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The New York Public Library debuts InstaNovels, beginning with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The NYPL says the new form is “a reimagining of Instagram Stories to provide a new platform for iconic stories.”
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A fascinating history of the index, from the scroll to the codex and from stichometric to alphabetic. → INDEX: A Brief History
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Extraordinary…what are the odds of this kind of discovery? → Mum’s a Neanderthal, Dad’s a Denisovan: First discovery of an ancient-human hybrid
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Can You Rewire Your Brain? Maybe. (It’s Tricky. Be Careful.)
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Of course the art isn’t the point, but it’s still pretty amazing. → Re-creating the “Mona Lisa” using light-stimulation and bacteria
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Ministry of Cinema says their mission is to “spread our love of cinema however we can.” And they do a fine job of it with their chock-full video channel.
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Apparently, Being a Victorian Librarian Was Oh-So-Dangerous. Not least because Melvil Dewey was a serial sexual harasser.
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Good Show Sir features only “the worst Sci-fi/Fantasy book covers.” Jump right into the gallery.
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Today, and every Sunday nearest August 26, is International Go Topless Day. Founded in 2007 by Claude Vorilhon (AKA Rael, founder of the UFO religion Raelanism), Go Topless Day fights for a specific equality, that “women should have the same constitutional right or men should also be forced to wear something that hides their chests,” and encourages women to go topless and men to wear brassieres or bikinis. This year, Go Topless Day serendipitously falls exactly on Women’s Equality Day.
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Links, links, links…from a certain, uncertain mind.
Links: August 12, 2018
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A bit of a meander here, but bear with me. First, Steven Pinker says something about the “n-word” that sounds reasonable but is pretty stupid, backing himself up with something even more stupid (that people somehow take seriously). Corey, AKA TiltedListener, does a fine job dismantling the latter sentence-by-sentence and Taylor Jones, a linguist cited in the article, demolishes whatever credibility is left. Where all this ultimately led me was to some writing about “ableist language”, which poses an ongoing challenge in my own speech. Particularly the word “crazy,” which, for some reason, I battle with myself about changing. || See also, John McWhorter’s interesting take on the poem that started the whole thing.
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“Shocking” is right. → The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier, American Hostage
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Forensic linguist reveals how murderer was snared sending texts because of commas || See also: Words on Trial and What is Forensic Linguistics?
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Whither Clark Bars, Mary Janes, Thin Mints and the eponymous half-chalk-dust half-sugar wafers? → Necco shuts down abruptly, is sold
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Fore-edge painting! → A Hidden Art Form You’ll Flip For (fore-edge painting) || Fore-Edge Paintings at the Lilly Library || Fore Edge Painting – An Introduction | On the Edge. Previously: The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd.
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“Kurt Vonnegut compared the role of the artist in society to that of the canary in the mines: Both alert us to the presence of danger. The reading brain is the canary in our minds. We would be the worst of fools to ignore what it has to teach us.” → Screen Time Is Changing Our Brain Circuitry || Pairs well with Why ‘getting lost in a book’ is so good for you, according to science.
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Katexic Clamorites know one of my favorite topics is words we mispronounce(d) because we learned them by reading. Daniel Midgley, host of the fab Talk the Talk podcast, proposes calling them “calliopes” (rhyming with ropes), “persephones” (rhyming with telephones), or “booklish.” Then he and the Speakeasy hosts share many great examples. → Speakeasy: accidental mispronunciations
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I Say LOL, You Say Ek Number: How People Around The World Laugh Online
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This week in visuals and visual art: The Daring Golden Bridge || Visarute Angkatavanich’s amazing betta fish photos || Dennis Isip – The Neon Archives
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Today in 1927, Wings, the only silent film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture (at the first annual award ceremony in 1929), premieres at the Criterion Theater in New York City. Starring famed flapper Clara Bow, Wings not only set the standard for aviation films thanks to the technical achievement of its air-combat scenes, but was also the first movie to show two men kissing and among the first wide-release films to show nudity. This was perhaps in keeping with the debauchery around the set in San Antonio (where The Rough Riders was simultaneously being filmed), which director William Wellman would later describe as the “Armageddon of a magnificent sexual Donnybrook.” Remastered by Paramount in 2012, you can watch ► clips of wings on YouTube and, naturally, pay to see the rest.
Links: August 19, 2018
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A powerful story providing one small entry point into an amazing and amazingly different world. → Raising a DeafBlind Baby
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Turns out our tears are more artistic than even the most dramatic amongst us might have thought. → Rose Lynn Fisher’s microscopic photography, the Topography of Tears. || Earlier: Fisher’s stunning BEEyond series of microscopic photos of bees.
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From micro- to macro-photography… → The Turn-of-the-Century Pigeons That Photographed Earth from Above
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This might make me start not only believing that the “millennials” label means something, but also that I like them. Alas, it is but a dream. → How Millennials Killed Mayonnaise || See also: You Can Now Watch A Livestream Of This Mouldy Fatberg 24/7 || And while I’m just free-associating: Animal fat on ancient pottery reveals a nearly catastrophic period of human prehistory
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A really well-written article about the trying dynamics of civility and dialogue in a small town characterized by both a liberal arts college and a philanthropic family with deep roots in the region…and the NRA. → How Civil Must America Be?
