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A New Tool To Try To Decode The Voynich Manuscript?

The 15th-century volume is written in a neat, careful script that bears little resemblance to any natural language, and no one has yet cracked its code. In a Q&A, Yale linguist Claire Bowern talks about approaching the task with computational statistics. - Knowable

Whistled Languages Are Not Dead Yet

In at least 80 cultures worldwide, people have developed whistled versions of the local language when the circumstances call for it. … By studying whistled languages, (linguists) hope to learn more about how our brains extract meaning from the complex sound patterns of speech." - Knowable

Bret Easton Ellis’ Unconventional Podcast Model

Ellis’s storytelling approach, that of serializing his memoir on a podcast, allows him to exploit both types of unreliable narrator: the one who knows they’re unreliable and the one who doesn’t. - 3 Quarks Daily

A Universal Translator Powered By AI

Aleph Alpha, a startup in Heidelberg, Germany, has built one of the world’s most powerful AI language models. Befitting the algorithm's European origins, it is fluent not just in English but also in German, French, Spanish, and Italian. - Wired

The New Children’s Literature Museum Inspired By Kiki’s Delivery Service

The design team says the architecture is inspired by Eiko Kadono's novel, which also inspired the Miyazaki film of the same name. - LitHub

Literary Culture Already Favors The Young

So why does a new Women's Prize have an age limit of 35? - The Guardian (UK)

All Of The Books Featured In White Lotus

Sure, they're aspirational - but maybe your reading pile is too. - LitHub

How Fan Fiction Is Changing Writing

In online communities, the number of voices informing a work grows as readers comment on one another’s posts and learn together. - The Atlantic

Substack Is Becoming A Platform For Fiction

"Authors including Elle Griffin, John McWhorter, Maggie Stiefvater, and Matt Taibbi use the service to serialize new books or publish short stories exclusive to their newsletter audiences … the latest of (them) is Anand Giridharadas." - Publishers Weekly

What’s In A Name? Why Parents Are No Longer Naming Their Kids Alexa

Seven years ago, Amazon released Alexa, its voice assistant, and as the number of devices answering to that name has skyrocketed, its popularity with American parents has plummeted. - The Atlantic

Using Social Media To Teach The Secret Language Of Enslaved African-Americans

"Videos teaching how to speak and write in Tut, and the history behind the language have flooded TikTok in recent months. … Now Tut speakers are teaching others through Google Classroom and Discord. Instagram pages have shared guides on writing and reading the Tut alphabet." - NBC News

Tennessee Teacher Fired For Teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates Essay

Matt Hawn assigned his high schoolers in Blountville, in the state's northeast corner, Coates's "The First White President," which argues that Donald Trump was elected because of white grievance. He says he wanted the class to assess the essay critically; the school board wasn't having it. - The Atlantic

The Mysterious Phisher Haunting The Publishing World

For four years, someone has been impersonating dozens of agents, editors, translators, and others in the book business to get early copies of new manuscripts. Attempts to find the culprit end up going in circles, and the manuscripts never get publicly leaked. What's going on? - New York Magazine

Children’s Book About Same-Sex Parents That Caused Row In Hungary Is Now In Russia

"(Weeks) after a Hungarian bookshop was fined for selling a children's story about … a child with same-sex parents, the same book has been published in Russia – but with an '18+' label on it in deference to the country's so-called 'gay propaganda' law." - The Guardian

A Trick To Get Beneath The Words

"On the first day of every month, I pick a poem, and then I read that poem every day that month." - The New York Times Magazine

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