Language & Linguistics

Bees don't just tell one another where to go — they also signal where not to go, mark flowers with scent, and even eavesdrop on rivals. This is a tour of communication as evolution actually built it: waggle dances, stop signals, and warnings shaped by predators, competitors, and spies. An invitation to follow very small animals into a world dense with messages we usually miss.

As a graduate student at Harvard University, I worked with B. F. Skinner, the preeminent behaviorist of the 20th century. Although my dissertation was about discrimination learning by pigeons, Skinner's...

George W. Bush is said to have claimed that “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” Whether or not it is true, that...

Translating Happiness celebrates the idea that untranslatable words – terms without an exact equivalent in our own language – can expand our emotional, intellectual, and even experiential horizons. Such words...

Picking up a book in a bookstore, a lot of readers look at a book’s opening and closing pages. From these they can get a sense of the basic idea...

The best entry point for the book is probably the introduction. I use that rather lengthy section to demonstrate the permeability of modernist boundaries and to lay out my argument...

Who, if anyone, is right, and how can we tell? Do we learn everything from scratch, or could some knowledge be innate? Is our brain one big network, or is it built out of modules, language being one of them?

I teach a course on the neural architecture of language at the University of California, Irvine. The first assignment I give my students is to pick a day and see how long they can go without using language: insert some earplugs and carry on with no talking, no texting, no reading, no language-based media. Most give up before the day is half over, reporting frustration, boredom, and isolation...

How do anthropologists describe their own practices? Their working concepts would have to be part of it. Nothing could be more diffuse or ubiquitous than the English-language use of relation,...

Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting is about what people sounded like in the nineteenth century. It doesn’t spotlight the brilliant voices of the stage or the famous voices of public figures....

Human beings think, speak, and write in metaphors. Those metaphors change as cultures do; people use them to respond to and reshape the world. Indeed, neuroscientists and literary scholars alike...

Political Vocabularies is about how Americans can agree on general political principles such as freedom and equality and at the same time disagree so vehemently about how to put those...

Numbers, words, and other symbols for precise quantities, are a human invention that had a broad impact on our cognitive and behavioral lives. This claim is based on extensive findings...

The first chapter, “Strawberries,” presents the formative experience: the voyage of HMS Beagle that formed Darwin’s views on the common humanity of all people and set the stage for his...

But another benefit comes from an appreciation of how the alphabet works (or sometimes doesn’t work), because we today are a chapter in its long story. The alphabet is a testament to innovation, and every population...

Bees don't just tell one another where to go — they also signal where not to go, mark flowers with scent, and even eavesdrop on rivals. This is a tour of communication as evolution actually built it: waggle dances, stop signals, and warnings shaped by predators, competitors, and spies. An invitation to follow very small animals into a world dense with messages we usually miss.

As a graduate student at Harvard University, I worked with B. F. Skinner, the preeminent behaviorist of the 20th century. Although my dissertation was about discrimination learning by pigeons, Skinner's...

George W. Bush is said to have claimed that “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” Whether or not it is true, that...

Translating Happiness celebrates the idea that untranslatable words – terms without an exact equivalent in our own language – can expand our emotional, intellectual, and even experiential horizons. Such words...

Picking up a book in a bookstore, a lot of readers look at a book’s opening and closing pages. From these they can get a sense of the basic idea...

The best entry point for the book is probably the introduction. I use that rather lengthy section to demonstrate the permeability of modernist boundaries and to lay out my argument...

Who, if anyone, is right, and how can we tell? Do we learn everything from scratch, or could some knowledge be innate? Is our brain one big network, or is it built out of modules, language being one of them?

I teach a course on the neural architecture of language at the University of California, Irvine. The first assignment I give my students is to pick a day and see how long they can go without using language: insert some earplugs and carry on with no talking, no texting, no reading, no language-based media. Most give up before the day is half over, reporting frustration, boredom, and isolation...

How do anthropologists describe their own practices? Their working concepts would have to be part of it. Nothing could be more diffuse or ubiquitous than the English-language use of relation,...

Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting is about what people sounded like in the nineteenth century. It doesn’t spotlight the brilliant voices of the stage or the famous voices of public figures....

Human beings think, speak, and write in metaphors. Those metaphors change as cultures do; people use them to respond to and reshape the world. Indeed, neuroscientists and literary scholars alike...

Political Vocabularies is about how Americans can agree on general political principles such as freedom and equality and at the same time disagree so vehemently about how to put those...

Numbers, words, and other symbols for precise quantities, are a human invention that had a broad impact on our cognitive and behavioral lives. This claim is based on extensive findings...

The first chapter, “Strawberries,” presents the formative experience: the voyage of HMS Beagle that formed Darwin’s views on the common humanity of all people and set the stage for his...

But another benefit comes from an appreciation of how the alphabet works (or sometimes doesn’t work), because we today are a chapter in its long story. The alphabet is a testament to innovation, and every population...