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Reading Blog - September 2026



Tags: bookshistoryserieslanguage

Wow, it's been three months since I successfully did a book post, and even this one is going to be a bit of a stretch. I think I was a bit discouraged after the Lianda and Prion posts did not make a dent on Hacker News.

The Indian Sign Language (William Philo Clark, 1885; 2017 edition)

A study of Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL) while it was still a widespread lingua franca across the Great Plains. Lewis and Clark brought an interpreter for their mission.
Decades later, this unrelated William Clark led a diverse group of Native American scouts in the Great Sioux War, and they all communicated in PISL. This book was conceived to train other Army officers in what he'd learned. The book goes beyond language and has had been printed with the subtitle "Description of some of the Peculiar Laws, Customs, Myths, Superstitions, Ways of Living, Code of Peace and War Signals of our Aborigines".

The book is mostly an alphabetic list of English words and tribe names, with descriptions of their signs and sometimes a related story. For some words he will mention a similar sign used by "deaf-mutes" (which I've learned was a term for any Deaf person) and must be describing early American Sign Language. The introduction mentions resources from the Deaf-Mute College at Jacksonville, Illinois. My grandma was born in a Deaf family there, so her grandparents were roughly contemporary with this research.

One thing that took time to sink in, is that Clark has no way to record the visual signs. He also says that when he used a sign first, the other conversant would copy the style (knowing it was what Clark understood) so he had to prompt carefully to collect different tribes' dialects. He also noted that signs changed over time (particularly coffee with the introduction of the coffee mill).

It's difficult to suggest this as a read unless you are a linguist. Partly because it's a reference book, also for Clark's bias / contempt against Native American culture and character. He goes over theories about the signs emphasizing feeling originating in the heart and valor over cowardice, where tribes originated (Bering Strait mentioned), and why PISL flourished in the plains while nothing similar was recorded in the east. On this, he describes Algonquin being spoken across the northeast, avoiding a need for a sign language. Today a few pages online discuss an "Eastern Woodlands Algonquian sign language", possibly used by Lenape scouts and as inspiration for Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, which in turn contributed to ASL. But not a lot of info.

Clark died in 1884 just before this book was published.
In the 1920s, Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg used PISL to communicate his stories for a biography. One online review says that he vouched for Clark as an adept communicator.

1930s recording of several signs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Il5R59sI4

8-part series by the Wyoming Humanities Council https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGP7BMowBVmwUU_VB9XqF3I5dECNn2hOI

Side-by-side PISL and ASL (note this doesn't seem especially focused on common signs) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI9mCITMu_k

Central Wyoming College course from 1991 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dDjkP_Dw04

Mark Twain (Ron Chernow, 2025) : Part 1 / ?

This (my first 2025 book, which I'm just getting to in 2026) is by the author of the Hamilton biography which inspired a Broadway play. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are way too far in my past for me to say something smart here, but I did read Roughing It, a Twain travelogue of Nevada, San Francisco, and Hawai`i, back in 2014 (surfing and volcanoes mentioned!).

I'm struck by how little I know about Clemens/Twain, and how I "know" him as a character anyway. Like the Supreme Court justice William Douglas, there are records, there are the stories which he fabricated or embellished, and there are myths and legends which have been attached by the public over time.

The Clemens family formed in high society and claimed important English ancestors, but there were failures in the marriage and the father's business, downgrading from lawyer to general store manager before Sam's birth. The eldest child - Orion - documented a lot of family history, though Wikipedia says much of his writing was lost or burned. Orion would have similar misfortune in business.
Mark Twain wrote his parents into his stories, which gives hints. Later he would reflect on the now-shocking memories from growing up in a slaveholding town, and his parents' treatment of slaves and outright disdain for abolitionists. Sam was willing to drop school and religion, but in his first travels north a traveling printer he continued the disgust for "human vermin" of New York and for any abolitionist politics.

