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The archive
Politics · Housing
…in order, each one shorter than the last. The first, written in January 2025, runs to 340 words and three subclauses. The last runs to 90. Between them lie a year of pencil crossings-out and, in every margin,…
Ideas · Language
…bottle opener and a set of coasters printed with sailors’ knots. It is titled “Beautiful Words With No English Equivalent,” and it offers 12 of them in a tasteful serif, each with its language in parentheses…
Culture · Books
The first sentence of The Weir House is 11 words long in the original Vellan, and Noor Callender has spent, by her own reckoning, about 140 hours on it. She has…
Technology · Language
…transcripts have become the largest part of the Orvan Text Bank, a collection of 2.3 million words that now feeds something the language has never had: a machine that can translate it, after a fashion, into English…
Technology · Infrastructure
…hit by everything. What’s fragile is what we know about it. What the code knows, in other words, is the law—or rather the law as it has actually been applied to 208,000 particular people, including every tribunal…
Ideas · Essay
…work at the anvil after dark was frequently banned outright. The first noise laws, in other words, were not really about noise. They were about where certain people were allowed to be, and when. Go back further…
Culture · Film
…said in public why. When she died in 1991, her obituary in the Westmere Courier ran to 140 words and mentioned her roses. This summer, The Salt Road was finally shown—first at the Halbridge Film Festival in…
Culture · Archives
…project tried a handwriting-recognition program on 40 sample pages; it read 61 percent of the words correctly and almost none of the abbreviations. The keepers read nearly all of them. “That’s Gil Abery,” Lew Gattis…
Ideas · Essay
…buyer’s inspector, running a thumb across the place, would feel nothing. Her job, in other words, was to make sure that nobody would ever know she had been there. She was very good at it. The mill’s wage book…
Politics · Government
…that duty engineers have kept on that desk since 1961. Under incidents, she wrote the two words the department exists to write: none reported.…
Technology · Right to repair
…also came with an operator’s manual that runs to 388 pages and tells him, in one form of words or another, to see his dealer 41 times. The trouble is where the dealer is. When Ostrander took over the farm,…
Ideas · Memory
…pulper were the records in which the town’s poorest residents appear by name, in their own words or close to them: the applications for relief, each a page on which a widow or a laid-off net-maker explained…
Culture · Museums
…bookmark with a tassel, a pack of postcards, a mug, and a small cotton bag printed with the words I went to the museum, with a blank space beneath it for the museum to say which. “Everyone thinks they’re different…
Technology · Machines
…does not stay put. It drifts toward the outlet and downstream, toward a town that, in the words of one of its council members, “found out after the fact that it lives under a radiator.” “Nobody asked us, or…
Science · Measurement
…level halfway between: 4.63 meters. Then he went inside, wrote the figure, the time, and the words wind SW 5, swell short in a logbook, and initialed it. Someone has done this at Westmere at least once a day,…
Politics · Water
…shortest on the page. Supply pipe: by owner’s plumber. Not inspected. For 95 years those seven words were the whole of the city’s knowledge about the pipe her son drinks through, and the whole of its theory about…
Science · Climate
…flows, and simply waits to melt, which may take several more decades. She expects, in other words, to be the person who closes the account. “People ask if that’s depressing,” she said. “It would be more depressing…
Ideas · Reading
…a block beneath a short rule and left alone until needed. The footnote was born, in other words, as a production convenience. It became something else almost at once. By the eighteenth century the footnote…