language

After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. Jing Tsu, a Yale professor and world-renowned authority on East Asian languages joins us to discuss her new book, "Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern."

Jess McHugh is a writer and researcher whose work has appeared across a variety of national and international publications, including The New York Times,…

Profanity has always been a deliciously vibrant part of our lexicon, an integral part of being human. We know why languages have terms of endearment, of…

Joe Donahue: The "Invention of Miracles" is a biography of Alexander Graham Bell, a revisionist biography, if you will. While best known for inventing the…

The fallout after Michelle Wolf’s roast at the 2018 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, Samantha Bee’s forced apology after calling Ivanka Trump a name I…

If you’re interested in learning a new language or just want to meet people who speak one, a club based in the Capital Region might be able to help you…

The received idea of Native American history as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" has been that…

Across the pond, Brits have scoffed that Americans are ruining the English language. Here in the U.S., Americans fawn over British accents and giggle at…

From an award-winning, “meticulously observant” (The New Yorker) writer, Helen Thorpe, comes a powerful and moving account of how refugee teenagers at a…

Max Décharné is a writer and musician. He writes about music regularly for Mojo magazine, where he is their chief authority on the subject of rockabilly…