All posts tagged: precursor

The HEATED RIVALRY Precursor Coming Back to Print

The HEATED RIVALRY Precursor Coming Back to Print

Published by José Betancourt

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Books Are Fashionable Again/Forever A model, a novelist, a professional ballet dancer, a chef, and Sarah Jessica Parker are among the figures in a new Vogue shoot devoted to the art of reading paper books. Chloe Schama writes that the project was “inspired by the increasing number of people who have been bidding goodbye to the pallor-inducing glow of the blue screen in favor of tangible ink and paper” and observes that more people seem to be “wanting to read what your friends are reading instead of what the algorithm serves you.” It does feel like this is in the air right now, some combination of disillusionment with technology and a desire for more and deeper in-person connection as we continue to recover from the pandemic and return to communal life. I’m sure there are naysayers (probably on Threads) bemoaning …

40,000-year-old Paleolithic carvings may be the precursor to human writing

40,000-year-old Paleolithic carvings may be the precursor to human writing

Published by Jenni Sidey

Rows of tiny crosses and dots run along the flank of a mammoth no bigger than your palm. Someone carved it from a tusk around 40,000 years ago, then went back and added the marks with care. They show up again on other Aurignacian objects from southwestern Germany, on ivory plates and figurines and bones. For a long time, it was easy to treat them as decoration, or as something too fragmentary to take seriously. A new computational analysis argues otherwise. Linguist Christian Bentz of Saarland University and archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz of Berlin’s Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte say the repeated sign sequences on Ice Age objects carry a measurable “statistical fingerprint,” and that fingerprint looks unexpectedly close to the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia. Their work appears in PNAS. They do not claim these marks are writing in the modern sense. Still, the numbers suggest the marks were more than idle doodles. Examples of Uruk protocuneiform tablets from Uruk V. (CREDIT: PNAS / CC-BY-SA 4.0, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Vorderasiatisches Museum/Olaf M. Teßmer) …

Israel Launches Wave Of Strikes On Lebanon In Precursor To Potential Iran War

Israel Launches Wave Of Strikes On Lebanon In Precursor To Potential Iran War

Published by Jenni Sidey

Some analysts fear Israel is testing out a precursor for another multi-front war as the US appears poised to attack Iran. Technically a ceasefire has been in effect in southern Lebanon, but the IDF military has been testing – or more like blowing straight past – these truce barriers. The Israeli Army carried out at least eight airstrikes in eastern Lebanon on Thursday, focusing on the Baalbek area. Multiple buildings were hit, with casualty figures not initially confirmed. Lebanese media Lebanon’s Health Ministry at one point specified that a “16-year-old Syrian boy was killed,” according to the National News Agency. There were reports of dozens more wounded and injured. The deceased was identified as Hussein Mohsen al-Khalaf, who died in a strike on Kfar Dan near Baalbek, L’Orient also reported. The IDF claimed the targets belonged to Hezbollah’s “elite Radwan Force” and were used for weapons storage and training. But as has been the pattern with these types of sporadic brief attacks, it provided no evidence for the claim. Israel further said the sites violated the …