From TED, Jay Walker explains why two billion people around the world are trying to learn English. A review of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language by Arika Okrent (and more). Knockabout popular debate appeals to few scholars, but if intellectuals disappear from the public eye, academia may suffer. A review of How to Win a Cosmic War by Reza Aslan. Giles Fraser doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry about the absence of humour in much thinking about religion today. Thumbs down from film critics? Studios find some love on the Internet. What do former beauty queens do once they've healed humanity of all its ills? A review of Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen by David Stubbs. Here's a top 10 list of the planet's evil greens. What would Martin Luther King Jr. — had he been alive today — thought of our latest president’s oratory? A review of History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: From the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan by Reba Soffer. Here's love letter to the Interstate System. A newspaper stole my grandmother: A writer's family history runs smack into the concept of plagiarism in the post-Google age.
