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Hyperlegibility

Trading Secrets for Attention

When I was a kid, if I missed a UPenn basketball game one night, I’d have to wait until The Philadelphia Inquirer arrived the next morning, shake the dew off the bag, throw out the useless (non- Sports) sections, and search for the box score. Because wild forests like the one on the left were “illegible” to tax authorities, “scientific forestry” transformed them into “orderly strands of the highest-yielding varieties,” Rao writes. For almost two and a half millennia, one of the inscriptions commissioned by Darius to justify his rule of the world—written in three distinct languages, and featuring a particularly imperious portrait of the king himself—had been preserved on the side of a mountain by the name of Bisitun.

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