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Matthew Battles
5 posts
People Talk
In a new history of the evolution of language, Matthew Battles focuses on humans’ relationship with writing. For Slate, John H. McWhorter argues that Battles’s distinction between the written and…
Why We Write with Words
For wherever writing seems to achieve preeminence as a tool of the powerful, we find at that moment that it becomes possible to take it apart and turn it upon…
Walter Benjamin’s Translation Machine
“The device itself looked for all the world like an Underwood typewriter, at once sleek and erect. In place of the roller carriage, however, rose a stately glass dome, like…
Vertigo in the Stacks
“When I first went to work in Harvard’s Widener Library, I immediately made my first mistake: I tried to read the books. I quickly came to know the compulsive vertigo…