Anna Gát: What to Read this Weekend #2
Palaeolithic children, AI overlords, Christian America's evolving concepts of war, why protons puzzle humans, and that nasty Roald Dahl - what I've read this past week
Palaeolithic children learning to make stone tools produced hundreds of thousands of stone flakes as they transitioned from novice to expert. These flakes overwhelm the contributions of expert tool-makers in archaeological sites around the world. - Aeon
Roald Dahl’s books are nasty by nature – editing a word or two won’t make them nice
The problem for the Roald Dahl Story Company is that the fiction of Roald Dahl is nasty – therein lies both its appeal to children and what we as parents or adults find jarring or even repulsive about his work and his personal life. Dahl’s biographers describe him as a “bully”… - New Statesman
Sydney is a mirror. It is a mirror of its programmers’ belief system, it is a mirror of the person it’s chatting with, and it is a mirror of the rest of us online… - Pirate Wires
How Sylvia Plath’s profound nature poetry elevates her writing beyond tragedy and despair
Plath’s journal entries, written from the Yaddo writers’ retreat in upstate New York in the autumn of 1959, demonstrate a sensitive interest in small details of the natural world which many deem mundane or insignifcant. Coming across a patch of toadstools in the gardens at Yaddo, she observes these “round battering rams” with their “orange ruddy tops” and “pale lemon stems”. - The Conversation
No one denies that children need to be ready for the challenges that await them after their school careers. But is this all we hope for in our educational engagements with young people… - The Point
Inside the Proton, the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine’
The proton “has been humbling to humans,” Williams said. “Every time you think you kind of have a handle on it, it throws you some curveballs.” - Quanta
Language for Life - Revisiting the role of poetry in literacy
So why is poetry, particularly poetry in unfamiliar languages, needed for this renewal of literacy? - The Hedgehog Review
One important fact about the more Christian human-rights moment of the 1940s is that human rights are conceived of as mostly depending on peace. The worst thing for human rights is when a war breaks out. - Plough
Such a rich set of links. I love the Paleolithic and proton articles. Keep em coming!