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Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham observes that the media these days speak in so many forked and foreign tongues - film, book, video game, broadcast, blog - that without a dictionary or a concordance it is hard to know who is saying what to whom. Over the last 50 years it has come to pass that on an examination paper at the end of a year's course in the history of western civilization a sophomore at a high-end New England university can answer:

"The Greeks invented three kinds of columns - Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth."

How does a writer tell a straight story to readers who think in circles? Maybe by sending smoke signals.