palimpsest
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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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The Act of Un-Erasing
For the Atlantic, Shawn Miller argues that what we decide to erase, through our technology, is often more enlightening that what is kept. Drawing an analogy between Middle Age palimpsests and a 19th-century Italian priest, Angelo Mai, who dedicated his…