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Finally I gave a presentation on this topic in Cambridge as a guest of @viewsproject.bsky.social and you can view it here youtu.be/SRC6QkiKtSo 🧵End/

Also: I'm sorry if I didn't cite you! It's a short article with a lengthy publication lead-in meaning that it is not a complete review but more of a starter-pack 14/

And before you ask, I don't have anything to say about emoji 😅 or about AI ✨, but perhaps you can find inspo on those themes if you dive into the article. 13/

Even so, the creation of language-based graphic codes was never any kind of milestone of human development. Writing as a technology has limitations as well as benefits, and communities can (and do) choose to abandon it or replace it with non-linguistic systems 12/

And those early ponderers with their culture heroes might have been on the right track: the creation of writing did not just happen naturally. It required individual effort, coordination and conscious experimentation 11/

However, writing is also very susceptible to contact processes (as opposed to mere 'invisible hand' processes). Eg, the transfer of a system designed for one language on to another language with a different structure, top-down political reforms and interferences, etc 10/

As a rule, writing tends to mould itself in predictable ways to elements of linguistic structure, particularly morphophonological structure. Also, its visual aspect tends to become more compressed over time. 9/

Early inventors—and re-inventors—of writing appear to have repurposed existing sign systems in such a way that they model linguistic structure in specific languages 8/

There are five recurring themes in contemporary scholarship on origins and evolution of writing: 1) typology, 2) social organisation, 3) non-linguistic notation systems, 4) visual adaptation, 5) cognition 7/

The modern consensus is that writing has been independently invented a very small number of times, and it's pretty hard to generalise about push-factors and pull-factors 6/

Much later, European and Anglosphere thinkers would regard writing as the final boss of Western Civilisation. If you achieve it, you've won history and you can go home and pour yourself a brandy 5/

In these traditions writing is often represented as a distinctly human innovation, attributed to ancestral culture heroes who take inspiration from supernatural patrons 4/

tl;dr: people have been pondering the origins and evolution of writing for centuries and across different knowledge traditions in the Middle East, China and Europe 3/

I've been developing notes for this paper for almost a decade, and it's finally out as a preprint 2/

​New article!: The Origins and Evolution of Writing www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... 🧵1/

I suspect is a case of US journalists being genuinely baffled by why other nations might think that government intervention is sometimes a genuinely good idea and can have wide public support

Here is the NY Times article archive.is/7rrlL The headline is deeply misleading, as if the author desperately wanted it to be true, and but had to run with "The ban didn't succeed in keeping every single child off social media and is therefore floundering".

Unpopular opinion on bluesky but as a parent I bloody LOVE Australia's social media ban for under 16s! People keep citing the same NY times article as evidence that it's failing. But the article itself concedes that the ban is succeeding in all the most important respects

I'm obsessed with Johanna Wacker's arrangement of Darlin' Cory. What are you working on?

My eleven-year-old's feedback on the people who wrote the Old Testament: you don't know how to do suspense. Fair.