The Hancock Paradox: Why We Write More Irony Where No One Will Recognize It
The article unpacks what it calls the Hancock paradox: although written text is demonstrably the weakest channel for conveying irony (people recognize it less well there, and even AI models like GPT-4 reach no more than 39.8% F1), we produce more irony in writing than in speech. Drawing on a game-theoretic model of indirect speech (Pinker), the concept of "strategic ambiguity," and the figure of Švejk, the author argues that textual ambiguity is not a flaw but a desirable feature — it enables deniability, where the "right" audience decodes the intent while the "wrong" one hears only the literal content. At the same time, it shows the dark sides of this mechanism (Poe's law, political "dog whistles," irony poisoning) and the limits of compensations like the winking emoji, which works only for some people and contexts.
A Guide to a World Where "Yes" Doesn't Mean Consent and Silence Speaks Louder Than Words
The article explores culturally conditioned strategies of refusal across the world's languages and cultures — from the indirect Japanese "hai" through the Arabic "IBM" system (Inshallah, Bukra, Ma'alesh) to the Chinese ritual of declining offers. It analyzes the grammatical structures of negation in various languages (Turkish, Finnish, Arabic, Bantu languages) and shows how these structures shape the repertoire of refusal strategies. It also examines the pragmatic transfer of cultural norms into a foreign language and the practical consequences of cross-cultural misunderstandings in both business and personal contexts.
"You" Isn't "ty" — It's "vy": How People Around the World Address One Another Informally and Formally
The article explores how different languages and cultures handle forms of address on the spectrum between the informal and formal "you" (the so-called T–V distinction). It traces the historical development from Czech through Polish, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and English all the way to East Asian languages (Japanese, Korean, Javanese), where systems of politeness reach far greater complexity. It shows that attempts by authoritarian regimes to change politeness forms from above mostly fail, whereas organic social shifts (such as the Swedish du-reform) succeed.
Why You Won't Finish Reading This Article — and Why That's OK
The article examines the paradox of reading on the web: most people only skim texts and 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a page, yet long, high-quality content demonstrably attracts engaged readers. Drawing on dozens of academic studies, it shows that what is declining is not the biological capacity for attention but the willingness to invest it in a single source, and that reading is being transformed, not disappearing.
Everyone Writes, Nobody Reads — and Then Came Artificial Intelligence
Scientific publishing faces a paradox: nearly four million articles are produced every year, yet most are never read in full. Artificial intelligence tools (Semantic Scholar, Consensus, Elicit, PaperQA2) make it possible for the first time to efficiently search and synthesize millions of texts, dramatically cutting the time needed for systematic reviews. The article analyzes the structural causes of this oversaturation (publish-or-perish pressure, predatory journals, publisher oligopoly) and argues that the ability to formulate precise queries for AI is becoming a key skill of the 21st century.