Language
Story Stream
Who Should We Emulate? January 13, 2025
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” This aphorism appears in Meditations, a collection of philosophical musings written by Marcus Aurelius, a 2nd century Roman emperor.Aurelius is considered one of the less tyrannical, ev...
Rough Turkish January 13, 2025
A consequence of the variegated fabric of my education and career is that I do nothing particularly well. I have enough Greek to make a nuisance of myself; I’ve absorbed enough higher math to make my obvious errors in basic daily calculations seem ra...
Bang the World January 08, 2025
One in a thousand people has six toes or fingers. Twenty-six percent of young people lack a gag reflex. And about two in seven dudes, according to my own research as a participant observer, will say something skeevy about women in exclusively male co...
“As I Know by Love”: Wendell Berry’s Another Day January 06, 2025
Wendell Berry’s This Day collected all his Sabbath poems from 1979-2012, and now Another Day collects the subsequent eleven years of Sabbath poems. These are worthy continuations of one of the most remarkable and long-lasting poetic endeavors in Amer...
Woke Language Is a Weapon of War October 03, 2024
Those who love our country’s principles of justice — equality of rights, equality under the law, merit and responsibility — must not be taken in when old and precious words are given radically new and pernicious meanings. Such manipulation of languag...
William S. Burroughs and the 'Language Virus' August 30, 2024
In 1986, the unclassifiable countercultural writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) laid out his thoughts about language:My general theory since 1971 has been that language is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it ...
Conservatives Need a Positive Governing Vision August 29, 2024
When Ronald Reagan said, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’” he articulated perhaps the core Republican philosophy of governance. It’s a negative philosophy, one based on what ...
10 Books, 10 Scents August 28, 2024
“Perfume is all about being someone else,” I wrote in my latest novel Perfume & Pain, “and I write fiction for a reason.” That is, both perfume and fiction allow us to try on a different identity, to wear someone else’s skin. My character who articul...
Our Home Sweet Home? August 28, 2024
“America is not just an idea. America is a nation.” That was J.D. Vance’s big applause line at the National Conservatism (NatCon) conference last month. That theme seamlessly transferred over to his speech at the RNC after being named the Vice Presid...
Matthew Davis' Reading List August 21, 2024
Matthew Davis’ compelling debut has a voice you fall into as easily as the holes of your own self-delusion. A humiliatingly accurate portrait of our so-called modern life, Davis’ prose is blisteringly funny and alive. Ahead, Davis shares the books th...
How Chaucer Remade Language August 20, 2024
Several years ago, after an ancestry deep-dive, I discovered that Geoffrey Chaucer is my eighteenth great-grandfather. What that means for my congenital particularities is hard to say. There’s a splinter of Chaucer, perhaps, in half of my thumbnail—a...
Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion Is Too Big to Fail August 20, 2024
“Rap is like country music,” said the always visionary Ice-T way back in 1993. “They both sing to their own neighborhood, they wear jeans and hats to the Grammys, they sing in their own language, to their own people, and they sell millions of records...
Language and the Politics of the Swarm August 19, 2024
Last week, I learned the term “murmuration.” It refers to the simultaneous movement of a large group of birds, typically starlings, who fly and change direction together. I’m clearly no ornithologist, but I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon late...
Books Even More Insane Than You August 14, 2024
When it comes to feeling summertime sadness, they say the only way out is through. But there's another option: The process can be expedited by books with protagonists and plots so deeply unwell that your own wretched emotions will look like a Hallmar...
Adverb English August 08, 2024
When the British retailer, W.H. Smith, rebranded its logo last year, confusion and bafflement ensued.The high street fixture, its Times New Roman logo mostly unchanged since 1792, earned its reputation by selling books, stationery, and for fleecing b...
Why I Finally Quit Spotify August 01, 2024
The other week, I updated the operating system on my Mac laptop after putting the task off for many months. (One intractable flaw of technological devices: they never actually update overnight as promised.) The apps on my computer all upgraded to the...
We Keep Us Grammatical June 07, 2024
“We keep us safe” is a progressive mantra. At Princeton, for example, this statement, plus an exclamation point, heads the tweet with the “Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment Community Guidelines” that Princeton Israel Apartheid Divest (@PtonDivestN...
'Do the Right Thing' Revisited June 06, 2024
Spike Lee’s 1989 classic Do the Right Thing is known for having sparked debates over conflicting methods of addressing racial oppression, namely, Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent, integrationist approach and Malcom X’s separatist and–when necessa...
Joseph O’Neill’s 'Godwin' and the Crisis of the Realist Novel June 05, 2024
n 2008, Zadie Smith wrote in The New York Review of Books that there were “two paths for the novel.” One was represented by Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, about a man who wakes from an accident-induced coma to find that he no longer understands the world ...
The State of the Gay Bar June 04, 2024
Queer nightlife is full of dreams, which at their best improve waking life. Coiled within conventional hopes for an evening is a utopian vision of society. “No one man owns house / because house music is a universal language,” Chuck Roberts announced...
The Many Lives of Arielle Dombasle June 03, 2024
Arielle Dombasle seems capable of almost anything. She is a singer, actress, director, model, and burlesque dancer widely considered a gay icon and a creative muse. She has inspired the work of legendary film directors like Eric Rohmer and Alain Robb...
Essay #2: Words, Words, Words February 28, 2024
In his fascinating book on moral intuition, The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt tells the fictional story of what he calls a “harmless taboo violation.” A sister and brother, Julie and Mark, are traveling together. While staying at a beac...
The Novelist as Information Machine February 27, 2024
Mathias Énard's The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, is, in essence, a three-part novel where the first and last parts–comprised of the diary of a young French ethnologist named David Mazon–are relatively easy, light, comic, and the middle s...
‘Schindler’s List’: An Oral History of a Masterpiece February 23, 2024
“Schindler’s List was never a cure for antisemitism,” emphasizes Steven Spielberg. “It was a reminder of the symptoms of it.”These days, tragically, antisemitism is all over the headlines: Neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesvi...
Godzilla’s Radioactive Origins February 22, 2024
This year, everyone’s favorite nuclear bomb-born kaiju Godzilla turns seventy. In the lead up to this major anniversary, Toho studios released Godzilla Minus One, its thirtieth film in the franchise, across more than five hundred theaters in Japan in...
