JSTOR
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This Week in Essays
Oh, the simple pleasures of life before the Internet. Emma Rathbone hilariously takes us back to that arguably better time over for New Yorker. At JSTOR Daily, M. Milks comes to claim their queer identity thanks to the most radical of groups:…
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The Rumpus Interview with Larissa MacFarquhar
Larissa MacFarquhar discusses her book Strangers Drowning, why she finds nonfiction so compelling, and how she gets inside the minds of her subjects.
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Defining Writing
For JSTOR Daily, Chi Luu examines the long-conflicting ideas of whether writing is a form of technology or a separate dialect of its spoken form. Luu references the upcoming film Arrival and the sci-fi novella it’s based on, Ted Chiang’s…
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Tech, Humanity, Language, and Romance
For JSTOR Daily, Matt Langione reviews the current state of artificial intelligence, and the strides AI technology must make to fully complement human thought and experience. The latest step, Langione notes, is the news that Google began improving its “natural…
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Searching for Your Next Band Name
For JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu looks at the “my next band name” meme to identify not just trends in pairing interesting words, but also the social phenomenon of how we understand what words mean.
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Remaking Historical Memory
For JSTOR Daily, Ellen C. Caldwell examines historical “memory-making” and our changing interpretations of historical events over time. Caldwell focuses on the 1746 Battle of Culloden, a battle that ended the Jacobite Uprising and decisively transformed the British monarchy and Scottish…
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Losing Language
At JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu looks at language loss in victims of trauma, specifically trauma in wartime. Luu’s case studies range from a monolingual teenaged prisoner isolated in Guantanamo Bay to POWs in Russia isolated from their native cultures…
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It’s Literally Genesis
Tara Isabella Burton revisits historical interpretations of the Bible’s Book of Genesis and the emergence of fundamentalist/literal readings of a text that, for centuries, had been interpreted as allegory.
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Mary Somerville: Journalist, Scientist
Matthew Wills revisits the life and career of Mary Somerville, a 19th century scientist, translator, and a popular science journalist. Somerville also has a notable place in linguistic history: the word scientist was first used in a review of her…
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All Sound and Fury
We are good at being morally outraged on the Internet, but what does it even mean? JSTOR Daily has a brief history of our outrage.
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The Art of Inventing Language
Chi Luu writes for JSTOR Daily on the popularity of invented languages, ranging from the mystical language created by a 12th century abbess to contemporary constructed languages such as Esperanto and Klingon. Invented languages found in literature are really examples…