By Avigail Oren

A reminder that Sunday is the last day for early-bird registration for the SACRPH Conference! Save yourself $20 and spend it on one of the amazing historical tours of Cleveland that will take place on the Sunday after the conference.

It’s also last call to submit an abstract for the a 2018-19 symposium sponsored by New York University and the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University on the Histories of Indigenous Urbanism.

Our former #MotW Katherine Zubovich has a new post on urban renewal and displacement in Soviet Moscow up on our internet-bff’s blog, Global Urban History.

Marisol Lebrón’s article on policing, colonialism, and Puerto Rico is currently open-access for a short time on NACLA.

LitHub on Belt, the magazine and press that are pushing back against the ruin/revival/renaissance narratives of cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit.

This is a real throwback, but I missed it in July when it ran in the New Yorker. Nathan Heller offers a great overview of corpus linguistics and the digital humanities in his examination of research that has been done on a corpus of emails from the Enron Corporation. As an editor, I particularly loved this passage:

Writing, along with fire-making and the invention of the wheel, is widely held to be a milestone of human progress. This view will seem naïve to anybody who has read much human writing. In its feral form, prose is unhinged, mystifying, and repetitive. Writers feel moved to “get things down on paper,” usually incoherently, and even in guarded moods say alarming stuff because they don’t know where to put their commas. (“Time to eat children!”) The true wellspring of civilization isn’t writing; it is editing.

And, of course, the money line and a truism of which I am so, so guilty:

(Who among us has not stood atop millennia of human language and, after a moment of reflection, signed an e-mail “Best”?)

And why not conclude with some who really nailed it with his correspondence?

Of all the letters I’ve unearthed in archives, this is by far the best. It’s a model of how to say no to someone you loathe. pic.twitter.com/cTQQ01fV5A

— Guy Walters (@guywalters) September 28, 2017

Until next week!