Margalit Fox: evaluation

Transcript context

…Somehow the idea of cracking a code or unraveling a mystery, to me, seems to run throughout all your work. There’s a kind of mystery of a life, which you’re never going to state but maybe very subtly hint at, especially with those first and last sentences. Talking Hands is about figuring out a sign language and how it came to be. Riddle of the Labyrinth is very explicitly about cracking a code. So, is that a common theme in your thought? Or solving this Edwardian mystery — I haven’t read that book yet, but — . Yes, I think that’s right. I’m passionately interested in heuristics. When I was a kid, my friends and I — you know, back when kids engaged in real play and didn’t just sit with their palm devices — we used to make little treasure hunts for each other. It’s all about heuristically following clues from A to B to C to get — the goal is not the thing itself. The treasure was just some silly little prize or nothing at all. It was just the chance to work through all the clues and see if you were on the right lines. Here, too, unpacking a sign language that’s never been analyzed. In Riddle of the Labyrinth, unraveling this Aegean script that was unearthed on clay tablets in 1900, not solved for 50 years because they not only didn’t know what the tablets said when they were unearthed on Crete, they didn’t know what language they were in. It’s a black box. How do you penetrate that? In obits, too, what are the heuristics of a life that allows someone to get from A to B to C to D, all the way to Z when I get them, in his or her life? How much of that is free will, and how much of that is determined by pure, blind fate? I get that you may not have that much spare time, given all that you do. But if you’re going to read something for fun in your spare time, what’s that likely to be, research aside?…

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