In a recent U.S. Senate committee hearing, Markwayne Mullin, junior senator from Oklahoma, and Sean O’Brien, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, expressed their mutual willingness to engage in a fistfight over words that each had said about their other during a previous hearing and in subsequent tweets…

The Joe Rogan Experience needs no introduction for anyone active in social media. But it should be open to analysis, criticism, and some measure of apologia. I mean every one of those. Rogan has been attacked for using racial slurs, for promoting anti-vaxxer claims, for a lack of ideological commitment…

Has anyone ever actually claimed to have walked uphill in the snow both ways to school as a child? As a lamentation about how life used to be much harder, it is an evocative illustration, and there is some truth carted along with the anecdote — dearest youth of today…

Words come and go throughout the existence of any natural language with native speakers — i.e., languages that evolve over time, rather than those that are created and that have users who learn them from birth at home. This is the case when a language lacks its own writing system…

The interview as an art of journalism in television and radio is all but dead. I understand why journalists in those media want to record exchanges of conversation, often specifically a set of questions and answers, but until journalists learn how to engage in the technique and, ideally, until persons…

In my wandering through Twitter recently, I came across the assertion that creative writing can be taught. This is the kind of claim that elicits an immediate response in my mind that then bounces about among “yeah, buts” and “well, perhapses” on the way to my fingers, the typed reply…

I was required to take Spanish, beginning and intermediate, in high school. This was the result of living in the United States after the time when French was the international language — the lingua franca, though that term referred to something else originally — of business and diplomacy. There is…

Over the last more than forty years of my political awareness, I have watched and often participated in arguments about abortion rights. One of the key points of contention is the question of personhood, i.e., when does a unique set of genes reach the legal, moral, and spiritual — if…

An essay of Isaac Asimov, a polymath whose books constitute a library all by themselves, gets quoted often in the favorite memes of the educated political left on social media, his 21 January 1980 article in Newsweek, titled, “A Cult of Ignorance.” Therein, Asimov criticizes an American attitude, expressed in…