*typo: magic THROUGH the millennia. A huge thanks to the book's fact-checker and proofreader, too!

This book was a massive lift. Huge thank-you to my coauthors Nina Strochlic and Pat Daniels and to our incredible editor @mayamyersbooks.bsky.social, as well as to the whole team at WonderLab Group and National Geographic, with a special shoutout to Kate Olesin and Jennifer Emmett.

Thanks! FYI, I am building out a Python implementation of the Naibbe cipher, as well as an automatic decryption script and a more robust Python version of Voynichesque. I will make those scripts available to the community as soon as I can.

Fair point. The first alternate that comes to mind is "feedification," with platforms training people to distribute + consume news & entertainment thru algorithmic feeds. 1/3 of US adults "believe that they no longer have to actively seek the news to be well informed": ijoc.org/index.php/ij...

This gets to broader point: For all its benefits, democratization is deprofessionalization. As the barriers to entry lower, more people will do unpaid work to buy algorithmic lottery tickets. Tech platforms seem to have realized that dreams alone can pay for the median piece of "engaging content."

To add here, the sheer difficulty of scaling this up makes it all the more tempting to rely on platforms like Substack for audience acquisition and growth. But among other things, the writer risks the same situation as publications a decade ago: tech platforms wanting to be audience landlords.

Headlines are an art form all their own—and they are are incredibly important to get right. The way I think of it, it's the hed, the dek, and the social copy in combination. If you can achieve snappiness and nuance thru a mix of all three (which is how many people enter stories), you're doing OK.

Weather Fox is another brand owned by Animals Around the Globe GmbH, of which Jan Otte is CEO. So yes.

Strengthens the hypothesis of a French affinity for the manuscript, on the basis that "Grey Poupon" is clearly just a corruption of "Green Coupon."

Maybe they didn't want to create confusion over the quality of their work?