'The verb," says Edward Vajda, linguistic adventurer. "The key to all this is the verbs."

"All this" is Mr. Vajda's announcement of a linguistic link between Asia and the Americas, a discovery that has sent a wave of celebration - and controversy - throughout his field.

Read the rest of the article here. The full original is here.

This is the fourth piece I've published since 1996 about Joe, a friend I made during the summer I lived in Alpine, Texas. It begins like this:

Remember Joe, my old friend from Alpine? He would be 80 years old this year, but he’s long gone. Survived cancer long enough to see the truth of God—he’d finally asked to see a priest after a lifetime of avowed atheism—and watch the twin towers fall. A month later I was driving to Midland for a burial in a place he never wanted. But Joe haunts me still. Especially when the economic news gets bad. I can hear his voice: Do you know what a derivative is, Michael? A liquidity put? Phantom envelopes mailed from Alpine arrived filled with clipped newspaper articles and forecasts of human greed highlighted with yellow marker. The words in my ears: Michael, you need a gun, and cash, small bills.

The rest is here. The original is here.

It's the nouns and verbs that catch our ears first. The complex words, the sediments of Greek and Latin affixes, the long noun phrases, the passive verbs. The surnames of researchers rising and fallen. The journal titles, the acronyms. You can also hear, in that perpetual dance with certainty, the hedges that soften claims ("it was reported that") or strengthen them ("though inconclusive, the data suggests..."). The language of science, with its specialized vocabulary and clipped rhythm, has a distinctive architecture.

The functional elegance of this rarefied speak is uniquely captured in one of its most inconspicuous words: "so."

Read the rest here. The orginal is here.

My review of William Safire's Safire's Political Dictionary starts like this:

Words are the most familiar part of language, because it's words we're most conscious of learning and forgetting. Only certain words, though. Your word-of-the-day calendar will never list "the" or "but." You boast about knowing French numbers, not the pronouns. What draws our fascination is the words for things, actions, properties and the other stuff of the world, not archaic prepositions.

Read the rest here. The original is here.

Most linguists approach language as just another kind of natural fact, like cells or rocks. Most of the intellectual action takes place in chairs, and it ends less often in triumphant discovery than in quiet revelation.

Then there’s Derek Bickerton. One of the field’s old lions, he has spent the last four decades studying pidgins and Creoles and writing a few novels on the side. A self-described macho “street linguist” for whom fieldwork is part pub crawl, Bickerton has a penchant for big ideas and a “total lack of respect for the respectable” that, judging from his new memoir, has put him at odds with bureaucrats and colleagues. “Bastard Tongues” is gossipy, vain and pugilistic — in other words, all the juicy things an academic memoir should be but too rarely is.

Read the rest of the review here. Original is here.

If you think people in America should speak only English, maybe Texas isn’t the state for you. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of people who reported speaking a language that’s not English at home rose by 860,000 to 6.86 million. They now make up 33 percent of the state’s population. (Come to think of it, maybe the U.S. isn’t the country for you: In 2005, 52 million people reported speaking another language, up 5 million since 2000.)

The Modern Language Association has just released colorful charts, based on data from the 2005 U.S. Census American Community Survey, that allow you to pull out data by state for the 30 most frequently spoken languages in the U.S. (All the data and maps are at www.mla.org/map_data.) It’s worth noting that these stats only cover speakers of languages other than English, not their fluency in English, so they capture seventh-generation, bilingual German families in New Braunfels as well as newly arrived Farsi speakers in Houston.

Spanish speakers account for the larger part of the increase in the population of non-English speakers. In Texas, they added about 737,000 non-English speakers. Texas had the second-largest increase, behind California. Even with anti-immigrant sentiment a major concern for the GOP, Spanish speakers gained in 44 states in the same period; only in Mississippi, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Maine, and Vermont did their numbers drop. That’s a 4.1 million-person increase nationwide.

The polyglotting of Texas and the nation seems so inevitable that true connoisseurs of xenophobia should rejoice about the boost in Spanish speakers. Spanish, after all, is a European language. It’s the only European language on the rise; the numbers for French, German, Italian, Greek, and Polish, all spoken by older generations of immigrants, are dropping. Spanish is written in the Roman alphabet, so you can sound out written words even if you don’t know what they mean. And the language has thousands of words recognizable in English because of a shared heritage. MALDEF or LULAC aren’t likely to adopt this as a slogan, but we’ll say it here: Compared with Chinese, Thai, or Urdu, Spanish is practically English.

In an excerpt from her new book published in The Forward last month, Harvard literature professor Ruth Wisse notes that Jews have received 12 of the 105 Nobel Prizes in Literature, writing in seven languages (German, French, Russian, English, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Yiddish).

"Beyond the disproportionate number of Jewish recipients," Wisse wrote,"there are three unusual aspects of this statistic: The multiple languages in which Jews wrote; that there were winners in two Jewish languages; and that one of those languages was Hebrew, which no modern Jewish community had spoken before 1900."

Observers seem to track the nations, not the languages, of the 105 Nobel-winning writers. Yet parsing the list of 25 languages that they wrote in turns up many other gems of disproportion.

For instance, more Scandinavians (13) than Jews (12) have received a Nobel, representing four of six Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic). More dramatically, more writers of English (27) have received awards than writers of other languages; French is second, with 13 awards, then German (12), and Spanish (10). This may reflect the global status (and the colonial legacy) of English and Spanish; French once had such status, too, though all the French winners so far have been French citizens, Belgian citizens, or Samuel Beckett. Only two winners wrote in languages that aren't attached to a nation, Yiddish and Occitan (which is a regional language spoke in the Provence region of France).

