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Punctuation arouses strong feelings. You have probably come across the pen-wielding vigilantes who skulk around defacing movie posters and amending handwritten signs that advertise "Rest Room's" or "Puppy's For Sale." People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won. Enlarge ImageClose Yet the status of this and other cherished marks has long been precarious. The story of punctuation is one of comings and goings.

How might punctuation now evolve? The dystopian view is that it will vanish. I find this conceivable, though not likely. But we can see harbingers of such change: editorial austerity with commas, the newsroom preference for the period over all other marks, and the taste for visual crispness. Though it is not unusual to hear calls for new punctuation, the marks proposed tend to cannibalize existing ones. In this vein, you may have encountered the interrobang , which signals excited disbelief. Such marks are symptoms of an increasing tendency to punctuate for rhetorical rather than grammatical effect. Instead of presenting syntactical and logical relationships, punctuation reproduces the patterns of speech.

Defenders of the apostrophe insist that it minimizes ambiguity, but there are few situations in which its omission can lead to real misunderstanding.

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you'll find in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post— a

in copy-editor-free zones—the Web and emails, student papers, business memos—with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.

the main reason is that the British way simply makes more sense. Indeed, since at least the 1960s a common designation for that style has been "logical punctuation."

For the most part, though, officials tended to ignore the society’s complaints, saying that they had more pressing matters to deal with than a missing apostrophe here or there. And experts in language and cognition concurred, pointing out that a misplaced apostrophe was unlikely to confuse anybody, and, in fact, apostrophes could likely be eliminated from written English altogether with no ill effect.

Over the years, fans have submitted examples such a cafe advertising “light bite’s,” a warehouse offering storage for “boat’s” and “car’s,” and a restaurant selling “snow pea’s.

Language is very probably the one characteristic that separates us from the chimpanzees, our closest relatives. All other major differences between us likely stem from language.

[Language] allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind and they can attempt to do the same to you without either of you performing surgery

Humans use discrete pulses of sound -- their language -- to alter the internal settings inside someone else's brain to suit an individual's interests. Because language is not a solitary pursuit, language is a form of social learning.

leads to both the erasure and criminalization of marginalized communities, has had dire consequences for both the psyches and lived experiences of black people in the United States since at least the 18th century,

“This is the press, an irresponsible press,” he said. “It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

Many studies have tackled implicit racial bias in law enforcement, health care and the legal field. In recent years, the phrase has become a buzzword used to broadly frame bigotry and racism as something so entrenched that some people aren’t aware that they subconsciously harbor racist feelings, associating black skin with negative behavior

I imagine that physicists are similarly deluged with revelations about how to build a perpetual-motion machine or about the hitherto secret truth behind relativity. And so I didn’t view the arrival of “A New History of Life” with great enthusiasm.

subtitle breathlessly promises “radical new discoveries about the origins and evolution of life on earth,” while the jacket copy avers that “our current paradigm for understanding the history of life on Earth dates back to Charles Darwin’s time, yet scientific advances of the last few decades have radically reshaped that aging picture.”

authors Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink are genuine scientists—paleontologists, to be exact. And they can write.

In the end, though, Litman concluded, the findings were complicated: these factors could largely tell a dog from a general success, but they couldn’t predict the true runaway sensations.

few things continued to stand out: story and social influence. The most important figure in determining ultimate creative success, Simonton found, was the writer. “We can learn a great deal about what makes a successful film just by focusing on the quality of the screenplay,” he declared. Still, as he’d found earlier, quality did not always translate to quantity

And the thing that could potentially be even more, or at least equally, predictive wasn’t easy to quantify: so-called information cascades (basically, a snowball effect) that result from word-of-mouth dynamics.

Max Planck won a Nobel prize for his revolutionary work in quantum mechanics, but it was his interest in the philosophy of science that led to what is now called “Planck’s Principle.” Planck argued that science was an evolving system of thought which changes slowly over time, fueled by the deaths of old ideas. As he wrote in his 1968 autobiography: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Is our understanding of the world based in pure objective reason, or are the theories that underpin it shaped by generational biases? Do our most famous thinkers actually block new ideas from gaining ground?

A new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that fame does play a significant role in deciding when and whether new scientific ideas can gain traction. When a prominent scientist dies, the paper’s authors found, the number of articles published by his or her collaborators tends to fall “precipitously” in the years following the death — those supporters tend not to continue advocating for a once-famous scientist’s ideas once the scientist is gone.

Thomas Kuhn, the well-known physicist, philosopher and historian of science, was born 94 years ago today. He went on to become an important and broad-ranging thinker, and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, transformed the philosophy of science and changed the way many scientists think about their work. But his influence extended well beyond the academy: The book was widely read — and seeped into popular culture

One measure of his influence is the widespread use of the term "paradigm shift," which he introduced in articulating his views about how science changes over time.

But in a survey conducted by the Alzheimer’s Society, half of relatives said that their loved ones’ memories had got worse after they began living more isolated lives.   

The most obvious factor is isolation. We know that a lack of social contact can affect the brain negatively and that the effect is most serious in those already experiencing memory difficulties.

Of course, not everyone has felt lonely during the pandemic, and the results of some studies have shown that levels of loneliness have plateaued over time.

