What does your brain look like when you read a Jane Austen novel? One group of Stanford researches is using an MRI machine to find out.
This is Your Brain on Austen
Twitter’s Poetics, Twitter’s Bots
As Teju Cole demonstrated with his real-time ghazals (one, two, and three) this past week, Twitter is a medium ripe for linguistic experimentation. And far from being the exclusive domain of human beings, the social network can also produce “found poetry” at the behest of computer programs – a practice I recently wrote about for The Bygone Bureau. But who’s behind these Twitter bots? Over at The Boston Globe, they check in with Darius Kazemi, the 30-year-old programmer who’s made some of the most-loved accounts out there.
“Flip him the flame”
Recommended Reading: “La Cahachina (or Pig Roast Box)” by David Tybor (Brian Engler trans.).
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Sky Dive From Your Desk
Betty Wants In and the Melbourne Skydive Centre have been churning out some simply amazing footage of sky divers, parachutists, and base jumpers. Check out their latest installment, Experience Freedom, and be blown away. (Previously: Experience Human Flight, Experience Zero Gravity.)
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Good Riddance
Recommended reading: Jason Arthur bids "Good Riddance to the Good-Bye-To-New-York Essay" for The Rumpus. Pair with Eryn Loeb's review of Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and our own Elizabeth Minkel's account of rereading Didion's original "Goodbye to All That."
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“Ultimately just plain nice”
Last week, I followed up the news that “because” may now be used as a preposition by noting that the American Dialect Society had named it their Word of the Year. Now, in The New Republic, John McWhorter argues that the new preposition is used to signal empathy and warmth. (Related: Fiona Maazel on the dangers of bad grammar.)
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Hot Air
The unwritten rules of steampunk declare that in every steampunk story, the Hindenburg never caught fire, the world never lost its desire for blimp travel and the skies are dotted with hot air balloons and zeppelins. As it happens, this element of the genre stems from old utopian narratives, many of which depicted a future of widespread balloon travel. At Salon, Kyle Minor reviews the audiobook of a new history of the hot air balloon, written by Richard Holmes, that shows how the rise of air travel changed the world's imaginative territory.