Sociolinguistics

One week after the Colorado shooting, Adam Gopnik takes a look back at what happened and what needs to change. Though it’s impossible to say that violence in American pop culture causes mass murdering, Gopnik says, the two are connected. Has the cost of movie violence gotten too high?

Fluency in just one language in the 21st century is a competitive disadvantage, and it could be holding back your brain. In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee wrote that bilingual people outperform single language speakers in cognitive tests of all kinds.

“Matilda,” now a Broadway hit, has a cast full of Americans doing British accents. We usually think of actors as carrying off the best fake accents. But others do it, sometimes with great success. What’s the secret?

When jazz saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa was still a student at Berklee College of Music, his older brother gave him an album called Saxophone Indian Style – as a joke. Mahanthappa had been suspicious of American jazz’s sampling of Indian music.