“Audiences love foreign TV and film. So do streamers. There’s just one little challenge.”
language
Posted inEditor's Pick
DeafBlind Communities May Be Creating a New Language of Touch
Andrew Leland’s fascinating piece in The New Yorker explores Protactile, a system of tactile communication that has evolved into a national movement for autonomy among DeafBlind people across the U.S. Still, several linguists have come to believe that, among some of its frequent users, Protactile is developing into its own language, with words and grammatical […]
Posted inReading List
Disappearing Language: A Reading List on Losing Your Native Tongue
Powerful reads on which language comes first, second, or even third.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Story
For the Love of Wordle: A Reading List on Puzzles and Games
Seven longreads on the communal pastime of puzzles, games, and crosswords.
Posted inEditor's Pick
On Writing: An Abecedarian
“To be inside the cathedral of a language is to be inside a particular view of the world.”
Posted inNonfiction
Death of Writing, Writing of Death: A Reading List on Artificial Intelligence and Language
Five longreads on artificial intelligence and a future filled with machine-written prose.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Typos, Tricks and Misprints
“Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Strange Persistence of First Languages
“Spurred by my father’s death, I returned to the Czech Republic hoping to reconnect to him. In doing so, I also reconnected with my native tongue, and with parts of my identity that I had long ignored.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Meet the Mystery Woman Who Mastered IBM’s 5,400-Character Chinese Typewriter
“Lois Lew operated the improbable, ill-fated machine with aplomb in presentations from Manhattan to Shanghai. 70-plus years later, she’s telling her story.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
We Need to Translate More Armenian Literature
“We need them to assert our very existence.”