It's worth noting that a large number of recipients (31) wrote in Romance languages, the linguistic descendants of Latin, more than you'd expect from the relatively small number of these languages and the global population of people who speak them. Of the top 20 languages spoken in the world, ranked by the number of native speakers, only four — Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian — are Romance languages. The Nobels are even more skewed toward Germanic languages. Fifty-one winners wrote in Germanic languages, only two of which (English and German) are in the world's top 20.

If you look at the writing systems the Nobel winners used, that's also out of balance. Ninety-two winners wrote in the Roman alphabet, which is used to represent fewer native languages in the world than other writing systems like Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, and Devanagari. Fourteen Nobel winners used other writing systems were used by Nobel winners, the most in Cyrillic (by five Russians and the Serbo-Croat Ivo Andrić). Given the Internet, other technology, and the global status of English, it's probably true, though, that most people in the world who can read know the Roman alphabet.

To find a breakdown that begins to seem fair, you have to go so broadly as to break down the winners by language families. More recipients of Nobel prizes wrote in Indo-European languages (97) than in non-Indo-European languages (eight), which were Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Hebrew. Yet even though Indo-European languages make up a major group of languages, they dominate the awards to an extreme.

Parsing this list of languages so assiduously reveals one thing: there's nothing proportionate about any of it. The winners have overwhelmingly been Europeans who use the Roman alphabet to write their Romance or Germanic languages. To the degree that such writers were also Jewish, they rode the coattails of this larger trend. In a similar way, it's not conceivable that the Scandinavians are overwhelmingly more verbally transcendent, or that Germanic languages inherently produce better literature, or that the history of Indo-European languages makes them essentially more Nobel-worthy. Using the Nobel prize list to show the literary or linguistic prowess of any particular group (as Ruth Wisse does for Jews in her essay) is akin to judging human appetites from the menu at a sushi restaurant.

The Nobel is to world literature what the World Series is to world baseball: a slice of literature that's very, very good, from writers who are very, very good, but that is, in the end, unrepresentative. Of course, nothing says they have to be representative. When an Asian country starts handing out prestigious prizes in literature to world writers, no one will be especially surprised if the prizes favor Asian writers, or those who don't write with the Roman alphabet.

It's too soon to tell, but maybe things are changing in Stockholm: In the last ten years, a third of the recipients have written in non-Indo-European languages, almost one-half of those since the awards were first presented in 1901. If that change is real, it might become harder and harder for some of us to share something with the languages of the writers who win. Even if it's not, it shows how wrapping a Nobel around Babel — the world in all its linguistic diversity — has always been a monumental task.

Read My Slips: Speech Errors Show How Language Is Processed

Researchers are analyzing spoonerisms and other slips of the tongue to help understand how humans--and even apes--can comprehend and use language

Kanzi, a 27-year-old bonobo, knows the difference between a blackberry and a hot dog. But sometimes, when researchers asked him to touch the abstract visual symbol, called a lexigram, that means blackberry, he touched the lexigram for hot dog, blueberries, or cherries instead.

Kanzi's errors weren't random mistakes, nor an indication of apes' language limitations, says Heidi Lyn, a comparative cognitive scientist at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, U.K. Rather, they show the complex way in which his mind had organized the lexigrams. For example, if Kanzi made a mistake when asked for "blackberry," he was more likely than chance to choose a lexigram for another fruit, much as you or I might say "red" instead of "black," says Lyn, whose paper on Kanzi's mistakes was published online in Animal Cognition in April and will appear in print later this year or early next.

Analyzing errors for insight into the covert mental processes of animals is a new direction for a technique that language scientists have used for 40 years to study language processing in humans....

To read the full piece, go here.

I have one word for you glib, fluent people, you who sound smooth, scripted, and rehearsed, who execute each sentence with crisp precision, because your success may be at stake:

“Um.”

Here and there you can catch a new attitude about this and other hesitations to the ideal, uninterrupted flow of speaking. Barack Obama’s main political consultant, David Axelrod, likes to record video of people on the street for political ads; they inevitably say “uh” or “um,” which he likes, he says, because it’s more authentic.

Read the rest of this piece here.

Jan Freeman, the regular language columnist for the Boston Globe, handed me her space when she went on vacation. This was my piece...

Wildness. We go outdoors, to the mountains or the ocean, to encounter the untamed and untameable. But this quality can be found closer to home, too -- our spoken sentences are full of wildness, right under the threshold of our attention.

I'm talking, of course, about verbal blunders.

To read the rest of this piece, go here.

The bartender may well be the loneliest person in this hotel on San Antonio’s Riverwalk. Just feet away from the darkened bar, people mill around the lobby with plastic glasses of lemonade in hand. “Oh, they’re all Baptists,” says Ben Cole, a 31-year-old pastor from Arlington, Texas. Or as he pronounces it, Babdists. Cole points out the dean of a Baptist seminary, then a man in a dark suit who Cole says is the armed bodyguard of a prominent seminary president. We’ve crowded into chairs with another pastor, Wade Burleson from Oklahoma, his wife Rachelle, and a pastor from Alabama, C.B. Scott, who knows hired muscle when he sees it. That used to be Scott’s line of work. It’s Sunday afternoon, June 10, and talk turns to what to watch on television tonight: the first game of the NBA finals or the last episode of “The Sopranos.”

“Actually, I’ve learned a lot about how to be a Southern Baptist from ‘The Sopranos,’” Cole says. “Hold your friends close but your enemies closer. The person who sets up the meeting between you and your enemy is working for your enemy. You know, the whole ‘Godfather’ thing.”

To read the rest of the article, go here.

Linguists have, in general, done a poor job of articulating why people should care that half of the approximately 6,900 languages spoken on the planet will be extinct in a century. And despite heaping scoops of truism and sentimentality atop exoticism, journalists haven't done much better. As for me, afraid of having to dip into the sentimentality and the fetishizing of Last Things, I've kind of been repulsed by the topic and have never written about it.

