Smile, You’re Speaking Emoji: The Rapid Evolution of a Wordless Tongue
Emotional Symbols emojis rapid evolutionE.O. Wilson has tried to explain everything: racism, overpopulation, cooperation, religion. Now he’s taking on the meaning of life Meaning of Stories
anonymised by analysing router information, research indicates The Stack
Few things are as melancholy, as bittersweet, as freighted with mortality as an inscription in an old book no longer owned by the dedicatee Morality
This time a month ago on the Reading group, we were hunting for the meaning of “Kafkaesque”. We were marvelling at its many applications and at just how often - and with how many subtle and not so subtle variations – the term is used and abused. But now that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is our subject, I realise that musing over the meaning of “Kafkaesque” is little more than wandering in the foothills. It is a diversion for amateurs. It is a dipping of toes into shallow waters compared to the deep black plunge that is attempting to define “Orwellian” Orwellian
If beheadings in 2014 seem shocking in their cruelty and theater, that is exactly the point, suggests anthropologist Frances Larson. Larson has researched the meaning of beheadings for a new book, “Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found.” The book addresses the political and cultural meaning of human heads—which she says are, upsettingly, “simultaneously a person and a thing”—and how, throughout history, they have been displayed as tokens of power and even collected. Though “Severed” was finished before the ISIS beheadings began, it is, unfortunately, newly relevant now. “Decapitation is the ultimate tyranny,” she writes Beheading is ultimate tyranny
If beheadings in 2014 seem shocking in their cruelty and theater, that is exactly the point, suggests anthropologist Frances Larson. Larson has researched the meaning of beheadings for a new book, “Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found.” The book addresses the political and cultural meaning of human heads—which she says are, upsettingly, “simultaneously a person and a thing”—and how, throughout history, they have been displayed as tokens of power and even collected. Though “Severed” was finished before the ISIS beheadings began, it is, unfortunately, newly relevant now. “Decapitation is the ultimate tyranny,” she writes Beheading is ultimate tyranny
