“War happens when words no longer work. Yet war is declared at the very point when words are at their most powerful. It’s an odd kind of paradox. In a time of war, the familiar words of your own language can become even more significant, as language is linked to the idea of home.” At JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu looks at trauma and language loss.
Loss in the Time of War
How Youse, Yix Talk
If you haven’t taken The New York Times’s regional dialect quiz, try The New Yorker’s satirical version instead. “What do you call a grassy area with gravestones and bodies in it? Goth cotillion.”
More on Reading Rainbow
My mom reacts to Reading Rainbow’s demise and points out that the show didn’t have to go and other less edifying programming is eluding the funding crunch.
Act 266, Scene 6
How do you turn a 900-page novel into a play? You make it five hours long, that’s how. Roberto Bolaño’s classic 2666 is headed for the stage.
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Felt Time
“As phenomenological philosophy has determined, self-consciousness is not a mental state that is added on to our experience, or that is particular; rather, it is a feature inherent in all experience. My perception contains me.” Send your Sunday into an existential tailspin with German psychologist Marc Wittmann and his heady ideas about the notion of time and consciousness.
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