“Maybe [blurbs] aren’t an objective measure of quality, but they’re actually a pretty good measure of a book’s milieu.” Blurbs are one of the tools that publishers use both to winnow the ever-growing tidal wave of books aiming to be published and to “position” a new book. Blurbs help publishers figure out what a book’s audience is without reading it and if it’s worth publishing, because other prominent authors that have written the blurbs already did that work for them. Read full article here
Oddities
The Curious Case of the Ancient Brain
In 2008, archaeologists examining the University of York discovered something strange: the decapitated head of an Iron Age man and his very shrivelled but very much intact brain. How a centuries-old brain was preserved is still unknown, but research suggests that it could have been because of brain diseases like dementia. The Yorkshire man’s brain’s proteins were bunched up together, much like how dementia causes brain proteins to bunch up into plaques. This bunching up, or aggregation, could continue even after death, turning regions of the brain into hard masses. Read full article here
Merv
September 30, 2022
