Invent A Better Book? Maybe We Don’t Need To

“In hindsight, we can see how rarely one technology supersedes another: the rise of the podcast makes clear that video didn’t doom audio any more than radio ended reading. Yet in 1913, a journalist interviewing Thomas Edison on the future of motion pictures recounted the inventor declaring confidently that “books … will soon be obsolete in the public schools.” – The Paris Review

The Simple Structure That All Human Languages Share

Sentences and phrases of human languages, all human languages, have an inaudible and invisible hierarchical structure. When we are children, we impose this structure on the sequences of sounds that we hear. Our minds can’t understand continuous streams of sound directly as meaningful language. Instead, we subconsciously chop them up into discrete bits—sounds and words—and organize these into larger units. This means that sentences have a hierarchical structure. – Nautilus

How Walt Whitman Hid A Dozen Same-Sex Love Poems In Plain Sight, And How A Researcher Found Them

Whitman wrote a sequence of poems title “Live Oak, With Moss” — inspired, scholars believe, by his romance with one Fred Vaughan — but scattered them throughout his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass so that they wouldn’t be conspicuous. (Two of them were removed from subsequent editions for the next century.) Here’s how a scholar, back in 1959, discovered the series and reassembled it in sequence. – Virginia Magazine (UVA)

The Shambolic Ways In Which We Learn To Write

John Warner defines “the writer’s practice” as a set of “attitudes, skills, habits of mind, and knowledge” that writers embody, carry with them, or engage in. He describes the most important writerly attitude this way: “Writers continually build expertise without ever becoming expert. It is like being inside an endlessly right-scrolling game of Super Mario World – except you never get to defeat the big boss.” – Plough