Category: Stories, Language & Media

  • Baudrillard’s Second Life, by René Capovin

    Fashion in the modern sense presupposes the becoming-autonomous of interaction, and is linked, in particular, to the communications of the mass media. In a society differentiated by functions, in fact, there is no one class or group that can impose its own “taste.” Everyone must conform their own taste to the information of all others.”

  • Around the Town (a Sports Gambling story), part 1 of 4

    As they went inside Grand Central Station, Moe and Siggy saw hurried commuters moving with tunnel vision, not looking at the homeless. The bag ladies and street people would put a damper on one’s day. Past the panhandlers and cup rattlers, the squeegee people, and the Monte dealers, the determined nine-to-fivers kept moving.

  • A Critique of the Idea of Neutral Language, by Marc Silver

    In Arguing the Case, Marc Silver shifts the ground in original ways. He is not content to “deconstruct” the discourse founding the disciplines he studies – political, legal, scientific, literary, and psychoanalytic. He reveals the rhetorical, logical and philosophical rules as well as the paradoxes and aporias, which sustain the disciplines he illuminates.

  • Nature: A Fragment, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe

    Rereading the reflections in which, at the end of the seventeenth century, Goethe voices his hymn to Nature, one acquires the sense of just how advanced is contemporary man in adding those ‘secrets’, in gaining access to that ‘forge’, in procuring those ‘powers’ which Goethe credits exclusively to the great artist Nature.

  • The Klingon Language

    At the same time that many of the world’s languages are either out- right disappearing or imploding into deeper uncertainty and complexity, there is one new language which is currently experiencing rapid exponential growth in its number of speakers, and is the object of widespread fascination.

  • The Fate of Languages

    There are about six thousand living human languages spoken in the world today. Estimates by language catalogers of the number of existing languages vary by about 10%, since it depends upon how one defines what distinguishes a language from a dialect. The vast majority of Earth languages are in danger of imminent disappearance.