As digital culture consumes our lives, the number of people who are giving up on books, especially young people, seems to be on the rise. Does this presage a kind of cultural collapse or the return to a different mode of learning?

"Style-shifting", a linguistics term which describes changes in our patterns of speech around different people, reflects the idea that we all embody many personas that reveal themselves according to circumstance.

Given the unreliability of economic forecasts, is there a way to make our predictions in economics a little more accurate, or, at the very least, more useful?

There is consensus that one common parent language spawned all tongues in the Indo-European language group—spoken by over 3 billion people. But that parent language, Proto-Indo-European, is ascertained more through inference than direct evidence.