By Rose Jacobs. There’s a debate going on in our department at the moment over teacher evaluation forms. The current questionnaire asks students to rate their instructors on whether they “ignited an interest in the language and corresponding culture.” Some people in the English department argue that the question isn’t appropriate for our courses. They have two reasons. First, which culture? Our staff is peppered with Americans, Australians, Brits, Indians, South Africans and even a German or two. More...

By Ilan Stavans. I have recently encountered an endearing trend among high-school and college students, informally as well as in classrooms and in larger gatherings: collective finger-snapping. Once, in the middle of a lecture I delivered at the University of Oxford, someone began expressing approval by snapping her fingers, and within seconds the entire hall followed her. More...

By William Germano. On a recent Daily Show, Trevor Noah casually slipped the term nerdgasm  into his riff on the new Star Wars trailer. More...

By William Germano. Stupid and brutal practices are not unknown in academe.
Among them (and the list may not be small), is the ritual of hazing. The term is less old than I thought. While the Oxford English Dictionary  provides an 1825 definition as “a sound beating, a thrashing,” it isn’t until a bit later in the 19th century that the dictionary of record identifies the term as we know it on campuses today. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. Is there any frisson more delicious than the learning of a crown wagongreat new word? OK, don’t answer that. But a great new word is a gift, and I received one last week only to find that it had been passed around certain circles for years. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. I ignore a lot of messages on my computer. Life is easier that way. Recently I ignored an update about texting on my phone that had to do with emojis. For years, I’ve been ignoring the little note when I’m replying to certain emails: “This message must be sent as Unicode.” Go ahead, I tell the computer. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. A colleague came to me yesterday with a question about a student paper on hearing loss. Should the student, he wanted to know, have capitalized the word deaf. More...

By Allan Metcalf. Unfortunately, shootings in schools and colleges have become so frequent in the United States that several websites have started to take score. The advocacy site Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, for example, maps and lists 152 school shootings in the United States since 2013. More...

By Allan Metcalf. Here’s a creepy story for Halloween. And it’s all true.
Half a century ago — on the first of March 1965, to be exact — there emerged from the midst of the increasingly excited and politicized student body at the University of California at Berkeley a new twice-a-month publication with the ominous title Spider. More...

By Allan Metcalf. What if everyone born within a particular generation shared the same view of the world, a view that was different from that of generations before and after. More...