By Lucy Ferriss. I’ve just returned from France, and the glow has not worn off. What glow, you ask? Would that be the long dinners over excellent wine, finished off with a plate of delectable stinky cheeses? The gilded sunsets over the Loire Valley? The newly refinished tapestries of The Lady and the Unicorn, with their mysterious sixth sense. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. The summer I was 20, I hatched the insane plan of riding the moped I’d purchased at my job in France through England and Scotland and over to my mother’s ancestral home in Ireland. Various near-disasters ensued, not the least of them occasioned by my ignorance of a war that was then raging directly along my path through Northern Ireland. But the daily challenge was the rain. More...

By Ben Yagoda. Toward the end of NPR’s Planet Money podcast last week, the host, Jacob Goldstein, said: “You can tweet at us at ‘planetmoney.’ You can tweet at me at ‘jacobgoldstein.’” More...

By Ben Yagoda. Catching up on New Yorkers, I happened on a poem by John Koethe, which begins:

It’s a great poem, but, needless to say, what mainly interested me was Koethe’s use of covers band instead of cover band — to mean a musical combo whose repertoire consists of songs popularized by other performers. More...

By Allan Metcalf. A language is a dialect with an army and navy, as the Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich once supposedly said. We could update that to say a language is a dialect with an army, navy, and Silicon Valley, and it’s that, not any intrinsic merit, that makes English the dominant language of the world so far this century. More...

By Allan Metcalf. Hack, hack, hack!
What’s that?
It’s the sound of a nation of hackers. That’s us in the 21st century.
Not so long ago, in the previous century, a hack was just a term at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for an ingenious solution to a problem. More...

By William Germano. It’s commencement season, and we all faced once again the last-minute fumble to figure out a pronunciation for Latin honorifics.
The responsibility for enunciating such things before a rapt audience of parents and well-wishers may fall on different shoulders depending on the institution, but if you’re an academic, there’s an excellent chance you’ll face the problem at one time or another. More...