1. Two from Aeon to start with today:

a) Cathedrals of convention by Reuben Cohn-Gordon: “Humans have a strong impulse to see things that are arbitrary or conventional as natural and essential – especially language” https://aeon.co/essays/are-the-exact-words-of-a-language-arbitrary-or-necessary

I don’t think I’ll spoil your reading pleasure by giving you the last three sentences: “But perhaps the best way to understand the intuitive appeal of Cratylus’ view is with the story about the Englishman who is trying to demonstrate the intrinsic superiority of his native language. In French, he argues, a spoon is called a cuillère, while in Spanish it is a cuchara, and in Hebrew a כף /kaf/. But in English, it is called nothing other than what it truly is: a spoon!”

b) Indexing the information age by Monica Westin from Manchester Metropolitan University is an account of the meeting one weekend in March 1995 in Dublin, Ohio at which a group of librarians and web technologists “created a radical system for describing and discovering online content that still directly powers web search today” https://aeon.co/essays/the-birth-of-our-system-for-describing-web-content

2. I mentioned Ethan Mollick’s blog, One Useful Thing, a while ago https://www.oneusefulthing.org/ Ethan and his wife Lilach have now produced a companion site, More Useful Things: AI Resources https://www.moreusefulthings.com/ which includes a ‘prompt library’ – exploring it helped me understand the potential of ChatGPT much better – and a rich collection of other resources, including a Wharton University ‘Crash Course’ made up of five short videos,  Practical AI for Instructors and Students https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9gmyvf7JYo

3. In Praise of Reading Le Carré’s Entire Oeuvre in Order is a CrimeReads piece by Ben Winters which outlines the interesting and thorough approach he took to reading John Le Carré’s work from start to finish https://crimereads.com/in-praise-of-reading-le-carres-entire-oeuvre-in-order/

Winters says this approach can be taken to almost any novelist – but possibly not Anthony Trollope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Trollope_bibliography

The Women Codebreakers who Uncovered some of the Cold War’s Most Notorious Spies is another CrimeReads piece, by Katherine Reay, which plays out against a Cold War background, as many of Le Carré’s early books did, and tells the story of the Venona Project, the all-woman team who cracked nearly all the Soviet Union’s secret communications for nearly forty years https://crimereads.com/the-women-codebreakers-who-uncovered-some-of-the-cold-wars-most-notorious-spies/

4. For a change, a gift recipe this time from The New York Times, one for Miso Leeks with White Beans that caught my eye the other day https://tinyurl.com/ycxy4rny

5. And, finally, Five Films for Freedom: “a dive into the world of LGBTQIA+ cinema from the comfort of home!” In partnership with BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival, the British Council is celebrating global LGBTQIA+ stories, in support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual people across the world, with this, its tenth annual online film festival https://film.britishcouncil.org/about/work/fivefilmsforfreedom