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Word by Word: A Linguist Reads the Menu

Kent Black The Boston Globe
Stanford linguistics professor and MacArthur Fellow Dan Jurafsky links the origins and evolution of foods to history, culture, tradition and trends. Wide-ranging topics include sexual metaphors in restaurant reviews, relationship of price to the number of syllables in menu descriptions, and the language on potato chip bags...among other things.

Injured Workers Suffer As 'Reforms' Limit Workers' Compensation Benefits

Howard Berkes and Michael Grabell NPR and ProPublica
Over the past decade, state after state has been dismantling America's workers' comp system with disastrous consequences for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer serious injuries at work each year, a ProPublica and NPR investigation has found. The cutbacks have been so drastic in some places that they virtually guarantee injured workers will plummet into poverty. Workers often battle insurance companies for years to get the surgeries, prescriptions and

Word by Word: A Linguist Reads the Menu

Kent Black The Boston Globe
Stanford linguistics professor and MacArthur Fellow Dan Jurafsky links the origins and evolution of foods to history, culture, tradition and trends. Wide-ranging topics include sexual metaphors in restaurant reviews, relationship of price to the number of syllables in menu descriptions, and the language on potato chip bags...among other things.

Review: Dunsinane/Chicago Shakespeare Theater

Alex Huntsberger New City Stage
The idea of 11th-century Scotland as a foreign land for the invading English army created powerful political possibilities in the dramatist’s mind ... with reference to Afghanistan and Iraq (and, perhaps, now Libya) ... seeing the play’s events from the perspectives of both the invaders (who, of course, consider themselves liberators) and the occupied population carries some rather profound implications for the politics of the modern world.

The Demolition of Workers’ Comp

Michael Grabell, ProPublica, and Howard Berkes, NPR ProPublica
Over the past decade, state after state has been dismantling America’s workers’ comp system with disastrous consequences for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer serious injuries at work each year, a ProPublica and NPR investigation has found. The cutbacks have been so drastic in some places that they virtually guarantee injured workers will plummet into poverty.

The Meaning of International Women’s Day

Alexandra Kollantai / Marge Piercy Jacobin
The following article was published in Pravda one week before the first celebration of the “Day of International Solidarity among the Female Proletariat” on March 8, 1913. In St Petersburg this day was marked by a call for a campaign against women workers’ lack of economic and political rights and for the unity of the working class, led by the self-emancipation of women workers.

50 Years After Bloody Sunday, Voting Rights Are Under Attack

Ari Berman The Nation
The attack on voting rights has spread to virtually every state in the country. From 2011 to 2015, 395 new voting restrictions have been introduced in forty-nine states (Idaho is the lone exception). Half the states in the country have adopted measures making it harder to vote. The Selma anniversary offers lawmakers a prime opportunity to move from symbolism to substance.