In his recent Nautilus essay, “The Kekulé Problem,” Cormac McCarthy suggests that our unconscious mental processes are a modern echo of the prelinguistic minds of our prehistoric…

The purpose of language is to reveal the contents of our minds, says Julie Sedivy. It’s a simple and profound insight. We are social animals and language is what springs us from…

Cormac McCarthy is best known to the world as a writer of novels. These include Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. At the Santa Fe Institute…

Every year, more than a billion people around the world celebrate Chinese New Year and engage in a subtle linguistic dance with luck. You can think of it as a set of holiday rituals…

Several years ago, my father died as he had done most things throughout his life: without preparation and without consulting anyone. He simply went to bed one night, yielded his brain…

When Paul Kay, then an anthropology graduate student at Harvard University, arrived in Tahiti in 1959 to study island life, he expected to have a hard time learning the local words…

You’d be forgiven if, settling into the fall 2003 “Literature of the 16th Century” course at University of California, Berkeley, you found the unassuming 70-year-old man standing…

There is a family living in Britain, known only as the KE family, with a few members that can’t quite say words like “hippopotamus.” They know the words, but can’t get their…

That natural agent or influence which evokes the functional activity of the organ of sight.” So begins the first definition of light in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Additional…

It’s a warm summer afternoon in New York City, and Bob and Mike Bryan are hitting the fuzzy covers off tennis balls, their looping forehands and backhands mirror images of one another.…