Tag: literature
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Along with Gemini, I’ve been developing the Words Above Average metric as an intellectual hygiene filter for online content. We’ve used calculations of lexical density, synthesis score, structural entropy, and durability multiplier, looking for evergreen intellectually stimulating nonfiction content. But I’ve also wanted to create a WAA metric for fiction. How would we adapt the…
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I love how Dana envisions the “common reader” — not the “incurious mass audience of the popular media” but rather “the idea of the general reader envisioned by Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf felt the vitality of literature depended — the intelligent, engaged non-specialist.” The first essay is the titular piece. It begins “American poetry…
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“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly…