“In a famous anecdote in the Confessions , Augustine describes seeing Ambrose
of Milan reading on his own without making a sound. Ambrose was not the first
person in history to read silently, but his quiet, private reading was unusual
enough to make an impression.”
Irina Dumitrescu ,
How to Read Aloud
(London Review of Books ,
September 10, 2020 )
posted 3/27/2021 8:00pm ∞
“In [Edward Baptist’s] 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the
Making of American Capitalism … he rejects ‘plantations’ (a term pregnant
with false memory and romantic myths) in favor of ‘labor camps’; instead of
‘slave-owners’ (which seems to legitimate and rationalize the ownership of human
beings), he uses ‘enslavers.’ Small changes with big implications.”
posted 1/16/2020 8:33pm ∞
“Roosevelt and his advisers never had a master plan. Rather, in the
administration’s first 100 days, they implemented a flurry of laws and
regulations. If those programs worked, they remained. If they didn’t, they
were dropped, to be replaced by others.”
Lizabeth Cohen ,
The Lessons of the Great Depression
(The Atlantic ,
May 2020 )
posted 3/25/2021 8:53pm ∞
“In the Hopi language surukaphe means ‘tail coffee’, or coffee watered down to
make it go further. In Brazilian Portuguese slang, chafé means ‘bad coffee’,
a blend of the words for ‘tea’ and ‘coffee’. Then there’s cholo in Louisiana
French, from chaud-l’eau , or ‘hot water’.”
posted 12/1/2022 8:00pm ∞
“For years, many linguists have believed that learning language is impossible
without a built-in grammar template. The new AI models
… demonstrate that the ability to produce grammatical language can be learned
from linguistic experience alone.”
posted 11/4/2022 8:00pm ∞