Until now, that is.

To read the rest of the piece, go here.

In the dim, humid basement of his Maryland home, Michael Scherer, a tall 38-year-old with the long, square beard of a mandolin player or a monk, leans toward a rebuilt Russian tube microphone, desperate for silence so he can begin recording a 200-year-old essay by an American founding father. Even in the makeshift studio he has constructed, with thick blankets hanging from nails in the joists and the basement windows plugged with fiberglass, the sounds of lawnmowers, car alarms, birds, air conditioners, and children kicking balls in the street still intrude. “I have to hold on a minute here—there’s a, there’s a truck,” he says. A few seconds later, the truck passes, and he reads in his deep, resonant voice, “The Federalist.” He stops, clears his throat, and begins again. “The Federalist, No. 19.”

Read the rest here. And please note this correction.

Immersive language learning in a realistic environment with native-speaking teachers will soon be available online, in the popular virtual world Second Life. Starting in September, a language school called Languagelab.com will offer English and Spanish classes. The cost of the classes will be comparable to those in the real world, which can cost several hundred U.S. dollars for a semester-long course. "You won't be taking classes in LanguageLab because it's a lot cheaper," says LanguageLab founder David Kaskel, an entrepreneur and PhD candidate at the Center for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London. "We think it's a lot better than in a physical space because there's more you can offer than in a classroom."

To read the rest of the piece, go here.

It’s a couple of days after Mel Gibson’s Mayan fantasy Apocalypto opened in the United States, and my wife and I are following a young Mayan man, Agosto, through the Yucatán jungle. A tour guide and biologist, he’s showing us a group of spider monkeys that live on the Punta Laguna preserve run by his village. It’s late afternoon, and while rain clouds gather, Agosto offers to show us around so the other guides can go home. As we walk down the slippery paths, he tells us about the place in a Spanish that’s remarkably easy to understand, probably because, as for us, it’s his second language; his first language is Yucatec Maya, the language that’s notoriously used for what little dialogue there is in Gibson’s bloody confection.

To read the rest, go here.

I spent years learning to diagram sentences from Catholic nuns, a biographical fact I share with Kitty Burns Florey, who explains the history of sentence diagramming as well as its appeal in her new book, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, just published by the upstarts at Melville House.

For Florey, diagramming was an experience with grammar that spoke to her nascent copyeditor. I liked diagramming sentences for a distinctly different reason: it's kind of kinky.

To read the full essay, go here.

The first painting I ever paid money for I don’t actually own, though it’s hanging in my living room. Let me explain.

A couple of years ago, a painting called “Chicken” caught my eye in a gallery in Sacramento. I’d gone there for a six-week consulting job that erased my money woes, lifted me out of depression, and probably saved my life. Grateful, and wanting to mark the transition, I decided to buy something that would remind me of this moment—a pot or a set of pots, or maybe even a painting.

To read the rest, go here.

Ten years from now, jokey newspaper articles about corporate follies will mention why the Chevy Nova didn't sell in Latin America, the hilarity that ensued when company names (e.g., Pen Island) became URLs, and how Google waded into the mighty river of language one day and drowned.

Google has launched an effort to keep people from using their name as an all-purpose verb. According to Michael Krantz on the Google blog, they still think that saying something like "I googled it" is acceptable if it's the alternative to "I looked it up on Google." If you used some other search engine, however, "google" as a verb is "bad. Very, very bad," writes Krantz. "You can only 'Google' on the Google search engine. If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to 'search' on Yahoo or any other search engine."

Pardon me if I don't feel chastised for googling on yahoo. I'd rather celebrate and encourage the linguistic process that turns a name into a verb, and I think Google should too. Here's why.

To read the full story, go here.

Part of the real history of English and Spanish in Texas...

There is a concoction of self-satisfied myth and ignorance about English that is served up at Sunday services, on the floor of the Texas Legislature, in newspaper editorials, and in political party platforms with the alacrity of nachos at a high school football game. This myth holds that English in Texas was God-given, inevitable, and inherently superior. In the immortal words of Ma Ferguson, “If the King’s English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me.” Thanks to Mel Gibson, everybody knows that Jesus didn’t speak English but Aramaic. (He probably knew Hebrew and Greek as well.) Maybe if Gibson had made a movie about the multilingual Alamo, where German, French, and Spanish-speaking men died alongside those who spoke English, it would be easier to point out the obvious and make it stick: Texas is populated by recent immigrants and the descendants of immigrants, slaves, and conquered natives....

For the full story, go here.

Serious linguistic scholars don't usually write about talking dogs and street signs -- not for publication, anyway. But that is what they do on Language Log, a funny, wide-ranging blog that provides up-to-the-minute linguistic commentary written for a wider audience.

Now three years old, Language Log, at itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog, attracts 5,000 daily visitors and is now partly captured in a book, ''Far from the Madding Gerund'' (William, James & Co.), which reprints some posts by Language Log's founders, Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Geoff Pullum, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

To read the full story, go here.

The totally charming Muse Magazine, a science magazine for kids, reprised my polyglot story in an abridged version. My article isn't online, unfortunately. But you can read the entire piece, originally published in the New Scientist, in the archive here.

How Being is making it easier for foreigners to learn its language

Move over, English. There's a new language bidding for global status. With 1 billion chatterers, Mandarin already outstrips English as the most-spoken language in the world. However, nearly all the speakers are, well, Chinese. But now, Beijing is aiming to change that by promoting the study of Chinese around the world...

The rest of this article isn't online. Yet.

