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Memory in the Meme

We live in an age of disposable context. We scroll through the infinite ribbon of the glass screen, pausing only for a microsecond to register a flicker of recognition before sliding our thumb upward, condemning the moment to the digital abyss. We have been trained by the Technocrats, those right-brained architects of our algorithmic prisons, to view this behavior as consumption. They tell us we are “consuming content.” But they are wrong. When we pause on a meme, that pixelated artifact of cultural shorthand, we are not consuming. We are remembering.

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Arm Angles in American Sign Language: The Textbook That Teaches What Other Textbooks Ignore

Watch any native signer and then watch an intermediate student. The difference is not in the handshapes. It is not in the facial expressions, though those matter. The difference lives in the arms. The native signer’s shoulders engage when emphasis requires it. The elbows extend and contract with meaning. The signing space expands for formal address and contracts for intimacy. The student, trained to focus on hands and face, moves through space as if the arms were merely transportation for the fingers. This is the gap that Arm Angles in American Sign Language addresses. It is the textbook we wished existed twenty years ago.

Arm Angles in American Sign Language by David Boles and Janna Sweenie

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The Weight of the Digital Attic

Sorting through a box of family photos in Nebraska last year, the physical weight of them stopped me. It wasn’t just the heavy cardboard. It was the specific gravity of each print. I held a single, fading photograph of folks I did not know, captured on their wedding day. Just one. It wasn’t one of twenty-seven burst-mode variations kept “just in case.”

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The Kinship of Strangers: When DNA Reveals What Identity Cannot Accept

Some truths arrive uninvited. They come in the mail, in the form of a cardboard box containing a plastic tube, a prepaid envelope, and instructions for depositing saliva. Six weeks later, they return as a percentage breakdown, a haplogroup designation, a list of genetic relatives you never knew existed. The Kinship of Strangers, the third novel in the Fractional Fiction series, asks what happens when those percentages contradict everything you were raised to believe about who you are and who belongs to your people.

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The Page Isn’t Dead, Your Attention Is Under Siege

Every few years we are invited to attend the same funeral. Someone declares that nobody reads anymore, that the printed page is finished, that books are an aging technology destined to become a museum object while the living culture migrates to earbuds and short video. It is a tempting story because it flatters our sense that we are witnessing a clean break with the past, a decisive turn of the wheel.

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