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“Zooming in on the document, they were pretty obvious,” says Ted Han at cataloguing platform Document Cloud, who was one of the first to notice them. “It is interesting and notable that this stuff is out there.”

From BBC – Future – Why printers add secret tracking dots

Languages not seen since the Dark Ages have come to light after scientists used a new method to inspect a trove of ancient manuscripts found in a monastery in Egypt.

They turned up extremely rare tongues, including Caucasian Albanian, on documents they found in Saint Catherine’s monastery on the Sinai peninsula that date back 1,500 years.

Monks originally wrote their texts down on parchments which were later scrubbed off and used to write the Bible by future generations who spoke in more modern languages.

From Scientists find languages not used since Dark Ages among ancient manuscripts recovered from monastery | The Independent

NPR story – Tolkien’s Plant Passion Moves Botanist To Create Guide To Middle Earth

When most people read J.R.R. Tolkien, they get swept up in mythical worlds of hobbits and elves, harrowing journeys in fantastical lands and epic battles of good and evil.

But Walter Judd says he got lost in the scenery.

“I started underlining every name of a plant as I was reading The Lord of the Rings,” he tells NPR’s Morning Edition.

All of the figures in the book — like this nasturtium — are hand-drawn by Graham Judd, who says he used a minimalist woodblock-style to let readers’ imaginations bring the illustrations to life.

Moved by Tolkien’s passion for plants, the retired botany professor spent years cataloging every plant that appeared in his writing, eventually compiling a list of 141 different species. He teamed up with his son, Graham, a professional illustrator. And together, they embarked on quest to transform that list into a botanical guide to Middle Earth.

While bitter experience has shown poetry exactly where it stands in the marketplace, and the novel has shrugged off multiple reports of its death and maintained pre-eminence, the short story is continually characterised as the neglected form that will be great again. The funny thing is, when you explore its history you find the perception of a distant golden age, an undistinguished present and a return to glory has always been around: the short story has a problem with reality.

From Survival of the smallest: the contested history of the English short story

This is the hidden underside of the browsing experience. When you’re surfing the web, sitting alone at your computer or with your smartphone clutched in your hand, it feels private and ephemeral. You feel freed to look for the things that you’re too embarrassed or ashamed to ask another person. But increasingly, there is digital machinery at work turning your fleeting search whims into hard data trails.

The mining of secrets for profit is done invisibly, shrouded in the mystery of “confidential partnerships,” “big data,” and “proprietary technology.” People in databases don’t know that dossiers are being compiled on them, let alone have the chance to correct any mistakes in them.

From How a Company You’ve Never Heard of Sends You Letters about Your Medical Condition

On C-Span BookTV

Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) talked about his book The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis–and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance, in which he looks at how to engage adolescents and young adults to become independent, active, and engaged citizens. He was interviewed by Steven Olikara.
See video here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?428117-2/words-senator-ben-sasse

The images, captured on film, often in black and white, are also being brought into the digital age, alongside the millions of others that comprise the Chronicle’s photo archive. Negatives and prints are gradually being scanned, and some of the best are being featured in the Instagram account SF Chronicle Vault. Atlas Obscura spoke with Timothy O’Rourke, Assistant Managing Editor of the Chronicle and Executive Producer of SFChronicle.com, about organizing millions of images, sharing San Francisco’s history, and stumbling across the perfect image.

From How San Francisco Chronicled Its Own Tech Boom – Atlas Obscura

F Scott Fitzgerald’s publishing career lasted just two decades, from 1920 to 1940, when he died aged 44. But in that brief time he published four novels, a play and 178 short stories (some of which he compiled into four collections), while leaving an unfinished novel as well as many incomplete stories, fragments, notes, screenplays and film scenarios. Most have gradually trickled into print over the 77 years since his death, and with the publication of I’d Die For You, the trickle all but ends: these are the last known uncollected stories from the archives.

From Out of time: F Scott Fitzgerald and an America in decline

As anyone who’s read Stein’s books knows, her approach encourages her subjects to air their grievances; as people opened up to her, they revealed stories of turbulence and violence, plus the tensions of classism, sexism, racism, and ageism. McNeil and McCain, who are currently working on an oral history of 1969, have noticed this in their interviews, too, and it may be Stein’s most remarkable legacy: the creation of a form that championed a mosaiclike reality, where every person’s account carries an equal weight as “truth.” Her “oral narrative” carves out a place where history is illuminated by people who had a hand in shaping it, yet had never been so much asked for their opinions, and are held up as sacred as the deeds that line history textbooks. “You can really document injustice and the way things went down so well,” McNeil notes. “I think Jean Stein deserves a medal for that.”

From How Jean Stein Reinvented the Oral History