Compared to sitting in a classroom or language lab, learning a foreign tongue from a podcast doesn't feel much like work. In the case of Chinesepod, a free daily podcast from Shanghai with lessons in Mandarin Chinese, language study is actually fun. When I tell people I listen to Chinesepod, they say, "Oh, I'd really love to do that in Spanish/French/Japanese, but I see all these language podcasts on the Web and I don't know how to choose." Here's a piece of advice: Find ones that sound like Chinesepod.

Read the rest here.

Inside Beijing's global campaign to make Chinese the number one language in the world.

A light snow is falling outside the windows of Cyrus H. McCormick School in southwest Chicago, but the second graders in Room 203 are not distracted from their lesson. May Cheung, an energetic teacher from Hong Kong, holds a cup to her lips and asks, "Wo he shemma?" (What am I drinking?) A forest of arms go up. "Cha! Cha!" (Tea!) An hour later, Cheung has kindergartners counting to 27 in Mandarin as she hands out Chinese New Year hong bao, the red envelopes that promise wealth, abundance, and good fortune. For most of the kids in this Mexican-American neighborhood, Mandarin is their third language - after Spanish and English.

To read the full story, go here.

If you’re male, you probably acquired, when you reached the brink of adolescence, a machine that burned gasoline or shot bullets, and with it you risked your own life and endangered the lives of others. It took you far from home and gave you an early taste of adulthood’s dark cracks. When I was 14, I acquired a typewriter. An aunt of mine, a high school teacher, had rescued it from her school’s defunct typing classroom in Michigan, and in doing so she rescued me, too. With a manual Olympia typewriter as my companion for the next 10 years, I endangered myself and others and let it take me far from home so it could give me an early taste of adulthood’s dark cracks.

Read the rest of the piece and see photos of my typewriters here.

For the first time in 12 years, the International Phonetic Association is
amending its official alphabet. A sound called the labiodental flap will be
granted its own letter, one that looks something like a v with a hook.

The sound, a buzz sometimes capped by a faint pop, is present in more than 70 African languages. It is produced by the lower lip moving back and forward, flapping on the inside of the upper teeth.

To read the full story, go here.

Last fall, the College Board asked 14,000 high schools in the United States
how many of them planned to offer Advanced Placement (AP) courses in Chinese in the fall of 2006, in preparation for the first Chinese language AP exam in 2007. The Board expected a few hundred to say yes, but jaws hit the floor when 2,347 schools said they were interested in Chinese. For those who believe that American children should learn more languages, especially those of economic competitors like China, this is good news. But there's one problem: We don't have enough qualified teachers. The system would need an estimated 2,000 more officially certified Chinese language teachers before all the interested schools could offer AP Chinese. A 2004 report by the Chinese Language Association of Secondary-Elementary Schools counted only 110 high school-level teachers.

To read the full story, go here.

WHEN Carol Padden first visited Al-Sayyid, a small Bedouin village in the Negev desert in Israel, her expectations were not high. Padden, a linguist at the University of California, San Diego, first went there in 2000 to study a newly discovered sign language. She expected to find something rather unsophisticated – an isolated group of deaf people who had invented a "home sign", a crude set of gestures and signs to allow them to communicate with each other.

But when she met her first signers, she realised at once that the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language had made the leap beyond home signing...

To read the full article, go here.

Among the facts in the new edition of Ethnologue, a sprawling compendium of the world's languages, are that 119 of them are sign languages for the deaf and that 497 are nearly extinct. Only one artificial language has native speakers. (Yes, it's Esperanto.) Most languages have fewer than a million speakers, and the most linguistically diverse nation on the planet is Papua New Guinea. The least diverse? Haiti.

Opening the 1,200-page book at random, one can read about Garo, spoken by 102,000 people in Bangladesh and 575,000 in India, which is written with the Roman alphabet, or about Bernde, spoken by 2,000 people in Chad. Ethnologue, which began as a 40-language guide for Christian missionaries in 1951, has grown so comprehensive it is a source for academics and governments, and the occasional game show.

To read the full story, go here.

It's been years since Timothy Sellers, then a budding naturalist, licked a slug. Now he writes pop songs about scientists who were less absurd about their empiricism. Thirteen of them appear on ''26 Scientists: Volume 1, Anning to Malthus,'' a CD that Mr. Sellers and his Los-Angeles-based band, Artichoke, recently released.

That's Mary Anning, the 18th-century Briton who assembled fossils to support her family and who first discovered the ichthyosaur. As in Artichoke's other songs, the one about Malthus mixes biographical detail (''Thomas Robert Malthus/the second son of eight kids/grew up with a stutter'') with intellectual history (''with the revolution/came a lot of high hopes/Malthus took a good look/uh-oh uh-oh) and the primordial rock chords of G, D and C (''la la la la la/la la la la la/la la la la la'').

For the full article, go here.

THE news arrived as an unexpected email. "Sir," it began. "First, let me apologise for bothering you, but I saw an article you wrote and had to write." The writer, N, went on to describe how his grandfather, a Sicilian who had never gone to school, could learn languages with such remarkable ease that by the end of his life he could speak 70 of them, and read and write in 56. (To preserve the writer's anonymity and that of his family, N is not his real initial.)

To read the full article, go here.

To read my previous Texas Observer piece about George Lakoff, go here.

Whoever wins on November 2, the fight over reality and political language will continue

The conventional view of politics says that people are swayed by words, images, or facts. But that’s false, according to Frank Luntz and George Lakoff, two of the most successful practitioners of political reality construction. They believe that increasingly political forces will clash less over reality than over how it’s shaped.

To read the full article, go here.

Jonah Ottensoser leans over the white stovetop to tweak its settings, giving me a full view of the black yarmulke on his head. But he's not about to bake a cake. Ottensoser, a large genial man with a gray beard, is an engineer, not a cook, and he's brought me to the kitchen in his Baltimore office to show off his proud creation: a stove that Jewish consumers will buy just to please God.

From sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, Orthodox Jews are forbidden to work, write, and drive. In all, 39 activities are off-limits to those complying with the Torah's fourth commandment, to keep the Sabbath holy. In the home, that means no cooking or fire lighting - or its modern analog, moving electricity through a circuit.

To read the full article, go here.

'Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin,'' the three little pigs taunted the big bad wolf. When Anna Van Valin was 4 years old, she pronounced the phrase ''not by the chair of my hinny hin hin'' and unwittingly advanced the study of children's language when she did.

Anna's talk was often observed. Her mother, Dr. Jeri Jaeger, is a linguist at the State University of New York at Buffalo who collects the speech slips that children make in order to understand how they learn language. For two decades Dr. Jaeger has collected data wherever she found available children (and willing parents): preschools, the supermarket checkout line and at home from her three children, Anna, Alice and Bobby (now 22, 20 and 18).

For the full article, go here.

For 36 years the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) quietly published a quirky monthly newsletter called Microgram for a small audience of forensic chemists. It was "law enforcement restricted," which meant you could obtain it only if you were a law enforcement official, a government investigator, or a forensic scientist. As far as the public was concerned, it was a secret. In January 2003 DEA officials started to make Microgram publicly available via the Web (at www.usdoj.gov/dea/programs/forensicsci/microgram/bulletins_index.html), where it joined a vast sea of information about illicit drugs: how to get them, how to use them, why to avoid them, why laws controlling them should be either tightened or reformed.

To read the full article, go here.

I am sitting in a cubicle, talking into a telephone headset, asking rote questions of people who have applied for life insurance. Today it's a woman, mid-20s, somewhere in New Hampshire.

"Occupation?"

"I'm self-employed."

"What industry do you work in?"

"Entertainment."

Her obliqueness is costing me money, because I get paid per interview. But I play along. "Who do you entertain?"

"Men."

"Men? Or gentlemen?"

I could hear her smirk. "Gentlemen," she replied coolly.

To read the rest of this article, go here.

BY day, Jeremy Kenney, 33, fixes Web sites and databases for the Republican National Committee. By night, on weekends and in his spare time he dabbles in an emerging form of political marketing: the online game.

Part advertisement, part journalism, part cartoon, such games put fun in the service of ideology -- with varying sophistication.

For the full article, go here.

The history and habits of a not-quite-extinct-yet Austin species

Do you know that little stone house at Eighth and Waller streets, set up high on a stone retaining wall, behind a stand of agaves and redbud? That's where I live. That's the house I'll be leaving soon. I write to deliver a piece of news; in the last two months, my landlord, Ramiro Diaz, and his wife, Mary, have both died, and the estate is selling the house (asking price: $180,000). When it passes into new hands, there will be one less great cheap rental house in Austin.

To read the full article, go here.

Got a good idea? Now think for a moment where you got it. A sudden spark of inspiration? A memory? A dream?

Most likely, says Ronald S. Burt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, it came from someone else who hadn't realized how to use it.

''The usual image of creativity is that it's some sort of genetic gift, some heroic act,'' Mr. Burt said. ''But creativity is an import-export game. It's not a creation game.''

For the full article, go here.

In the new issue of the magazine The Next American City, Richard Florida, the author of the bestselling book The Rise of the Creative Class – in which Austin plays a prominent role as a model "creative Mecca" – has answered his critics. Or so claims a breathless press release from the magazine, which is based in New York City. "His new work finds that creative regions generate not only more jobs, but also higher salaries, more innovations, and more high tech growth," gushes the release.

To read the full review, go here.

MARY ANN BUCKLES heard from a friend in her amateur choir that her 20-year-old dissertation on a video game was now considered a classic. ''I thought, classic dissertation?'' Ms. Buckles recalled. ''They hated my dissertation.''

The friend was referring to an article in Circuits on Feb. 26 that mentioned Ms. Buckles, who is widely credited with having written the first academic study of the aesthetics of a video game. In 1985, Ms. Buckles -- or Dr. Buckles, to use a title she does not use -- earned her doctorate in German literature for a dissertation titled ''Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame 'Adventure.'''

For the rest of the article, go here.

OVER the last two years, Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist employed by Intel Research, has visited 100 households in 19 cities in seven countries in Asia and the Pacific to study how people use technology. Twenty gigabytes of digital photos later -- along with 206,000 air miles, 19 field notebooks, two camera batteries, five umbrellas, three hats, two doses of antimalarial drugs and one pair of her favorite sandals -- she has come back with some provocative questions about technology, culture and design.

For the full article, go here.

SOME day Dexter Palmer might be a professor of 20th-century American video games, editing The Annals of Computer Game Research with his good friend and colleague Roger Bellin, who by then might hold the Grand Theft Auto Endowed Chair at a prestigious university.

Right now, Dr. Palmer and Mr. Bellin analyze video games only on the side. Dr. Palmer, a 29-year-old with a Ph.D. in English, writes test questions by day for the Educational Testing Service (and by night reworks his dissertation on James Joyce, William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon into a book).

For the full article, go here.

If you were hearing this instead of reading it, you might notice a pause here and there tucked between the phrases, filled with a familiar, soft hum or rumble -- an um or uh.

Though a bane to teachers of public speaking, people around the world fill pauses in their own languages as naturally as watermelons have seeds. In Britain they say uh but spell it er, just as they pronounce er in butter.

To read the full article, go here.

A SOCIOLOGIST among geeks and a geek among sociologists, Danah Boyd has 278 friends who link her to 1.1 million others.

