April 18, 2012
My efforts to get my head around Facebook have finally resulted in a feature for Intelligent Life. From my reporting trip to Menlo Park, to watching Asperger’s families support one another (they love Legos!), to watching thousands of friends gather online around a 36-year-old classmate dying of cancer, to finding that kids no longer get drivers’ licenses like they used to, to catching up on breastfeeding moms catching up with each other in the middle of the night… many of the things I found about how Facebook has changed our life surprised and even touched me. I look at the downside too–we will miss our habits of discretion if we discard them lightly. But take a look and judge for yourselves.
April 7, 2012
Norman Veasey and Christine Di Guglielmo, a former judge and his former clerk, argue in a new book, “Indispensable Counsel”, that a CLO must be a “courageous Renaissance person”. By this they do not mean that he must fight the trial bar with one hand while painting frescoes with the other, but that he must perform more than one role. He must be a business partner and a guardian of corporate integrity. He (or she—20% of America’s big-company CLOs are women) represents the entire corporate entity, not just its managers. He answers directly to the board as well as to the boss. Professional ethics often require the CLO to say no to the other suits in the C-suite. One CLO complained to Mr Veasey and Ms Di Guglielmo that: “They sometimes view you as the ‘Business Frustration Department’…” [Read the whole article.]
March 23, 2012
I’m just home from the delightful CIBER conference on language and business, where I gave the keynote. Chapel Hill, where I had only ever been when visiting colleges as a high-schooler, was charming.
Also with the language hat on, I reviewed Daniel Everett’s Language: The Cultural Tool for last week’s issue of The Economist. Tom Bartlett’s nice long roundup of the controversy over language and the mind, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is also well worth your time.
March 3, 2012
In the past few weeks I took a look at the Obama administration’s attempts to roll back legislation; co-wrote a piece on linguistic software that helps detect fraud; and answered a difficult question – "What’s the best language to learn besides English?" — with a surprise answer: French, with native and second-language populations in every corner of the globe.
January 26, 2012
With my business-writer hat on, I took a look at Britain’s big-bang legal reform (and its wider meaning) in this week’s Economist.
With my word-nerd hat on, I chatted about language books with The Economist‘s literary editor.
And finally, I insisted on KPCC public radio that the decision by Waterstone’s to drop its apostrophe wasn’t even the end of the apostrophe, much less the beginning of the End Times. Somehow I still lost the popular vote on the debate.
January 13, 2012
Many folks think a ridiculous name will doom a child. But given the names Taco Monster, Rockwell Bonecutter, Chuntania Dangerfield and Vernon Lee Bad Marriage, Jr., could you tell who would be a civil servant, who an epidemiologist, who a technology consultant and who a convict many times over? These, more fascinating examples, and my thoughts here.
December 29, 2011
A review of Michael Erard’s Babel No More:
"CARDINAL MEZZOFANTI of Bologna was a secular saint. Though he never performed the kind of miracle needed to be officially canonised, his power was close to unearthly. Mezzofanti was said to speak 72 languages. Or 50. Or to have fully mastered 30. No one was certain of the true figure, but it was a lot. Visitors flocked from all corners of Europe to test him and came away stunned. He could switch between languages with ease. Two condemned prisoners were due to be executed, but no one knew their language to hear their confession. Mezzofanti learned it in a night, heard their sins the next morning and saved them from hell.
Or so the legend goes. In Babel No More, Michael Erard has written the first serious book about the people who master vast numbers of languages—or claim to. A journalist with some linguistics training, Mr Erard is not a hyperpolyglot himself (he speaks some Spanish and Chinese), but he approaches his topic with both wonder and a healthy dash of scepticism…" (Read the whole article.)
December 10, 2011
"The two sides are locked in a standoff. Trial lawyers and their Democratic allies call for health reform along European lines to reduce costs, making torts less expensive. Republicans call for tort-reform first, saying it is the best way to keep costs down. But Massachusetts’s universal health-care law has not (yet) bent the cost-curve, and Texas-style damage caps have not in fact increased doctor numbers. In reality, incentives must change in American health care across the board, and tort reform is only part of that.
Nonetheless, good ideas deserve serious debate. “Loser pays” should not shield wrongdoers. Keith Hylton of Boston University’s law school estimates that the welfare-enhancing effect of making negligence more expensive would be the biggest economic benefit of loser-pays. And high-merit but low-stakes cases should be more economical to file…" (Read the whole story.)
November 25, 2011
Sigh. There’s an old internet joke that the longer a discussion goes on, the probability of someone comparing someone else inappropriately to Hitler approaches 1. A lighter, but nonetheless serious, version of that has happened in an otherwise fair-to-positive review of You Are What You Speak in the Sydney Morning Herald. Ruth Wajnryb ends her review with several surprising sentences that are supported by no evidence in her review, nor by anything in my book itself. I have just sent this letter to the editor of the paper; following it, I include the passage in the book that Ruth Wajnryb seemed to be referring to.
Dear Madam,
I was stunned to reach the end of the (positive) review of my book You Are What You Speak, to find attributed to me a view I absolutely do not hold. "His tone shows how miffed he is that the Jews didn’t learn the right lessons from the Holocaust. They should have learnt… that the right of national self-determination was permissible to all peoples but not to them." That your reviewer infers this bizarre anti-Semitic view that I do not hold from my "tone" is deeply irresponsible. Throughout my book I am critical of nationalist identity politics: in America, France, Spain, South Africa, China and many others. This does not mean that I regret the creation of those states, nor do I regret the creation of Israel. It’s not my job to wish established states off the map; Ruth Wajnryb seems to have confused me with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
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November 2, 2011
I’m very excited to be addressing the small topic "What is English?" at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan next Tuesday, November 9th. The event is near-full, but there are still some tickets available, so if you’re interested, get them sooner rather than later!
From the official description:
The language we know today wasn’t born this way, but as a near-random dialect among many a few centuries ago, built up by grammar book writers and dictionary makers since.
Where does a language come from, and what political and social factors are at play in building a language and a community?
