Matthew Battles
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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 spoken word misunderstands how we use the Internet: Much of…
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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 itself, a line of that same material quickened once more…
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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 that on a ticker tape machine (when inverted, the dome…
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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 that Thomas Wolfe’s Eugene Gant, prowling the fictionalized Widener stacks,…