So says Friendster.com, whose millions of members have transformed it from a dating site into a free-for-all of connectedness where new social rules are born of necessity. A 25-year-old graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, Ms. Boyd studies Friendster, hovering above the fray with a Web log called Connected Selves (www.zephoria.org/snt) and interviewing Friendster users. Her irrepressible observations have made her a social-network guru for the programmers and venture capitalists who swarm around Friendster and its competitors.

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THE YOUNG MAN CLAIMED HE WAS FLEEING THE TALIBAN. They were killing all the Hazara, a Shi'a Muslim minority, in his village in Afghanistan, he said. He and his brothers had spent their days hiding in the mountains, but the Taliban came from an unexpected direction and caught him. The Taliban tried to force him to pray with them and struck him when he refused. He managed to escape, and his father, a poor wheat farmer, had paid a smuggler more than $3,000 to transport him to Sydney via Pakistan. Or so the refugee in his mid-20s told an official at Australia's Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs during his interview for asylum.

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MICHAEL EVERSON, a 40-year-old typographer who lives in Dublin, considers himself blessed because he has found his life's work: to be an alphabetician to all the peoples of the world. Mr. Everson's largest project to date -- a contribution to a new version of Unicode 4.0, an international standard for computerizing text -- is cementing his reputation.

His mission has taken him to Kabul, Afghanistan, and Helsinki, Finland; to Beijing, Tokyo and Redmond, Wash. His Dublin house is a shrine to his obsession with every writing system that humans are known to have created -- 148 of which Mr. Everson says he can use for writing his name. In the hallway is an icon of the saints Cyril and Methodius (Cyril is often credited with inventing the Cyrillic alphabet) and a page from a Maghreb manuscript from North Africa.

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Hermetic Studies has been marginalized academia since the enlightenment. Can a UT professor and grad student editing a journal change that?

You might think that a periodical devoted to the study of alchemical thought from ancient Egypt to Harry Potter could easily get money -- when the universe resonates with the harmony of aligned planets, go salvage some hubcaps, pop-tops, and old bullets and transmute them into gold to pay the printer. Barring that, why not ride the pop-culture groove that's allowed J.K. Rowling, James Redfield, and Umberto Eco to make gold of their own?

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This was a eulogy for Jim Sledd, a professor in the English Department who was retired by the time I was a graduate student but famous for his crankiness, his book on dictionaries, and his fight against bureaucrats and racists. I only met him once, when a fellow grad student, Chris Pearce, and I went to interview him. I talk about meeting him in the piece, which I did for the Observer--Sledd used to write for the Observer and was a friend of former editor Michael King.

Teaching writing to freshman college students–teaching writing to anyone–is like digging fencepost holes on the prairie. It is necessary work: without a hole there’s no post; without a post, there’s no fence; without a fence–everything falls to entropy. It’s also endless work. After you dig one hundred thousand holes, the horizon’s still no closer, and somehow the feral-minded children popping out of the undergrowth seem wilder, and younger, than ever.

The late James Sledd, who died on July 21, 2003, a professor emeritus of English at The University of Texas and longtime contributor to the Observer, dug many fencepost holes himself, first as a graduate student at Texas from 1939 to 1945, then as a professor from 1964 onward until 1985...

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The children of activists struggle with their parents' choices

One spring morning in 1989, Rob Meeropol woke up with a political vision bright in his mind. Since the mid-1970s he’d been leading an effort to reopen the case of his parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for conspiring to steal atomic secrets. The existential crisis this caused him was acute: Mired in the past, he was too busy to spend time with his own wife and children. To make matters worse, he also worked, unhappily, as an estate attorney "in the belly of American business," as he puts it. He wanted to be politically active but he wasn’t sure how. He wanted to be a son of the Rosenbergs, but in his own way.

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An interview with SWT's Arturo Mancha, whose novel in progess was a recent break-in casualty

Arturo Mancha would have called the theft of his debut novel five years in the writing devastating. Titled Auroboros, it would be the diamond in his sky. "The way I think about it," the 26 year-old writer said, "is if a person could lay out all his or her works on a table, this novel would be the centerpiece of my table. Everything else would be second in pride." Two years ago, he joined the creative writing MFA program at Southwest Texas State University to get advice writing what he intended to be his only novel. For the past five years, "it's brought me to brink of examining everything I've ever known," says the 26-year-old writer. "I've lost friends, and made friends because of it. It's been physically and emotionally draining." He intended to finish school, publish the book, and then move back to Eagle Pass to teach writing at the community college and help his family run their print shop and party-rental store.

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In the City of Ideas, the people with ideas are the ones with day jobs

Jill Bedgood cracked one day, in a bathroom down the hall from her office. It was 1983. After two years of graduate work in studio art -- the first time in her life she'd focused on her own art -- the sculptor found herself working clerical jobs, again, to pay the bills, and scraping up time at night and on weekends, again, to make art. She had to have a Day Job.

For Bedgood a better job as an art instructor didn't exist; no one in her class had one. "That life I'd lived as a grad student, that life of doing my art every day, was gone," she remembers. "I thought I was going to go crazy." She left her desk, locked herself in the bathroom, beat the wall, and screamed.

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You can tell a lot about a profession by the fantasies of its members. Academics, I have found, secretly want to be freelance magazine writers. For a long time, while I worked on my doctorate in English, I suspected as much. But once I became a journalist myself, I attracted sotto voce confessions. They want my job.

Does this mean they want the financial risk, the rejection, and the uncertainties of the market? Of course not. They do, however, want the romance of writing, the freedom of freelancing. Some of my friends from graduate school, now safe in tenure-track jobs, tell me they wish they knew how to write, because they want their ideas consumed out of love, not obligation, and they want their research to matter in the world. I understand that perfectly well. That's why I do what I do.