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Via Reader B., who says, “my favorite part of this was the Russian AI.” → The Quantified Heart
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Love this: students author a handbook for teachers (and it includes a lot more than just the fascinating “Philly Slang” section). → Jawn? Ocky? Philly kids school teachers with new handbook
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Last week it was forensic linguistics…this week, food linguistics. → The Creepy Language Tricks Taco Bell Uses to Fool People Into Eating There
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I try to stay away from links to Atlas Obscura, which all Clamorites should be reading anyway, but this was too interesting not to note. → Tattooing in the Civil War Was a Hedge Against Anonymous Death
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MOAR TWITTERZ! → First, from Reader A., Deleted Wiki Titles (@DeletedWiki) posts “actual article titles that have been removed from Wikipedia for various reasons.” On screen right now: Oscillating penguin of ultimate seduction — Five clicks to jesus — Category: Farts in literature — I DONT NO HOW TO MAKE A WIKERPEDIA ATRICLE. || Second, a thread of “metaphorical invective” that made me literally LOL and has that old-school-twitter vibe or, in the words of Reader S., who shared the link, a “community feel.” || And finally, the sometimes fascinating examples of real-time text-to-image generation in this thread.
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Today in 1902, Ogden Nash, perhaps the finest light verse poet ever (in the English language, anyway), is born in Rye, New York. Perhaps most famous for his 1931 poem “Candy / Is Dandy / But Liquor / Is Quicker” (updated in 1968 with the additional line “Pot is not”), Nash composed over 500 pieces, may of which used unexpected rhyme schemes, twists-of-words and turns-of-phrase that word nerds in the Clamor should appreciate. “Further Reflections on Parsley,” the first Ogden Nash poem I read, when I was not yet ten, I still remember completely: “Parsley / Is gharsely.” See also: ► Ogden Nash recites ‘Oh, Please Don’t Get Up!’ and ► Common Cold by Ogden Nash (read by Tom O’Bedlam).
Links: July 29, 2018
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“String is far more important than the wheel in the pantheon of inventions.” → The Long, Knotty, World-Spanning Story of String
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I’d never really thought about this…and now I can’t stop thinking about it. → Bilingual Authors are Challenging the Practice of Italicizing Non-English Words
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The language at the end of the Earth || Pairs with: Why no-one speaks Indonesia’s language
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Coin-Op Eye Candy → coinop_london
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“With the aid of a Georgetown law student, Genevieve Bentz, he [John Mikhail] embarked on a lexicological odyssey into dozens of long-forgotten dictionaries, published over a 200-year period before 1806, 40 regular dictionaries and 10 legal dictionaries” → Trump’s ’emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling
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I’m unsure whether sharing this is the right thing to do. It is definitely challenging to see. → Willoughby Wallace Hooper: Photographer of Death
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Sometimes I read about physics and math that I barely (to be generous) understand. But still…octonions? → The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature
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I want to be there. → Ye Oldest Public Library in the English Speaking World
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Wikipedia page of the week: an internationally published Siamese cat. → F. D. C. Willard
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Today in 1966, singer, songwriter, painter and future Nobel Prize in Literature winner Robert Allen Zimmerman—better known as Bob Dylan—crashes his motorcycle near Woodstock, New York. Or does he? In any case, Dylan didn’t perform publicly for years and took the opportunity to both reshape his image and record some powerful songs that would emerge years later on The Basement Tapes.
Links: July 22, 2018
- The New York Times asks: Why Are Some Crows Committing Acts of Necrophilia?. A fascinating article in itself…and includes one of the best corrections ever (at the end of the article). Pairs well with podcast listening: ► HBM038: Do Crows Mourn Their Dead? and ► The Genius of Birds: Live From the Aspen Ideas Festival. Closer to (my) home and involving the greatest of corvids: Hundreds of birds seem to mourn deaths of fellow ravens.
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BAP! BARM! COB! BLAA! → Why the UK has so many words for bread. Thanks, Reader B.!
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The Digital Newberry collections feature more than a million “manuscripts, maps, books, photographs, artworks, & other rare & unique materials” from the famed Chicago research library. Such as my first cool find: a 1931 map of Chicago’s gangland from authentic sources.
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Myrtis Dightman not only broke the color barrier, but became one of the best bull riders who ever lived…and then he just kept going. → The Jackie Robinson of Rodeo
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Science says: You Should Actually Send That Thank You Note You’ve Been Meaning to Write
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The OEDILF—pronounced /oh-DILF/—aims to create “at least one limerick for each meaning of each and every word in the English language.” Currently at about 100,000 entries but most are marvelous! → OEDILF: The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form || Via the highly-recommended A Way With Words podcast
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Terrifying, sad and emblematic. → Alt-Right Troll To Father Killer: The Unraveling Of Lane Davis
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Sichuan, spice and spies. → How the chili pepper got to China
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This week in bots: Botnik’s Twilight Zone but creates eerily apt ideas for revivals of the iconic show. On Twitter, @venmodrugs culls public profiles on Venmo to highlight … umm … strange transactions … and @ThinkPieceBot creates hot take, think piece headlines that often sound much more interesting than the real thing.
