Mike Pilewski writes about life, politics and culture in the United States
On several recent occasions, I’ve noticed how my American students have redefined the word “kid”. It’s now a neutral way of referring to a man of college age, as in, “that kid in the yellow shirt” or “the kid who’s studying biology”. It’s long been common for older people to refer to their own offspring as kids for years after … >>
The next Star Wars movie is months away, but its second “teaser trailer”, out since mid-April, has already got fans excited. Those of you not very familiar with Star Wars may at least recall how the overwhelming popularity of the “original trilogy” — Episodes IV through VI, which came out in 1977–83 — contrasted with general disappointment at the “prequels” … >>
March 10 marked the 15th anniversary of the death of a famous American whose life was devoted to advancing our knowledge about language. He was, unfortunately, a controversial individual prone to drug use and violent outbursts, and wound up spending most of his life behind bars. He also liked bananas. I’m talking, of course, about Nim Chimpsky (1973–2000), the second … >>
The situation in Ukraine is not going to be an easy one to solve. The consensus in American political circles is that it’s bad and something must be done. How bad is it? Interviewed on a CNN news program on Sunday, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski compared the situation on the Crimean … >>
The Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, under way since February 7, have taught us a big lesson: Russia may lag behind English- and German-speaking countries in winter sports, but it is far ahead of us in orthographic efficiency. Russian needs only four letters to spell the name of the host city: Сочи. English needs five, while German — for shame! … >>
The Internet has come a long way in the last 25 years. Once the exclusive domain of scientists and the military, it’s now in the offices, living rooms and phones of almost everyone on the planet. One thing, however, has not changed: the propensity of users with inadequate social skills to torment one another in nitpicky arguments. This became more … >>
Suppose you wanted to send a message to someone living thousands of years in the future. How would you do it? We can forget about trying to express it in electronic form. Personal computers have been around for only 30 years, but already quite a number of file formats have become obsolete — and replaced by others that are much … >>
After two and a half years, my high-school German class reached a milestone when our teacher put away the textbook and got out the board games. We were so proud to have learned enough of a language that we could actually do something with it. Monopoly wasn’t a language game per se, but playing it in German taught us important … >>
If you could live at any time in the past, when would you like to live? I think I’d feel very much at home during the Renaissance, or in ancient Greece. Those were great times to be a scientist, a philosopher, a traveler, or all three. Scientists and philosophers saw it as part of their job to be on the … >>
Back when I was a newsreader for my college radio station, I was shown one of the thickest books I’d ever seen: a binder containing, I guess, about 500 pages. Those were all the rules an American radio station had to follow, as laid down by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). While I found the book daunting, my contemporaries found … >>