Tag: LanguagePage 1 of 7
Bob Holmes , June 22nd, 2022
At a Comic-Con, or comic book convention, in Los Angeles in 2010, the trolley signs were in Klingon. Doug Kline/The Pop Culture Geek Network/Flickr This article was originally…
Piers Kelly , May 19th, 2022
This handwritten example of Vai script dates to around 1850. British Library/Wikimedia Commons In a small West African village, a man named Momolu Duwalu Bukele had a compelling…
Chip Colwell , April 26th, 2022
SAPIENS magazine is an online portal for readers to better understand the world and what it means to be human. AerialPerspective Images/Getty Images WHAT IS SAPIENS MAGAZINE? SAPIENS…
Justin D. Wright , April 4th, 2022
Enslaved people built the Rotunda at the University of Virginia in the 19th century. Chrispecoraro/Getty Images Go to undergrad, go to graduate school, get a Ph.D. heft onto…
Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein and Daniel Ginsberg , March 31st, 2022
Picture a traffic light. This isn’t a trick question. We want you to visualize some sort of box housing three lightbulbs, each behind a colored filter: red on…
Christine Weeber , March 23rd, 2022
Our team—Dr. Margaret Noodin, Christine Weeber, and Jason Vasser-Elong—invites submissions of original, unpublished pieces for the Indigenizing What It Means to be Human: Stories, Poems, Dreams, and M…
Dennis Rodgers , March 18th, 2022
Last year, the Allegra Lab began a thematic thread showcasing a selection of the wonderful “academic fictions” written by students as an assignment for the course on “Cities,…
Chip Colwell , March 17th, 2022
Since SAPIENS launched in 2016, several social media outlets have been central to the magazine’s promotion strategy. Every week, we publish multiple posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram…
Kathryn E. Graber , March 14th, 2022
[no-caption] TheKit_13/Pixabay This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. For most of the 20th century, English speakers re…
Tom Boellstorff , November 3rd, 2021
Pronouns are giving us trouble. English speakers face a dilemma. The current structure of our language is exclusionary with regard to gender: The personal pronouns “she” and “he”…
Andrew Brandel , September 29th, 2021
Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021) describes war’s dispersal into everyday life, intimacy and the domestic. Departing from genres of…
Aaron Gerry , September 16th, 2021
This comic book reimagines the oral traditions of Mexico’s Ñäñho people, introducing mischievous creatures called Tlaloques, which inspired the toy at left. María Gámez Tlaloc is a tempes…
Kathryn Derfler , September 15th, 2021
In this free live event, Yoli Ngandali, SAPIENS Media & Public Outreach Fellow, asks Justin Wright five questions about Lead me to Life: Voices of the African Diaspora, a…
Nicola Jones , June 30th, 2021
[no-caption] Rawpixel/Getty Images Ask SAPIENS is a series that offers a glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings. I sometimes shudder to think of my authors’ faces when they…
Timothy Y. Loh , June 15th, 2021
“Should all deaf children learn sign language?” This seemingly innocuous question was the theme of a roundtable article published in the influential journal Pediatrics in 2015, which compiled…
Chip Colwell , June 3rd, 2021
In this free online webinar, SAPIENS’ editor-in-chief Chip Colwell explains the ins-and-outs of writing for the magazine and its peer publications. Learn who is behind the SAPIENS editorial…
Guest Contributor , March 11th, 2021
Street art, Oaxaca City, Mexico. 2007. Photo: Ryan Anderson. By Louis Philippe Römer Activists, politicians, and public intellectuals have turned to the word “fascism” to analyze the intensified…
Chip Colwell , March 2nd, 2021
Writing a pitch involves untangling your ideas into a clear message. mikroman6/Getty Images So, you think you have the seeds of a great essay or opinion piece. Maybe…
Chip Colwell , February 18th, 2021
In the summer of 1960, Jane Goodall left England for what is now Gombe National Park in Tanzania. With the aid of legendary paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, Goodall was…
Chelsea Horton , January 13th, 2021
Facing language problems in Peru’s new coffee economy During a recent trip to the Andean-Amazonian foothills of Southern Peru, I hiked out to a remote corner of the…
Sophie Chao , November 19th, 2020
“Transition” by Papua New Guinean artist Philemon Yalamu. From Papua New Guinea: A New Dawn by Fondazione Imago Mundi/Luciano Benetton Collection. A Death in the Rainforest: How a Languag…
Elizabeth Keating , October 20th, 2020
[no-caption] Anna Shvets/Pexels It’s morning in Houston, Texas, for Jeremy* and his team of engineers, and nearly evening in a small town north of Bucharest, Romania, for Costa…
Nicola Jones , October 8th, 2020
[no-caption] FilippoBacci/GettyImages For academics used to the idea of “publish or perish,” writing may seem to be a well-practiced and even perfected skill. But trying out a new…