Keith Kahn-Harris

Kahn-Harris looks denialism squarely in the eye, finds it ugly, unpalatable, and also an understandable human response to complexity and "dark desires" which modern liberal societies morally reject, whilst often still enacting.

His own unpalatable truth is that denialist ideology can't be logically reasoned with nor legislated into silence and therefore has to be engaged with, though not on its own terms, providing a template for doing so. Not exactly a comforting read, but an interesting, unflinching and thought-provoking one.… (mere)

The warning message inside a kinder egg, not exactly high literature but it forms the basis for this exploration of language. Looking at which languages are included and which are not, Kahn-Harris considers the important of society and the connections between languages. His etymology considers the families of language and the subtle differences between them and how this relates to history and politics. He also explores the obscure languages of the world, either those where kinder eggs may never be seen, eg. languages that have no words to translate the message, or those that are so obscure they are only spoken by a handful of people. He also considers 'new' languages, ones that are being added to all the time eg. Hebrew, and those that are purely fictional eg Klingon, Dothraki. All in all this book takes a preposterous premise and produces something magical.… (mere)