A bit of a grab-bag of things I read, and found interesting, over the last month: Unearthing The Truth, in The Economist, is about recent discoveries in Great Zimbabwe, a medieval state after which the modern country is named. It was a major regional power and the center of a complex trading network; it is …
Tag: language
April 2021
Phoenix is sometimes referred as the most ecologically unsustainable city in the world. A city of millions in the the middle of a desert, it says something about what human effort and ingenuity make possible but also perhaps about how long impossibility may require to manifest itself. Needless to say, the city depends entirely on …
January 29, 2017: What’s Your Evidence?
January 29, 2017: What’s Your Evidence? Of the books I read in 2016, a favorite was Rachel Cusk’s Outline. So I was excited to hear that her newest novel, Transit, was a sequel to that book. Both follow the narrator, Faye, through a series of more or less ordinary days taking place around major life …
January 15, 2017: Language Games
As the new year progresses, and the presidential inauguration draws near, I, like all of us, am attempting to adjust to new realities. This is not easy. I’m not going to write about the election, as such; I am still without anything really useful to say about it, and I have no desire to add …
Recommendations for July 19, 2015
Obviously, it’s been a while, so this one is a little long, and it goes back a little further than usual to some stuff I’ve had queued up for a while. Article: “To Build a Better Language” by Sam Dean A short history of the artificial and proposed “universal” language Esperanto, occasioned by the availability …
Recommendations for June 30, 2013
I have no particular preamble this week. Here’s some stuff I like: Album: “Run the Jewels” by Killer Mike and El-P Doing something I don’t usually do: posting this without actually having listened to most of it yet. But the Miller Mike album, which El-P produced, was one of the best records of 2012, …
Recommendations for June 9, 2013
Still not back on the Friday schedule; I may decide to leave these for Sunday, since I will be teaching on Fridays in the fall as well. But in any case, here are this week’s recommendations. Video: Tool: “Lateralus” Guitar Percussion Cover by Sam Westphalen Now, I know Tool is not everybody’s thing. I know …