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Today in 1849, poet, translator and teacher Emma Lazarus is born in New York City. Lazarus would publish her first volume of poems and translations, to no small acclaim, at just 18, but her most enduring work was the sonnet “The New Colossus,” which is (for the time being?) inscribed on a plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, ending with the famous lines:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Links: July 15, 2018
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The always awesome 99% Invisible podcast put out a particularly tasty episode last week on the interrobang (‽‽‽) and the octothorpe (###) || See also, two new (to me), conversational word nerd/language podcasts I’ve been enjoying lately: Lexitecture and Words for Dinner. Speaking of podcasts, how has it taken this long for something like Wilson—a podcast magazine (sadly iOS only right now)—to become a thing?
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“The Race Card Project encourages people to condense their observations and experiences about race into one sentence with just Six Words.” Some of them are extremely powerful.
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Play the Font Memory Game for the 30% discount on a quality book…or just because it is addictive.
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This week in Twitter: @WYR_Bot is a neural network that asks deliciously weird, sometimes surreal “would you rather” questions every three hours on Twitter. A few from recent days: “Would you rather eat your own hair or have a cat with a giant cake?” “Would you rather be able to run anywhere or have no pain?” “Would you rather be santa or climb uncontrollably??”
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This Week in Wikipedia: the bizarre story of Jára Cimrman, “universal genius, and one of the greatest Czech playwrights, poets, composers, teachers, travellers, philosophers, inventors, detectives, mathematicians, and sportsmen of the 19th and early 20th century.” And entirely fictional.
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This week in heists: ATMs spewing cash, jet-setting money mules, and more than a billion dollars still missing and the Con Queen of Hollywood ( Thanks, Reader B.! )
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“Such ambiguous words not only allow the speaker to avoid being pinned down but also allow the receiver to interpret the message in a way that is consistent with their preconceived notions. Obviously, the result is poor communication.” → How to communicate likelihood and probability more effectively.
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“There’s an ambient grandiosity to it all, like fridge poetry for Roman Emperors.” → I don’t get the appeal of Jordan Peterson. This has to be the best (and most brutal; same thing) assessment of Peterson and his “thinking” I’ve been lucky enough to read.
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Today in 1919, novelist and philosopher (Dame Jean) Irish Murdoch is born in Dublin, Ireland. Winner of the Booker and James Tait Black Memorial prizes, the Whitbread Award, and routinely listed as a top 10, 50, 100 etc novelist, Murdoch’s fiction nevertheless remains under-read, though not as criminally under-appreciated as her philosophy. Murdoch led a rather unconventional lifestyle, marrying novelist and critic John Bayley (who declared that sex was “inescapably ridiculous”) in 1956 and remaining with him, while engaging in numerous destructive affairs with men and women, until her death from Alzheimer’s—a cruel end for such a bright mind—in 1999. To learn more about Murdoch, I highly recommend Martha Nussbaum’s insightful 2001 assessment of Murdoch, the “anomalous” novelist and philosopher. Good places to start with her deeply various fictions are the Booker-prize winning The Sea, The Sea, her first novel Under the Net and the unrepentant and racy A Severed Head.
Links: July 8, 2018
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“The day Joe Howlett died dawned perfectly.” → How one man died so a whale might live
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The Oxford English Dictionary wants to record “the words, phrases, and expressions particular to where you live or where you are from.” → Appeals: Words where you are | Oxford English Dictionary. Also, a fun Twitter hashtag to follow: #WordsWhereYouAre.
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Are humans really blind to the gorilla on the basketball court? → Re-thinking the iconic experiment. Pairs well with re-contextualizing the “marshmallow” test and refuting, or at least harshly rebuking, the Stanford Prison Experiment.
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Celebrating the world’s most beautiful libraries (and a new book about them). → Libraries: Where the world’s memory is stored
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“The researchers found longevity benefits associated with nearly every level and type of coffee consumption.” Good news, assuming you feel longevity is a benefit. → Drinking Coffee May Help You Live Longer
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Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. → Independent Voices
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What was the best thing before sliced bread? Now you can know. → The Best Thing Before Sliced Bread – a History of Sliced Bread and Its Idiom
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Today in 1867, German artist, printmaker and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz is born in Königsberg, Prussia. Though apparently often dismissed by contemporary artists, this art lover finds her often dark, always emotional work—even her self-portraits, not a favorite genre—irresistible. Some of my favorite pieces include: Old Man with Noose, Woman with Dead Child, Hunger (hey, I said her work could be dark!) and Self-Portrait, Hand at the Forehead. Though she made fewer then 300 prints, there are many more at WikiArt and MoMA.
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