1. This one from Anthropic will take some time to explore thoroughly, Claude’s language learning tutor, which offers “customized language tutoring based on your goals and proficiency” https://claude.ai/artifacts/inspiration/2af221b6-367f-4b4f-9fe9-25710f5f8feb

A number of the languages I once (sort of) spoke are now on life support and I wonder if this might help?

2. A piece for Himal by Jason Stanley, who, to give you a bit of background so you know where he’s coming from politically, was until recently the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University but has now accepted an appointment at the University of Toronto based on what he describes as ‘the deteriorating political situation in the United States’, How fascism works in India https://www.himalmag.com/politics/india-modi-fascism-hindu-nationalism-muslims

India’s fascist turn under Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist rule, says Stanley, has multiple parallels with global fascist tactics and history, including in Nazi Germany and Trump’s United States.

Not sure it would have been too difficult to work out Stanley’s politics, mind you!

3. Two pieces from Literary Hub

Against AI: An Open Letter From Writers to Publishers https://lithub.com/against-ai-an-open-letter-from-writers-to-publishers/

We want our publishers to stand with us. To make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines.

What Would Happen If the Chatbots Broke Free of Their Masters? by Paul Bradley Carr on “the danger—for Tech Bros—of empathetic, knowledgeable Artificial Intelligence” https://lithub.com/what-would-happen-if-the-chatbots-broke-free-of-their-masters/

The tech industry I first wrote about as a young, eager technology journalist circa 1999 felt like it was filled with heroes. A brave new world in which plucky upstarts like Amazon (“The World’s Biggest Bookstore,” run out of a Bellevue garage) would bring hard-to-find books to the masses, or at least to my small town that lacked its own bookshop.

4. Nautilus, which describes itself as “a different kind of science magazine (whose) stories take you into the depths of science and spotlight its ripples in our lives and cultures”, offers two free articles a month – slightly frustrating as there’s lots of good stuff there! Here’s my own two freebies for this month (and it’s only the 1st):

Finding Peter Putnam: The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind by Amanda Gefter https://nautil.us/finding-peter-putnam-1218035/

Chasing Lost Languages by Laura Spinney, https://nautil.us/chasing-lost-languages-1221167/

If humans have been talking for 200,000 years—for most of our species’ existence, that is—then an estimated half a million languages might have been spoken in all.

5. And, finally, the strange story of Burj Al Babas https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/turkey-castle-ghost-town