As part of our World Endangered Writing Day 2025 celebration of calligraphy in minority scripts, we’ve compiled–well, Alana Brown did most of the work–this set of recommendations, mostly on Instagram, where you can see some of the rich profusion of the work being done to sustain minority writing through art. Reminder: you can register for […]
Thanks to the VIEWS Project, I gave a talk at the Writing As Visual Experience conference last month in Cambridge that was and is currently the best representation of my thinking (and the most fun any speaker ever had while suffering from COVID). The talk was titled “Consider the Mermaid,” which may not make any […]
Dear friends of the Endangered Alphabets, and of the written word: I plan to write a book about a fascinating and paradoxical phenomenon taking place all over the world. Just when we in the West are abandoning the art of handwriting or delegating writing altogether to AI, a number of minority cultures around the world […]
Every single time I give a talk about the Endangered Alphabets project, one question comes up: What about cursive? Is handwriting still important? And what is its future? This is more than nostalgia: it touches on a fascinating and paradoxical phenomenon taking place all over the world. Just when we in the West are abandoning the art […]
On Monday morning (that is, September 9), I had an adventure beyond a geek’s wildest dreams. In Cambridge for a couple of weeks to do endangered alphabets research, I went to the Cambridge University Library and, casting around for somewhere to start, I asked Frank in the Manuscripts Reading Room for a couple of books […]
September 7th is International Sudoku Day, and in observance of this fine global event, the Endangered Alphabets Project is pleased to bring you our first International Sudoku Day Contest! Here’s how it goes. I’m going to post three sudoku in this blog, of varying levels of difficulty. In each case, instead of the numerals 1-9 […]
Ever since I started the Alphabets, it has been my dream to go to Indonesia, land of a score of amazing traditional scripts, so I can see them in their natural habitat, help support revival movements, and maybe even do a little carving in local woods. To do that, though, I need to raise some […]
Nowadays, we think of writing as something that appears on paper, or a screen (or a billboard), and something we read/consume individually, but this is a very recent idea. Venture back a few centuries, or out among the endangered alphabets, and writing is part of a performance–such a fascinating difference that it’s the subject of […]
As many of you know, I am fascinated by our perceptions and misperceptions of writing, and one of these that occurred to me as I was in the middle of drafting Writing Beyond Writing is the fact that the invention of printing led us to think of writing more and more as a product and […]
A surprising (to me) number of people still wonder why someone would go to all the trouble of inventing a new script for their language when, as they see it, the world seems to have enough perfectly good ones going around. Let’s hear the answer, or some of the answers, from the source. A guest […]