From newspaper printer Sam smoothly transitions into riverboat pilot, showing a knack for memorizing the river. This is also an opportunity for him to read, or have books read to him. One leads to his maybe-satirical polemic about Shakespeare not being the true author of his plays, Is Shakespeare Dead?.
For the Civil War years, Chernow compiled several takes about Sam's loyalties. He escaping being pressed into service for Union river boats, and enlisted in the local, pro-Confederate militia. If anything, he seems like a microcosm of Missouri's own division: holding a status quo of slavery but resisting running either to secession or to Union military control. When Orion gets a job in Nevada Territory, Sam jumps at the opportunity to choose the West instead.

In mining towns of Nevada, we get the first pieces by "Mark Twain". He held his own in a meeting with "America's first stand-up comedian" Charles Browne, forming a professional and personal friendship (Browne was known by his stage name, Artemus Ward. Lincoln read from his books at a Cabinet meeting). Chernow suggests that Browne's act and premature death primed America for Twain's own speaking career.

The Roughing It years had more feuds and financial troubles than I remember from Twain's telling. But the Hawai`i trip ends with a new opportunity - a speaking tour over multiple cities.
Then Twain embarks on his most famous trip through Europe, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Egypt, with his travel letters later published as The Innocents Abroad. Wikipedia says "he is either outraged, puzzled, or bored by each encounter" - which seems odd for a successful travelogue? - but there was an appeal to his cariactures of passengers and holy relics, his admirations and flirtations with foreign women, and novelties such as an audience with Tsar Alexander II. After the voyage, one of his shipmates introduced him to Twain's future wife.
Though the book is the source of his famous quote "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness", Chernow has found multiple notes and quotes which show that Twain was not kind to the Moroccans, Turks, Arabs, Jews, and other groups along his path.

The sections about his wife Olivia are interesting, partly to analyze Sam Clemens the real internal person? She refused his proposals several times, and was not known to make or understand humor, yet they got along well. In the late 1980s Laura Skandera Trombley "as a graduate student, discovered the largest known cache of Mark Twain letters" and her PhD thesis became the feminist retelling of history Mark Twain in the Company of Women. In 1995 it was apparently a revelation that Olivia did not drag Twain down.

Olivia had recently recovered from illness and years of bedrest. Twain wrote about a faith healer curing her, but from recent scholarship it seems like her issues stemmed from tuberculosis of the spine? Her medical issues in this phase of her life, possibly influenced her family's willingness to accept Twain and offer them a house and business investment in Buffalo. Unfortunately the two years after their wedding are marred by frailty, sickness, and deaths, including the Clemenses' first child and a visiting friend. Twain fled from Buffalo to Hartford, and avoided it afterward.

Twain's hectic lecture circuit led him into more fame, but frustration with demanding travel and experiments with strange antics on stage. I'd compare this to the modern comedy circuit book Thank You for Coming to Hattiesburg (note: I haven't read this).

This isn't definitive because it's a biography and I'm only partway through, but I believe part of the appeal of Mark Twain comes from him being a laid-back Southerner (almost everyone comments on his posture), but not too tainted by the war for Northern audiences. Also his abrasive personality, profanity, and odd style are interpreted to be "Western" in a way which can gloss over a faux pas or formality.
There is also a passing mention that The Innocents Abroad reached a broader audience through subscription publishing (door-to-door salesman across America, including farms and towns without bookstores), and that this was eschewed by most famous and formal writers.

I don't know everything that's going to be in this book or what happened after Hamilton, but I get the sense that there was an editor at Chernow's side saying, this book is for the ages, and in the future Gen Z and Gen Alpha ethics-scape you are going to be cancelled for missing any racism; you are going to be asked whether Twain was a pervert. There are many mentions of Twain obsessing over young women, which is leading up to his "angelfish" club late in life. Strangely there is a 1991 Disney movie Mark Twain and Me adapted from Dorothy Quick's experience.

