The Second Sex (book review)
Reading this now, in 2025, was like visiting a site where something astonishing was built some 75 years ago, something that goes on challenging readers even as the terms of that challenge shift and...
Category: language
Deaf Republic: Book Review
Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic, London: Faber and Faber, 2019. You might wonder, as I did, whether I was reading a fable, a myth, a folktale, a parable, or something else, something different. Of course...
Eros the Bittersweet: Book Review
It’s the sort of literary criticism that expands a language, in some sense “rewrites” the text or group of texts under consideration. Reading and translating ancient texts for evidence of a specific experience, namely...
The Spell of the Sensuous: Book Review
This book seems like “mine,” in a sense few ever turn out to be. That’s because it recognizes the difference between spoken and written language. It’s a subject of very long-term interest to me....
Training robots?
LinkedIn advertises quite a few job opportunities in the “AI training” area. Please, fellow writers, don’t squander your hard-earned human skill on robots! Writing is a way for humans to discover, invent and evolve,...
The Domestication of the Savage Mind: Book Review
I didn’t like the title very much, but understand, in retrospect, the intended irony: it expresses the kind of thinking Goody does his best to discredit, an old, ugly pattern encoded in the terms...