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"Just look at me," says Charlie Smoke. "You can tell from my round eyes, I'm not Asian. You can tell from my straight hair, I'm not African. You can tell from my dark scrotum that I'm not white. There's only one thing left: I'm an Indian."

If only it were that simple. Smoke is a 40-year-old resident of Regina, Saskatchewan, who identifies himself as a member of the Lakota Nation, an informal association of North American Indians. Yet he has no birth certificate, no passport�no official form of identification whatsoever. And over the past year, his identity has become a matter of considerable dispute.

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Every group of people, every place, has it own economy of belonging, and in each new place, in order to show you’re not dangerous, you have to spend the local currency. Otherwise the locals may murder you, or refuse to feed you, or somehow shun you according to their custom. Every summer for about five summers, my younger brother worked at a hotel on an island off the New Hampshire coast, which you get to by taking a ferry from Portsmouth 10 miles out until the mainland appears as a sliver of land. Then, just as you think you’re headed for open ocean, the great white bulk of the island and its assorted clapboard outbuildings suddenly rise up, stretched across the rock of the island and its primrose thickets.

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In April 2001, a Californian named James Johnson began to suspect that the owners of an apartment he wanted to rent in the San Francisco Bay Area were ignoring his phone calls because he was African-American. Johnson hadn't met the landlords in person or told them about his race. But he had spoken to them by telephone, and he assumed that they could identify his race from the way he spoke. So he sued, alleging racial discrimination.

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The Slow Work of Evaluating Abstinence Education

Does abstinence-only sex education work? Buzz Pruitt and Pat Goodson, two professors of health education at Texas A&M, can’t say. Not yet, anyway. In the last two years, they have received nearly $360,000 from the Texas Department of Health to do a rigorous scientific evaluation of the state’s 31 so-called "abstinence contractors." "Every-one wants to know the bottom line," Pruitt said. "We don’t have that information yet."

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Team Sanchez Ponders What It Means To Be Hispanic

Given that language and politics are so linked, it’s remarkable that linguists and political professionals rarely mingle. So when George Lakoff, a Berkeley linguist, traveled to Austin for a day-long meeting with Democratic political consultants back in August, he was anxious. "I’m the novice," he said at the time. "They know their candidate, they’ve been around for years." Lakoff was being a little demure–it was hardly his first foray into electoral politics and public affairs. Lakoff’s no stranger to rhetorical battles, either; he survived fierce infighting among linguists in the late 1960s and 1970s; he later helped shape a popular discipline called cognitive linguistics. And his 1996 book, Moral Politics, applies cognitive linguistics to the political world.

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Eyesore, money pit, or romantic ruin, Intel's Ozymandias awaits its fate

Ozymandias I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert ... Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817

Gripes and grackles love the Intel building, but the grackles know something the gripes ignore: Before it was an eyesore, a civic embarrassment, a symbol of Austin's high tech downturn and the costs of Smart Growth, or a sober allusion to other buildings' grimmer fates, it was a building -- what the Intel Corporation calls "AN-2."

What kind of building? Five stories of naked concrete, whose upper columns are tufted with rebar, AN-2 now looks like a cutaway illustration from some David Macaulay book on How Skyscrapers Are Built. Its raw bulk springs out in the sky, night or day. An architect would call AN-2's current appearance a "wireframe": a three-dimensional wire model of a structure that's been peeled apart to show its crucial innards. With the final four stories unbuilt and no exterior, AN-2 is so spindly it resembles a parking garage, a prepubescent one. AN-2, the flat-chested parking garage.

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Televangelist James Robison Weighs In On the WTC

No one in the Bush administration seems to want to talk about how U.S. foreign policy has put us in the crosshairs of terrorism. Yet, at least one dissenting note has been sounded by an unlikely source: Bush spiritual advisor James Robison, the Euless televangelist who speaks and prays with the President on a regular basis. In a September 15 New York Times story, Robison outlines an argument worthy of Noam Chomsky. "Arrogance in relationships with Third World and foreign countries, plundering other countries for resources while supporting their despots, and indifference to others’ poverty and pain," has brought us to this juncture, the Times paraphrased Robison as saying.

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Austin-based Stratfor Attempts to Make Smart Money on Global Intelligence

On November 22, 1999, an Austin company called Stratfor sent a bold e-mail to 15,000 recipients around the globe. Its subject line: "Philippine President's Days Are Numbered." In the brisk prose that has become its trademark, Stratfor's evaluation of the political situation in Manila contained bad news for the fortunes of actor-turned politician Joseph Estrada. "Whether removed by force or by the broad coalition arrayed against him," the message concluded, "Estrada is unlikely to fulfill his six-year term in office." The forecast was part of a "Global Intelligence Update" (or GIU) that Stratfor produced daily and sent to its registered subscribers for free.

In Manila, the forecast was used by anti-Estrada forces to mobilize popular opposition. Meanwhile, Estrada supporters dismissed the Stratfor analysis as mere Internet dross, unattributed and unsourced. Most dangerously, they said, no one had paid for it. "It's like the crank predictions about the end of the world, which we read from time to time," Senator Francisco Tatad told the Manila Standard. "It is rubbish, pure and simple."

Stratfor -- the company's name is a contraction of "Strategic Forecasting" -- was doing for the Philippines what it does for every region of the world: vacuuming up all far-flung bits of information from Internet sources, analyzing them...