A recorded impersonation of Twain's voice: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1vlnxi2/til_the_main_reason_we_know_mark_twains_voice_is/

The Innocents Abroad was adapted by PBS in 1983, including filming on location, but it's dull. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bDmQFOjCcA

Notes from Previous Reads

The Japanese translation of R. F. Kuang's Babel has won an award. Katabasis was a finalist for a Nebula, but lost to The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, a Native American paranormal horror which has gotten a nod from Barack Obama. Someone said the audiobook was good; I am trying it.
Review of Kuang's newest book Taipei Story by a Chinese speaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cduEZvZ_Eag

Lonnie Bunch is resigning from the Smithsonian, after his successful founding of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and leading the whole Smithsonian since 2019.

As a kid, Whoopi Goldberg was the funny lady in Sister Act, Ghost, and Star Trek. She has EGOT. A mention in the New Yorker tuned me to this video about a restaging of her performances as "The Whoopi Monologues". Whoopi describes the necessity of writing her own acts to prove she could be cast in a wide variety of roles, also a weird kind of heartwarming for her to introduce everyone who is reading her characters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjorQSny14g&t=9m18s

The Tibees channel has covered recent issues in the Indian and Korean college entrance exams, which both faced serious problems this year despite the government anticipating and attempting to fix those same problems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_qRRstrwGE

Members of the AcademicQuran subreddit discuss why Muslim and non-believers are interested in secular Quranic studies: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicQuran/comments/1w3ksde/why_muslims_and_nonmuslims_participate_in_the/

Re: the Spanish civil war books - historians are uncertain of anything that Hemingway wrote about WW2 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2fjfpf/did_ernest_hemingway_shoot_prisoners_of_war/

2016 prediction about AI writing books in 2026: https://www.reddit.com/r/MarkMyWords/comments/54w8b4/mmw_in_the_year_2026_books_that_are_partly_or/

Mini debate on AskHistorians about if pit traps were significant in the Vietnam War, compared to mines and other explosives: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wo6mlr/every_so_often_you_come_across_a_viral_post/

A schizophrenic person has left "Schuylkill Notes" for 7–10 years on hiking trails and inside sealed food packaging. They likely work in a facility that boxes up brands for multiple grocery stores. The subreddit is really unpleasant with people dropping in to 'decode', claims to have met the person or evidence, or AI research (example: "the reason its printed is because they use google docs" appears to be rehashed from an older post claiming a margin or font is distinctive of Google Docs).

Science(+) YouTuber Angela Collier did a great overview of Mendel and scientific revisiting of his experiment. She mentioned the Mendel Museum in Brno, which was cool. My criticisms would be (1) not giving a lot of credit to the fraud allegation - it's not that it was 75–25, but that probability isn't exact even at this scale; (2) additional luck of picking traits which on different chromosomes; and (3) prior studies of mice and bees, so there's a legend that the church said "bro, your monk project can't be watching mice bang".
I remember the museum as generally good. They had some artifacts, and answer some questions about Mendel's research and limitations in predicting other kinds of traits. They had a display about ear lobes etc. which we all learned in school, even though these are generally debunked as Mendelian.

I did a little research to find that the end of July, Unicode rejected my proposal to add "Arabic Ligature: Lam with Small V with Alef" (isolated and final forms). They plan to update some language, but essentially I'm in the wrong:

The proposed character is already representable by a sequence of characters and therefore ineligible for encoding. There are several FAQ entries explaining the use of presentation forms and, specifically, stating that there is no need to encode presentation forms

Annoying repeat questions on the GIS subreddit about how people are using AI and which provider works best. I get that it can write code and queries, automate away scripting, speed up some other work. But the posters usually brag that they (or someone online) have found out how to do everything GIS in AI, including strange claims which give away that they don't understand the tech or their writing. I assume this is AI writing and LinkedIn mindset leaking?