When the new grammatical structures and phrases express something that conventional language simply cannot

this new grammar-bending, punctuation-erasing, verb-into-noun-turning, key-board-smashing linguistic convention doesn’t dominate the whole Interne

language generated on Tumblr is is now becoming Facebook and Twitter language and influencing language everywhere from Buzzfeed to Autostraddle.

Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988

It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.

His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.”

European plane maker Airbus EADSY -0.02% SE said Wednesday it plans to cut production of its flagship A380 superjumbo and A400M military transport aircraft, threatening thousands of jobs, though overall strong demand for airliners may mitigate staff cuts.

But Airbus’s A380 has missed out on the boom. Airlines worry that they won’t be able to fill an aircraft that seats more than 500 passengers. Plus, the superjumbo carries a price tag of $445.6 million before typical discounts,

Emirates Airline, the world’s largest by international traffic, in February signed an order for 20 A380s with an option for 16 more.

"Today, I have strongly recommended to every governor to deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers that we dominate the streets," he said.

"One law and order, and that is what it is, one law. We have one, beautiful law," he said.

D.C. had no problems last night," Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. "Many arrests. Great job done by all. Overwhelming force. Domination. Likewise, Minneapolis was great (thank you President Trump!)."

Obama gives readers more than a mere recitation of events. He offers an insider’s peek into his thought process

Obama’s well-earned reputation as someone who could overthink almost anything is one reason fellow writers, especially in the media, found him so fascinating

Trump’s supporters found his “honesty” refreshing, by which they meant, he’s saying what I’m thinking, no matter how ignoble my thoughts.

How do scammers use language to trick their victims?

Researchers often have pondered the psychology of how and why certain people fall for scams, especially ones that appear to be so obvious to others. Scammers target certain human traits, including vulnerabilities that can be easily exploited, such as naiveté, overconfidence in one’s intelligence or abilities, an overly optimistic expectation of immediate success in life, or a desire to feel good about helping others. As communication on the internet has gotten more sophisticated, so have the scams. Many still fall for it, as con artists continue to target businesses as well as individuals.

Nigerian 419 cons (the number refers to the fraud section of the Nigerian Criminal Code) are practically the oldest scams on the internet. They can actually be traced back to the 1920s, in the form of a confidence trick most gothically known as the Spanish Prisoner. The victims are asked to pay out more and more money to release the wealthy relative of your respectable foreign correspondents (who naturally doesn’t exist), cruelly imprisoned in Spain, in return for a large reward (that never comes).

none of these arguments reaches past adversarial notions of democracy. They all characterize free speech as a matter of conflicting rights-claims and competing factions.

As long as political polarization precludes rational consensus, she argues, we are left to “[make] personal choices and pronouncements regarding what we are willing (or unwilling) to tolerate, in an attempt to slightly nudge the world in our preferred direction.” Notably, she makes no mention of how we might discern the validity of those preferences or how we might arbitrate between them in cases of conflict.

Free speech advocates are hypocritical or ignore some extenuating context, they claim, while those stifling disagreeable or offensive views are merely rectifying past injustices or paying their opponents back in kind, operating practically in a flawed public sphere.

the crash of two linked cryptocurrencies caused tens of billions of dollars in value to evaporate from digital wallets around the world.

People who thought they knew what they were getting into had, in the space of 24 hours, lost nearly everything. Messages of desperation flooded a Reddit forum for traders of one of the currencies, a coin called Luna, prompting moderators to share phone numbers for international crisis hotlines.

“DYOR” is shorthand for “do your own research,”

these fears can no longer be confined to a fanatical fringe of gun-toting survivalists. The relentless onslaught of earthshaking crises, unfolding against the backdrop of flash floods and forest fires, has steadily pushed apocalyptic sentiment into the mainstream. When even the head of the United Nations warns that rising sea levels could unleash “a mass exodus on a biblical scale,” it is hard to remain sanguine about the state of the world. One survey found that over half of young adults now believe that “humanity is doomed” and “the future is frightening.”

At the same time, recent years have also seen the resurgence of a very different kind of narrative. Exemplified by a slew of best-selling books and viral TED talks, this view tends to downplay the challenges we face and instead insists on the inexorable march of human progress. If doomsday thinkers worry endlessly that things are about to get a lot worse, the prophets of progress maintain that things have only been getting better — and are likely to continue to do so in the future.

If things are really getting better, there is clearly no need for transformative change to confront the most pressing problems of our time. So long as we stick to the script and keep our faith in the redeeming qualities of human ingenuity and technological innovation, all our problems will eventually resolve themselves.

In the old days—and here I mean even as recently as 2000 or 2004—audiences were built around media institutions. The New York Times had an audience. The New Yorker had an audience. The Weekly Standard had an audience.

If you were a writer, you got access to these audiences by contributing to the institutions. No one cared if you, John Smith, wrote a piece about Al Gore. But if your piece about Al Gore appeared in Washington Monthly, then suddenly you had an audience.

There were a handful of star writers for whom this wasn’t true: Maureen Dowd, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion. Readers would follow these stars wherever they appeared. But they were the exceptions to the rule. And the only way to ascend to such exalted status was by writing a lot of great pieces for established institutions and slowly assembling your audience from theirs.