Stop Talking About the World’s Oldest Language

Conversations with Jane Austen, Proto-Indo-European, and Why I Hate One Specific Type of Listicle

I’m scared that I’m going to accidentally time travel. I’ll be driving through the New Orleans exurbs and glimpse a neon sign in the window of a darkened dive bar, or I’ll momentarily find that my line of sight contains nothing but trees and dirt and brick—nothing datable to the 21st century—and I’ll feel an obviously irrational but very real terror tha…