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The Italian thinker, who died in 2016, was a professor, a novelist — who wrote, most notably and at one time inescapably, “The Name of the Rose” — a semiotician, a columnist and a connoisseur of arcana.

Not since Italian philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco wrote the surprise bestseller “The Name of the Rose” in 1980 has an entertaining mystery novel so elegantly doubled as a reflection on the instability of truth.

In 2017, Turchin founded a working group of historians, semioticians, physicists and others to help anticipate the future of human societies based on historical evidence.

As it is, there is enough material in Bezos’s Blue Moon presentation to keep semioticians busy for years.

If you tried to think about the cultural significance of every object in your life, you wouldn’t get anything done, and people would call you a semiotician behind your back, and nobody really wants that.