Leviathan Turns 20

In June 2013, the professor and programmer Mark Sample debuted the Twitter bot @mobydickatsea. Every two hours, the account would tweet a randomly selected fragment of text from Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece, without context and in no predetermined order. Entries could be humorously elliptical (“swallowed down and thrown up by a whale”) or rich with accidental meaning (“the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.”). The decontextualization of Melville inspired a ...

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