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High-Altitude Language, and Other News

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On the Shelf

caucaucus

  • Reading can affect the behavior of those who identify strongly with the central characters, a new study (and a million Twi-hards) finds.
  • In other research news: a controversial linguistics study suggests that high altitude can directly impact the development of languages.
  • “Civil libertarians and consumer advocates call it digital book-burning: censoring, erasing, altering or restricting access to books in electronic formats.” 
  • The activist group Geeks Out has called for a boycott of the upcoming Ender’s Game film in protest of author Orson Scott Card, who opposes same-sex marriage. Card responds, in part, “Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984.”
  • In less fraught lit-cinematic news, Charlie Kaufman is taking on the adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five.