Learning Arabic in Cairo after the Arab Spring.

The rapid rise of a wordless language.

A story of rooms, philosophies, and missing words.

"We move [ ], tapping? Perhaps. Certainly an eight garbage bags’ worth spontaneous factor with a pair undetermined. I lose weight. Karen is one way to do it. Take a page. We are garden sprinklers on a hot middle and cross the middle. Formlessly in all directions, and… one two three four. Now paint on blank canvas. Section four with section one and [ ]omes. And you have a new page. Its effect is immediate, though [ ] the thing."

A professor of mathematics "disconnects" from his work and broods on his past.

"As a child, he never figured out how to explain himself. A hurricane of questions whenever he’d taken an aimless walk, just over that way to see the neighbors’ dog or the flock of parakeets that came around in the late afternoon, I just went overthatway, that’s all. They’d say: why? What for? What dog? At this hour? To see what about the dog, what parakeet? I’d respond: Over that way because they’re pretty. He’d blush saying the words over that way because they’re pretty. Later, he’d get furious, when they’d ask him about feelings."

A student plagiarizes a paper, and is drawn into an ongoing debate about oppression.

"Some parts of the paper I had just copied down verbatim, without really understanding, and now I was stuck with them. Now they were my opinions."

A lesson from a spurned grammarian.

"With the aid of the comma, statements are united, points of view are broadened, and the complexities of reality are more accurately rendered. Here, on the other hand, are examples of less elegant sentences: You're just too difficult to love. ... I've met someone else."

A history of the divide between computing and language, and why we “define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of our selves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can ‘understand.’”

When we form our thoughts into speech, some of it leaks through our hands. Gestures are thoughts, ideas, speech acts made tangible in the air. They can even, for a moment, outlive the speaker.

What hand motions can teach us about language, ethnicity and assimilation.