While looking for the (still unclear!) origins of 'pax' as shorthand for passengers, I re-learned that Southeast Asia uses pax for other contexts (apartment size, number of diners at a table) so it could be a British clerical thing. A Google News Archive search returned articles about a 1988 Pan Am memo, but nothing really old.

Tagging the Lake Ontario name-affirming sign on OSM: https://www.reddit.com/r/openstreetmap/comments/1w3t1lt/i_added_the_lake_ontario_sign_that_was_installed/

Last August, my bank was concerned about a projected shortage in my mortgage escrow account. This time around they mailed me a big refund check, and lowered my monthly payment.
Why? I don't know.

My pet peeve is that links to package-tracking in my daily USPS emails direct me to sign in, when entering the number on their website shows me the info without a sign in.

Mass Media

Apple's Dark Matter returned for a season 2, is doing good, and last week had a really outside-the-box contemplative episode with lots of American Sign Language.

People are so allergic to reporting information that the UN adoption of Equal Earth is being posted constantly as "a New World Map to Show Africa's True Size". Detailed breakdown: https://www.polgeonow.com/2026/09/un-new-world-map-africa-size-2026-mercator-equal-earth-projections.html

Update on Bill Clinton's photographic memory:

In the fall of 1992, Bill Clinton's narrative about Vietnam, ROTC, and the draft was undermined by old letters; he claimed to have misremembered. An October 1992 editorial by Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has a little snark about "Clinton's excellent memory", but one by Mona Charen goes without a mention.
The national tipping point appears to be 1994. The Washington Post article was the first in January, though Clinton reciting Macbeth in The Comeback Kid (1992) and Arkansans' stories for Bill Clinton: As They Know Him (1994) came close. By November an article in Reason magazine collects these accounts to name photographic memory as "the essence of Bill Clinton's cognitive disability, and the reason for his dependence on his wife".

When Red Letter Media talks about Star Trek, it's frequently mentioned that Kirk's character was reinvented in pop culture knowledge (particularly him being impulsive, reckless, and a ladies man). The 2009 movie "electrified" these traits and made them canon, but the original TV episodes can be surprising. If this is true after 40 years, is it possible that we've absorbed and teach totally backwards ideas about Shakespeare, Moby Dick, or Narnia? Does it increase or decrease if the source is a text?

I'm surprised how many subreddits love videos of this new generation of humanoid robots. Robots racing, lifting weights, protesting, falling apart while trying to jump hurdles, etc. These do not carry low-latency LLMs or any big intelligence or perception. They are looking right through you. The advance is how well they can balance while running or doing other tasks on two feet.

Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly is an odd documentary, also an odd title, right?
There are going to be 'villains' who go viral in Olympics coverage; I am thinking of Elizabeth Swaney whose performance in the 2018 women's halfpipe skiing event was noted for "lack of effort". I doubt that so many people watched women's halfpipe skiing, but something about her lacking performance radiated outward through social media. Swaney used her heritage to represent Hungary in a category where four Americans made it to the Qualification round. This is a known 'hack' for getting into the Olympics.
Part of Raygun's problem is that breakdancing was controversial as an Olympic sport, unfamiliar to audiences, and the 'easy' and 'hard' countries for representing breakdancing are not well-known. Enter Raygun, the second-oldest competitor in the women's competition. She's never been flipping all around. This lack of "power moves" is discussed in detail in the documentary. So she knew she was being outclassed in international competition, but still qualifying for your country.
After Raygun's performance, corners of the internet spread theories about performance art, her PhD, her partner or another competition drawing better dancers away from the Olympic qualifier, etc. This is one of those moments where people hear a story in the first 24–48 hours of uncertainty, and stick to it years later.
Similarly I was ready to embrace my so-far-described internet hate narrative, but the documentary includes:

I previously mentioned The Assembly, the Australian / Commonwealth series where autistic students interview someone. There's another Austalian series You Can't Ask That - a 2016 episode with Muslims goes viral sometimes - and the 2020 season that's on Netflix includes "Public Housing" and "People Who've Killed Someone".