Longreads

NEW YORK (AP) -- In New Brunswick, N.J., a building superintendent opened the door to apartment No. 1076 one balmy Tuesday and discovered an alarming scene: terrorist literature strewn about…

If theres one thing I learned in graduate school, its that the poet Philip Larkin was right. (They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.) At the time, I was a…

On April 29, Dorothy Parvaz disappeared. A former reporter and columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Parvaz now works as a correspondent for Al Jazeera, and she’d flown to Syria to cover the latest uprising in the Arab Spring. After Parvaz disappeared, no one knew exactly where she was, or if she was safe, until 19 days later when she was released from an Iranian detention center and sent home to Vancouver, BC.

That's right, metaphors, like Shakespeare's famous line, "All the world's a stage," or more subtly, "The darkness pressed in on all sides." Every speaker in every language in the world uses them effortlessly, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity wants know how what we say reflects our worldviews. They call it The Metaphor Program, and it is a unique effort within the government to deal with how we use words.

On April 20, 2005, George W. Bush signed into law a bankruptcy bill that had been pending in Congress for eight years. The bill was written by credit-industry lobbyists, shopped to their friends in Congress, and supported by tens of millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions. It might be dismissed as just one more piece of highly focused special-interest legislation except for the damaging vision of middle-class America that it reinforced: irresponsible people consumed by appetites for goods they don’t need, who think little of cost, and who would rather file for bankruptcy than repay their lawful debts.