Showing results by publisher "Basic Books" in Words, Language & Grammar

Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated Do you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the...

The global history of the rise and transformation of bookstores, from medieval book merchants to today’s neighborhood indies. "This is the arresting and ultimately optimistic story of the making and marketing of print culture. Here is a book for every book-lover to buy.” -Jeff Jarvis, author...

A top scholar reveals the most complete picture to date of how early human speech led to the languages we use today  The invention of language began with the apelike calls of our earliest ancestors. Today, the world is home to thousands of complex languages. Yet exactly how, when, and why this...

Forget the language instinct—this is the story of how we make up language as we go Language is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity—and one that remains poorly understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater show us where...

A history of libraries and the people who built them, from the ancient world to the digital age. “Engaging [and] ambitious” —The Washington Post Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold...

A brilliant examination of history and language that explains why AI, for all of its wonders, cannot truly speak. For all of history, the only creature on earth that could speak was man. Then suddenly, with the dawn of artificial intelligence, a machine could talk back. AI seems to do the very...