Photo: Museum of Intellectual Property

• Let us mourn the tech culture of the late twentieth century, which bore only a superficial resemblance to the libertarian, Objectivist, misogynist creep fest that is Silicon Valley today. Flipping through old issues of Wired, Anna Wiener admires an earlier (if ultimately no more forgivable) strain of techno-utopianism: “Wired’s recurring gadget spread, ‘Fetish,’ is where I always flip first: a catalogue of mid-nineties stuff-lust, resplendent with fine-art mouse pads, data gloves, chunky digital cameras, personal stereos, and vibrating office chairs for the gaming élite. Some of these products are unimaginable now, like SelectPhone, a digital phone book for all fifty states contained on four compact disks … In early Wired, technology wasn’t just entertaining; it was a tool, meant to liberate and enlighten. Products were positioned as socially transformative (‘We’re Teen, We’re Queer, and We’ve Got Email’). I was strangely moved by an article about Santa Monica’s Public Electronic Network, an online town hall used by the city’s homeless and wealthy alike.”

• There are around 117,000 speakers of Cree, an indigenous language in Canada that, to go by the sample phrases in this piece, we would do well to save—and to learn ourselves: “With entries ranging from pwâkamo-pahkwêsikan, the Cree word for pizza—‘the throw-up bread’ in literal English—to môniyâw-matotisân, a sauna or a ‘white-man sweat,’ a crowdsourcing project documenting the vitality and evolution of the most widely spoken indigenous language in Canada is about to be published. Neal McLeod, a poet and indigenous studies professor at Trent University, set out to connect with other Cree speakers on Facebook, aiming to gather together classical Cree vocabulary and to ‘coin and develop’ words relating to contemporary life … ‘One of the things on my bucket list … is to translate Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope into Cree,’ writes McLeod, before laying out Cree for Attack of the Clones: kâ-môskîstâkêcik aniki kâ-nipahi-nâh-naspitâtocik, ‘literally, “when the Ones who resemble each other in an uncanny fashion attack”,’ and tâpwê mamâhtâwisiw awa, ‘the Force is strong with this one.’ ”

• As the Soviet Union fades into the rearview mirror, it’s becoming harder to find reliable, intimate accounts of life in the USSR. A new graphic novel is trying to change that: “The Italian graphic novelist Igort went to Ukraine in 2008 and stayed for nearly two years. He met people at marketplaces and on country roads, and drew their lives. ‘Word by word I listen to the account of an existence that has become an undigested mass,’ he writes, at the beginning of one section. ‘It pushes its way out from the gut. The following is a faithful transcription of that story’ … These phrases sum up everything that is good and everything that is not so good about The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death Under Soviet Rule… The translation, sadly, is often tone-deaf and downright sloppy—the peculiarly unappetizing language in this passage is just one example. But the stories he has collected are indeed an undigested mass, often a mess, and this is a good thing.”

• Today in old encyclopedias: the Britannica’s eleventh edition, from 1910–11, has earned a reputation over the past century as a grade-A reference text. What makes it so? “I think the eleventh more than any other edition is a feat of editorial engineering. The editor, Hugh Chisholm, actually had a vision for what an encyclopedia could be and then molded together all the contents that he had to work with to create a single statement about the optimism of the age and the triumph of technology and what progress is … Part of it is the way Chisholm templated the articles. He was a newspaper guy, Chisholm kind of looked at each one of these articles as a story. According to Janet Hogarth, who worked with him, the templates were exhaustive. Even when he didn’t know what the subject was, he knew how a story should be look and feel—how it should be structured.  The result of that is a compulsive readability. There are people that sit around for hours reading the eleventh because its just such a pleasure.”

• A new film festival looks at genre flicks helmed by women: “The word genre comes from the French term for ‘gender,’ an etymology that’s especially salient in a kicky, wide-ranging two-week series at Film Forum that spans more than a century. Curated by Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, ‘Genre Is a Woman’ highlights what should be a well-known fact but is too commonly overlooked: that female directors, ever since the birth of the medium, have not limited themselves to the pink ghetto of romantic comedies and aspirational weepies. Distaff auteurs—beginning with cinema pioneer Alice Guy Blaché, whose The Pit and the Pendulum (1913) is likely the first-ever screen adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe—have made their marks in, among others, noirs, westerns, road movies, science fiction, and grindhouse, all types of films often thought of as the sole province of their male counterparts. ‘Genre movies’ have actually been, to some degree, equal-opportunity employers.”