“When Dante published The Divine Comedy in 1321, barely 10% of the Italian population could read. In 2008, by contrast,…83% of adults worldwide were described as literate by Unesco. In a world of 7 billion, of whom about one-third use ‘some kind of English,’ that’s a huge potential audience for books.” — Robert McCrum
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This is 168 stories, one per year from 1776 to 1943. Every person in them was real. Most of them you’ve never heard of: fishermen and farmers, shoemakers and mill workers, people who crossed oceans and some who never left their town. They are the people who made [my] four grandparents.
Apple sent their WWDC 2026 invitations built around the Swift logo. Swift is the programming language developers use to build native Mac apps. I’m definitely reading too much into it. I’m going to do it anyway.