A master palindromist spells out his 40-year ‘love affair with reversibility’

Barry Duncan is known as ‘the master palindromist.’ For those unfamiliar with the term, palindromes are words, phrases or sentences that can be read the same way forward and backward, such as ‘race car’ and ‘a man, a plan, a canal, Panama’. Few people are as committed to the form as Duncan, who creates palindromes that range anywhere from two words to a whopping 800 or more. In this charming short from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Duncan works as a bookseller, he details the immense joy he finds in arranging his ‘26 steadfast and faithful collaborators’ into reversible reads.