Category: words

“We should look anew at 1920 not because centenaries have magical properties but because Fitzgerald’s remarkably sensitive inner ear helped him register, before almost anyone else, when America started losing its balance.” – The New York Review of Books

“It’s far and away the most ‘knowledgeable’ natural language generation program to date, and it has a range of potential uses in professions ranging from teaching to journalism to customer service. GPT-3 confirms what computer scientists have known for decades: Size matters.” – The Conversation

“How many times have I run up against these assertions? — in a chat between translators protesting because they are not listed in a publisher’s index of authors; or in the work of literary theorists, even poets. … In recent months, I have been dividing my working day between writing in the morning and translating in the afternoon. Maybe comparing the two activities would be a good way to test this writer–translator equation.” For Tim Parks, at least, they’re not at all the same. – The New York Review of Books

The great author and his home country, about which he wrote his most widely-known books, have not always gotten along since he fled the Communist regime in 1975 and didn’t return after it fell. (The latest flare-up happened earlier this year.) But now the 91-year-old Kundera has been awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, one of the Republic’s highest honors for writers, and he has “joyfully” accepted. – The Guardian

“A growing body of research suggests that we may be missing out by reading only with the voices inside our minds. The ancient art of reading aloud has a number of benefits for adults, from helping improve our memories and understand complex texts, to strengthening emotional bonds between people. And far from being a rare or bygone activity, it is still surprisingly common in modern life.” – BBC

Individual letters or parts of letters are printed on each face of a cube, so cubes can be placed in rows to form words, or cubes with letter fragments can be stacked to create letters at a large scale. They’re then placed on blank wayfinding infrastructure that has a small lip to hold them up. The resulting system is similar to a beautifully considered mega game of Scrabble, and can easily be adapted to meet the needs of the community it serves. – Fast Company

Hannah Lynch was “a neglected Irish writer, famous in her time,” but studying her also gives a window “into a robust international women’s culture at the fin-de-siècle that only recently has become the subject of critical revival, to which Irish writers, artists, journalists, and activists contributed.” – The Irish Times