Is writing now changing the world for the worse?
Humanity’s great civilising accomplishment may have slipped the leash. Computer programs and surveillance also involve ‘writing’, potentially making us decreasingly human
The getting of wisdom
Inherited knowledge saved the indigenous Andaman islanders from the 2004 tsunami. But how will fast-changing data affect our judgment?
Man of many parts
The learning on display in this latest Collected Non-Fiction is as astonishing as ever – though ‘B-sides and Rarities’ might describe the more marginal pieces
Use it or lose it: has the public library had its day?
I write this in a garret a few doors down from the public library in Muswell Hill, north London. It…
Written in blood or bound in human skin: the world’s weirdest books
Dennis Duncan enjoys some of the world’s most bizarre books
How to organise everything — Judith Flanders’s history of finding things
In the middle of the last century, Robert Collison, one of the founders of the Society of Indexers, addressed himself…
From bibliomania to kleptomania: the serious crimes of book lovers
In the spring of 1998, Rolling Stones fans in Germany were disappointed to hear that the band had been forced…
The serious games of the Oulipians
Have you heard of the Oulipo? The long-running Parisian workshop for experimental writing? Even if you haven’t, you might have…
Treasures from Ancient Egypt’s wastepaper baskets
In 2016, after some unseemly back-and-forth between the Commons and Lords, it was decided that Acts of Parliament should no…
Hernando Columbus deserves to be as famous as his father, Christopher
On 9 May 1502, a young Spaniard joined the fleet setting sail for the newly discovered Americas. The boy, Hernando,…
