Nikhil Sonnad

MARK!!! This is Bradley from Campaign Associates. We’re the guys you hired a while back to help you look into a presidential run.

California, Texas, and New Mexico have long been the most multilingual states in the US. In those places, over half of kids aged eight or younger have a parent who speaks a language other than English at home.

Hope Hicks today became the fourth White House communications chief to depart the job in under a year.

Learning has an evolutionary purpose: Among species, individuals that adapt to their environments will succeed. That’s why your brain more easily retains important or surprising information: It takes very little effort to remember that the neighbor’s dog likes to bite. Remembering the dog’s name is harder. One ensures safety, the other is just a random fact.

Before your trip abroad, you hit the flashcards hard. You memorized how to say essential words and phrases like “hello,” “where is the bathroom,” and “I’ll have a beer.” But once you arrived, it’s like your brain had never encountered the language at all. Words would not come.

Speaking English well is a good sign for a country’s development. Places where people have relatively good English skills score higher on measures of quality of life, average income, and more.

At the height of the 2016 American presidential campaign, Russian propagandists used Twitter accounts to spread conspiracy theories, misinformation, and political division. That and other shady online activity led Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating foreign interference in the election, to indict 13 Russian nationals.

The day after Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 in a Florida high school shooting, injuring many more, Donald Trump delivered an address to the nation. In line with his remarks following last year’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, the president didn’t much mention gun violence or gun control—in fact, he didn’t use the word “gun” at all. Trump blamed the tragedy on mental health, although he himself signed last year’s bill to relax vetting of mentally unstable gun purchasers.

#MAGA, #Trump, and #NeverHillary are among the most-tweeted hashtags by Russian troll accounts, which are known to have sought influence in the 2016 presidential election. But so is #BlackLivesMatter.

Mixed doubles curling is a new event at this year’s winter Olympics in South Korea. Perhaps the most interesting thing to be said for the sport is that players wear microphones. That means viewers can hear them discussing strategy and shouting at each other in their native languages. Because there are no referees, viewers can also hear the two teams discuss scores and settle disputes—usually in English.

One in seven Americans speak Spanish at home. Zero White House websites offer information in that language.

Languages change as they gain more speakers. When a language grows, its expressiveness expands and contracts at once: Its vocabulary expands, but its grammar becomes simpler. This paradox in language can help us understand why simple ideas take hold rapidly in large cultures, while complicated ones tend not to become mainstream.

Donald Trump’s administration is struggling with Asian geography—not a good idea in an area of the world where sensitive territorial disputes abound. India regularly punishes people who show disputed territories as not belonging to its landmass. Vietnam refused to stamp Chinese passports that depicted a disputed area as belonging to its larger neighbor.

Donald Trump doesn’t think languages other than English belong in the US. During his 2016 presidential campaign, he criticized Jeb Bush for speaking “Mexican,” because “this is America.” He also wants people’s English-speaking skills to determine whether they get to move to the United States.

Researchers in China broke scientific ground a few weeks ago by creating two tiny, adorable monkey clones. It would be easy to think that this is purely in the interest of science. But like most things in China, it is also political.

Japanese speakers use a lot of English words. There is baa, meaning “bar,” hoteru for “hotel,” and hundreds of others. Using English can give whatever a Japanese person is saying a touch of sutairu, or “style”—and doing so has been fashionable since well before the spread of internet and Hollywood movies.

What language do you think this song is in?

Imagine you have just arrived to work on a Saturday morning, and you are told to select “Test missile alert” from a drop-down menu. You should absolutely not select the second option. What are the chances you don’t mess it up?

Donald Trump’s famously, er, candid way of speaking is increasingly having real diplomatic consequences.

The job of a journalist is to give a damn. To call out bullshit. To uncover the fucked up. Yet journalists are discouraged from describing their work as such—because swearing is taboo.

With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say “tea” in the world

Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic senator from California, has released the full transcript of a congressional interview with the co-founder of Fusion GPS. The private investigation firm was behind a salacious dossier of research into Trump’s Russia ties that was made public last year.

The latest edition of Spain’s most prestigious dictionary has been released (link in Spanish). And it has a lot of English in it.

Language education in the United States is finally starting to look like it belongs in the 21st century.