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English is a treasure trove of words, each with a precise meaning. It is also a source of confusion and frustration, since so many of those words have subtle connotations and refuse to stand still.

Most of us are living in a landscape designed for the car. “These days, so much of urban planning is undoing the mistake of the recent past.”

English is a treasure trove of words, each with a precise meaning. It is also a source of confusion and frustration, since so many of those words have subtle connotations and refuse to stand still.

Great Plains. One man grabs a calf’s hind leg and lifts. Another seizes a front leg and heaves, flipping as easily as possible the two-hundred-pound animal. Then each man pulls hard to keep it still.

If the summer of 2020 had a visual refrain, it was of statues coming down, the likes of Jefferson Davis and Christopher Columbus being sawed and pulled from plinths, dragged into rivers.

The house my mother grew up in burnt down in ’85. I hope y’all never experience something like that—losing everything, Mom told my brothers and me when we were too young to understand.

Is it possible to understand the persistent lag in vaccination rates as a function of failed metaphor? That is to say, as a failure of language—the language of data, the language of science, the language of political rhetoric (to name just...

Summer is the time of the child, a time to go barefoot in the grass, splash about in the creek, outrun the neighbor’s bull or the neighborhood bully. It is, even more gloriously, the time of the scamp, that subset in the Venn diagram of...

Where sunlight dims, lies a vast and largely unexplored region known as the ocean twilight zone. It’s also almost entirely unregulated.