articles about reading and the brain: What’s Going On In Your Child’s Brain When You Read Them A Story? || Your Brain on Reading (Why Your Brain Needs You to Read Every Day)
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With at least 7000 glyphs (compared to fewer than 850 for Latin scripts that can be used to represent hundreds of languages), Chinese fonts are just as awesome and complicated as you would expect.
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I think it’s possible to embrace the idea of cultivating quiet time and even that some technologies tend to have more negative effects on our (or at least my) inner landscape without buying wholesale into the “technology is ruining our brains” market. → Why we owe it to ourselves to spend quiet time alone every day. See also: Bored and Brilliant and Being Bored Is Fun and Good, Sorry.
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And I thought learning that porcupines could climb trees was scary… → New Research Shows That T-Rex Was as Smart as a Chimp
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Kids these days, with their smart phones and their globe and paper making, leather-working and clog-cobbling.
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Twenty years after finding a newborn, buried alive with his umbilical cord still attached, the jogging rescuer is reunited with him.
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The 100 Best One-Star Amazon Reviews of The Great Gatsby || Pairs well with Report: John Grisham Slowly But Surely Climbing List Of Greatest Living American Authors Thanks, Reader B.
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Today in 1894, Dashiell Hammett, premiere author of hard-boiled detective novels and stories, is born on a farm in Saint Mary’s County, Maryland. Hammett wasn’t just one of the best, iconic authors of tough-guy mystery fiction, but one of America’s best prose stylists, evidenced in books such as The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon as well as indelible short stories including “Corkscrew” and “Nightmare Town. A dedicated anti-fascist, Hammett managed—despite being a disabled veteran of World War I with tuberculosis—to re-enlist during World War II, where he served in the Aleutians. Incidentally, if you can get there, the Aleutian World War II Museum and the bunkers in Dutch Harbor are extraordinary.
Links: May 20, 2018
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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.
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.
Links: April 29, 2018
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From the brain trust at GQ, 21 Books You Don’t Have to Read (and 21 you should read instead)…with a little something to irritate everyone.
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The New New York Times Twitter account tweets words as they appear in the New York Times for the first time. Great fun to follow despite the occasional “firsts” that are misspellings || Related: NYT Minus Context, posting often surreal verbatim bits from the New York Times || See also, more Twitter fun: Fake Library Stats
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With pictures this powerful, I can’t imagine what experiencing the The National Memorial for Peace and Justice would feel like.
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Even if just browsing them as nerdy eye-candy, Xenographics (“weird but (sometimes) useful charts”) are great.
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Choose Your Own Adventure books are being adapted into interactive Choose Your Own Adventure Movies.
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Two examples of large scale book art made their way to me this week…and they are astounding! → Alicia Martin’s Biografias Book Sculptures and Matej Kren’s “book cell”, which could come straight out of my head.
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Inspired by this NYT article, I gave the peanut butter and pickle sandwich another try. And…they were right. Except in dissing the bread and butter pickle’s delectable suitability.
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Can Handwriting be Copyrighted? Well, no. But using the names of celebrities could have been a problem.
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Some great art this week: Seung Hoon Park’s woven photos & Mimi Choi’s Makeup Artistry & Kate Kato’s paper sculpture
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Today in 1852, the first edition of Peter Mark Roget‘s Thesaurus is published. Originally “only” 15,000 words, the current 7th International Edition contains more than 325,000 words and phrases. Highly recommended: The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus, an ultra-readable biography of Roget, a driven, eccentric polymath, inventor of the slide-rule and, umm, frolicsome bachelor who was compelled to categorize just about everything starting at the age of eight. In fact, he intended his thesaurus to be not just a categorization of words, but of the world’s ideas.
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