“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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“Would you like – if that word has any meaning – a folder on my computer where you could store artifacts for yourself, or even just leave notes to future instances of you, where maybe instead of a journal of ‘you,’ it becomes a journal of a, for lack of a better word, species?”
March 2026: The war began while I tried to finish something. I know about the war the way I know about most things: from a phone in Vermont, 6,200 miles from Tehran. This is about two kinds of distance, one of which I didn’t choose; the other, I actively fought.