The Science of Baby-Name Trends
What makes a name suddenly pop—and then die? Social scientists and historians have been puzzling over this for decades.
Vulgarity: An Alternative Language of the People
Was Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue the font of all popular culture studies?
Pirating Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in the 1840s
When Parley's Illuminated Library published a pirated version of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens decided he had had enough.
The Incredibly True Story of Fake Headlines
Are you still reading? Editors frequently use this space to include important contextual information about a news story.
Walter Benn Michaels: What’s His Deal?
The literary critic Walter Benn Michaels challenges the prevailing trends of postmodernist theory.
How Linguists Are Using Urban Dictionary
Urban Dictionary continues a long history of recording low-brow language. It’s also a repository of a specific kind of internet immaturity.
What We Lose When We Lose Indigenous Knowledge
By mistaking a culture’s history for fantasy, or by disrespecting the wealth of Indigenous knowledge, we’re keeping up a Columbian, colonial tradition.