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Dueling Media Campaigns About Sexual Abstinence Let Everybody Off the Hook

It’s difficult to be enthusiastic while you’re telling teens not to have sex, much less look hip and cool about it, which is why the Texas Department of Health spent about $395,000 producing the public service announcements that anchor its new sexual abstinence media campaign, "Zip-It!," now showing in five major markets in the state. The TV spot (there’s a radio spot, a logo, a t-shirt, and a keychain, too) is recognizable by the slogan, "You don’t have to prove your love." The words flash like a marquee to the beat of a hip-hop song, while a camera peers through a fisheye lens at a DJ scratching a record in a narrow booth. According to Sherry Matthews, whose Austin-based Sherry Matthews Advertising Agency researched and produced "Zip-It!" for TDH, the music was developed by Los Angeles hip-hop producer Milk Chocolate, and Rolling Tiger films shot the video on the same set as the ‘La Vida Loca’ video. The biggest threat to "Zip-It!" is that teens will feel patronized by it, so no "Zip-It!" material identifies the sponsor as TDH, and a "Zip-It!" website won’t be linked to TDH’s. "The point was to make this something that’s really hip and cool for the kids, to position it as something they can really buy into," Matthews says.

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The Bush Dyslexicon
by Mark Crispin Miller
W. W. Norton
304 pages, $24.95.

Each time we hear President George W. Bush open his mouth, we should hear the sound of rushing air, argues media critic Mark Crispin Miller in his new book, The Bush Dyslexicon. A 76-page essay tacked onto 180 pages of verité quotes and transcripts, organized by categories ("Kosovo," "Bob Jones University"), it's a compendium of Bush's best-loved (and most feared) linguistic manglings and, more importantly, an attempt to make sense of what they mean. Fervent W. bashers will buy Miller's line. But Miller actually knows very little about language, and the damage he does with it makes one wonder if the partisan advantage has actually been served.

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Will Harrell and the New Texas ACLU Lay Siege to the Lege

For an organization that limped through the Nineties with virtually no presence at the Legislature, the Texas state office of the American Civil Liberties Union is enjoying something of a progressive lobbying renaissance this session. ACLU-supported legislation is thus far doing well. As of last week, a bill prohibiting racial profiling by police had passed the Senate, and has good prospects in the House. A historic (if somewhat limited) reform of the state's criminal defense system for indigent defendants is also likely to pass. Two bills on rules of evidence in drug cases are a little shakier, but have moved forward. A bill requiring public access to the disciplinary records of police officers is expected to pass, and another one requiring that the testimony of police informants be corroborated by other sources will pass out of Senate committee soon. And two House bills calling for a moratorium on the death penalty -- unlikely to pass, but receiving surprisingly wide support -- will move to a floor debate soon, as will a similar Senate bill.

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Laura Dunn takes Green back to Louisiana's Cancer Alley

We’ve been on the road to Baton Rouge for an hour when Laura Dunn, a 25-year-old student filmmaker dressed in bell bottoms and platform shoes, snaps in a CD playing "Gasoline Dreams," a song by hip-hop band OutKast. "All right! all right! all right! all right! all right!" the song begins, prompting a burst of dancing in the front seat from Dunn, who will prove on this trip that she is as willful as she is energetic. Her light brown hair bobs, and she laughs, which she does easily. "Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline!" the song booms. Suddenly the dancing stops and Laura is still. "Hey, that could be our theme song," she says to David Carroll, a 34-year-old musician who approached her after a screening and said he wanted to help. He does media relations; today’s he’s driving to Baton Rouge. "Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline. That’s so perfect."

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If you are a 17-year-old boy and your sister who is 16 has a friend with long legs and big brown eyes, you’ll behave. Right? Damn. If you come home and they’re perched on the couch, you’ll be polite as something newly hatched, especially if your sister’s friend is gangly herself, a girl who hasn’t grown into her beauty yet, a girl who isn’t sure how to put her hands but knows how bright her eyes should go. It makes her interesting. A girl who can just adjust her volume but doesn’t know what music she broadcasts. Which is more than okay. She might not know it yet. But she will.

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Looking for Meaning at the Texas Books Festival

Around 2 o’clock that afternoon, the protesters filed loosely up the Capitol ground’s main drive, and that’s when the Texas Book Festival started to get spicy. It was Saturday, day of rest and leisure, we were there for books, and they were mounting the Capitol steps, about 300 strong, waving signs and clapping their hands. What they were protesting wasn’t immediately obvious (the death penalty? the drug war?), and mixed among tourists, bewildered festival-goers, and men in military uniforms standing near Veteran’s Day wreaths, they seemed out of place–until I heard their chants, led by a woman with a bullhorn: "Every vote counts! Every vote counts!" After they massed in front of the Capitol, clean cut and mostly hempless, I recognized them: Despite all the sharp anti-Republican pith of their placards, they looked all the world like Nader voters hungover with guilt by association.

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How Books Can Save American Democracy

Citizen Critics
By Rosa Everly
University of Illinois Press
189 pages, $39.95.

In an appendix to her provocative new book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly gives her reader what seem to be odd instructions: call a radio talk show, make an argument, and support it. "What I’m asking you to do is to enter the entertainment-oriented sphere of local talk radio and use it to make an argument about something you feel requires comment," she writes. The assignment isn’t for the reader, it’s one Eberly gives her undergraduates at UT-Austin...

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Since September I have spent one afternoon a week in a classroom with 13 other graduate students. But we don't talk about semiotics or Chaucer or the Mexican Revolution or motivation theory or any of the myriad other arcane topics that have filled our heads since our academic careers began. Instead, we talk about leveraging opportunities, meeting new challenges and assessing risk.

Welcome to the new world of graduate career development.

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On the day I flew into London, the news of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet had been pushed to The Guardian’s eighth page. Hospitalized with a stomachache while his lawyers appealed a British court’s decision, a weakened Pinochet appeared to be stalling his inevitable extradition to Spain, where he would face charges of torture and other violations of human rights. London was a layover on my way to Ireland, where another former Latin American head of state was reported to be hiding out. I was determined to use some of my time there to track down Carlos Salinas de Gortari, president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994.

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