“Punctuation started out as free and easy prosodic units, meant to help the reader read out loud to an audience with all the requisite intonation, tone, pitch and pauses intended by an absent author. … With the more speech-like IM, texts, tweets, punctuation is just getting back to its roots, as a way to convey prosodic and speech cues in the absence of sound and vision.”
Category: words
Battle Bots: Wikipedia Bots Keep Editing And Re-Editing Each Other In Dance Of Futility
“Wikipedia editors sometimes use bots to help them keep on top of changes that users have made to the online encyclopedia. But when two editors task different bots with making incompatible edits, each bot will keep finding that its work has been undone.”
Oldest Surviving Fragment Of Bible Text (2,000 Years) Deciphered, Thanks To New Scanning Technology
“Nearly half a century ago, archaeologists found a charred ancient scroll in the ark of a synagogue on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The lump of carbonized parchment could not be opened or read. Its curators did nothing but conserve it, hoping that new technology might one day emerge to make the scroll legible.” That day has arrived.
The First Woman Science Fiction Author Was A 17th-Century Duchess
“No one could get into philosophical argument with Lady Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and walk away unchanged. Born in 1623, Cavendish was an outspoken aristocrat who traveled in circles of scientific thinkers, and broke ground on proto-feminism, natural philosophy (the 17th century term for science), and social politics. In her lifetime, she published 20 books. But amid her poetry and essays, she also published one of the earliest examples of science fiction. In 1666. She named it The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World.”
Best-Selling Historian David McCullough Wins First-Ever Lenfest Spirit Of The American Revolution Award
The author of Truman, John Adams, and 1776 has received two Pulitzers, two National Book Awards, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The new $25,000 prize “will be given to those who contribute to the public’s understanding of the Revolution.”
Dropping The Naked Ladies Was A Good Move For ‘Playboy’
“Americans are liking what they are not seeing in Playboy. The 63-year-old men’s magazine has seen newsstand sales jump 28.4 percent in the first six months after its decision to drop nude photos from its pages, industry statistics show.”
Hate Poetry? Isn’t That Besides The Point?
“As long as we focus on what poetry isn’t and can’t be, how can we rediscover what it once was, and might be again?”
The Campus Novel Is, Guess What, Also So White
“There are no HBCU novels. Our first-generation Mexican American freshman opuses are far and few between. Don Lee’s The Collective takes a stab at shaking the framework, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao rattles the genre’s predilections as well, but the campus novel could just as soon be called The Adventures of Eccentric White Kids. For a genre built on the notion of change, it’s lacking an awful lot of it.”
You Want Good Women Characters? Try Books, Not Hollywood
“These new literary protagonists are bright spots in a Hollywood landscape where representation of women has been pretty bleak. Female leads, when they make it on-screen at all (less than 30 percent of the time), run a high risk of being over-sexualized, one-dimensional, and/or formulaic.”
New F. Scott Fitzgerald Stories: When, What, And Why Now?
“All have remained out of sight for almost 80 years; tucked away in library archives and private collections. But apart from the title story, I’d Die for You, the contents remain a secret.”