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
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
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
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
"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
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
"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
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
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
"(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