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What Lasts And (Mostly) Doesn’t Last

Lincoln Michel | Counter Craft | 21st August 2024

How many writers or titles from bestseller lists of yore are recognisable today? Surprisingly few. The converse is also true: Melville and Kafka lay forgotten for decades before being “rediscovered”. The books that endure usually have a dedicated following of specialist readers. They are foundational in a style or genre. Lovecraft died poor and obscure but is easily the most influential horror author today (1,900 words)

TikTok LLM

Eleanor Stern | New Inquiry | 24th June 2024

To bypass TikTok’s algorithms with their “intense, often inscrutable” censorship, users have created a “mirror-lexicon”: nazis are yahtzees, kill is unalive, porn is corn — a “replacement vocabulary” in linguistics parlance. Some of it has left TikTok’s confines; teachers worry about students using “unalive” in emails. This “algospeak” harks back to a central irony of language taboos: “proscription is productive” (2,500 words)

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