Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

What’s That Thing Where You Feel That Thing and It Makes That Other Thing Happen?

May 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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You know that sudden rush of existential dread that comes from your alarm seemingly going off just moments after you shut your eyes and you are no longer able to ignore the cosmically-pointless-but-personally-frightening impending machinations of the day ahead? Or that thing where you see a dog, blissfully unaware of the futility of its own existence, getting sprayed in the stomach by a water hose and you can't help but wonder why not me? There are no words for those feelings because there are no words for a lot of feelings. Other languages often do a better job—think "schadenfreude," or ... Read More

More like this: Education
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The Great White Hoax

April 26, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Chael-Sonnen

Chael Sonnen spent most of his fighting career as a marginally above average fighter with a bombastic personality and tragicomic penchant for losing big fights in the most embarrassing fashion possible. However, thanks to a depleted pool of contenders in the UFC’s middleweight division and some well-timed wins, he earned a shot at reigning champion and pound-for-pound kingpin Anderson Silva that was scheduled for August of 2010. What followed was straight out of a certain political strategist’s playbook. In the lead up to the fight, Sonnen claimed that Portuguese, Silva’s native ... Read More

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Abridging A War of Words: Gazans Learn Hebrew

January 9, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

The tongue of the wise useth knowledge aright; but the mouth of fools poureth out foolishness. --Proverbs 15:2 The Associated Press’s Diaa Hadid reports that a leading university in Gaza (Wikipedia informs me it has nine universities), the Hamas-linked Islamic University of Gaza, is now offering a degree in Hebrew. The man-bites-dog aspect of this is that Hamas has called for the extirpation of its Hebrew-speaking neighbor Israel, while Israel has pretty much sealed off its 31-mile border with the 139-square-mile Gaza Strip. But calls for destruction aside, neither entity is going ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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Speak, Memory

October 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Illustration: Sébastien Thibault

A FEW YEARS AGO, Captain Emmanuel Joseph decided to learn Arabic before his deployment to Iraq. “At first it was easy,” he told me. At his base in the U.S., he explains, “we had native speakers teaching us basic things like greetings; imperatives like stop, go, walk; and some numbers and nouns. It was very much survival-level.” In Iraq, Joseph (not his real name) continued trying to learn Arabic with Al-Kitaab, the main textbook used by American universities and the military. But he struggled. “I was forgetting more than I was learning,” he said. “With every chapter in the ... Read More

More like this: Culture, November-December 2012, Science
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The Music Man

October 24, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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JOSÉ XUNCAX FIRST LANDED IN JAIL at 13 for armed robbery. Since then, he’s been in and out of the system, as he calls it, six times. Now, at 15, tall, muscled, with close-cropped brown hair and a scar over his left eye, he’s serving six months for another robbery. He lives at Camp Mendenhall, a juvenile-detention facility tucked between the mountains at the northern edge of Los Angeles County. School never meant much to José, and he stopped going entirely after probation officers showed up in his classroom to execute a warrant. When he arrived at the camp, he was, by his own account, ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Education, November-December 2012
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To Boost Creativity, Study Abroad

August 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Creativity Boost Abroad

Looking to hire someone who will make a creative contribution to your organization? Here’s a tip: When checking applicants’ college transcripts, don’t focus exclusively on their grades or honors. Take note of whether they spent time studying abroad. That’s the implication of newly published research, which provides the best evidence yet that studying overseas boosts one’s creativity. A semester spent in Spain or Senegal leads to higher creativity scores on two different tests, according to research conducted by Christine Lee, David Therriault, and Tracy Linderholm of the ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, Education, Findings
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Can a Law Save a Language?

June 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Graphic heads speaking different languages

In late May, the province of Central Java, Indonesia, passed a law requiring residents to use the regional tongue, Javanese, once a week. The law is symbolic and probably unenforceable—"I swear officer, I yelled at my mother in Javanese this very morning"—but addresses what a local councillor called “a tendency for many Javanese people not to use Javanese in their daily lives.” Why is the government panicking over how its people talk, and why should we care? If Javanese is dying, it’s hard to detect by the usual means—counting how many people use it. The language's ... Read More

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Second Language Translates Into Clearer Thinking

April 24, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Would you like to think more rationally, especially where your finances are concerned? Did you learn a second language in school — say, Spanish? If so, University of Chicago researchers have a suggestion for you: Use Español. A research team led by psychologist Boaz Keysar reports using one’s second language reduces or eliminates certain biases that otherwise infiltrate our decision-making. Specifically, our aversion to potential loss — a bias that can lead us to pass up promising opportunities for potential gains — diminishes as we ponder options in a language learned later in ... Read More

More like this: Education, Findings
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Linguistic Myths and Adventures in Etymology

March 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The alarm went off. What does that mean? Recently, a friend who is learning English couldn’t quite figure it out. Isn’t the alarm going on, not off, he asked. Comprehending such phrases is often one of the more difficult steps in learning a language. These idiomatic expressions are collections of words that mean something different than each word’s dictionary definition. For example, “that barking dog next door is driving me up the wall,” if taken literally, could mean that the neighbor’s poodle has recently earned a driver’s license and is using a car to accelerate up the ... Read More

More like this: Education, Skeptic's Café
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Library to Rediscover Aboriginal Languages

August 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Earlier this month, in writing about a new funding program from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Idea Lobby blogger Emily Badger highlighted the need to preserve endangered languages around the world. It isn't out of a sense of charity. Other languages are more than just different ways to communicate the same ideas; they're repositories of completely different ideas. With that understanding, the State Library of Australia's New South Wales is starting a new project to rediscover and preserve forgotten or endangered antipodean languages. (Take a ... Read More

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