Six Tuscan Poets, by Giorgio Vasari, 1544.

Six Tuscan Poets, by Giorgio Vasari, 1544. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota.

Communication

Volume V, Number 2 | spring 2012

Purchase

Preamble

Word Order

By Lewis H. Lapham

The Internet is blessed with undoubtedly miraculous applications, but language is not yet one of them. Technology cannot displace the primacy of words.

More

Body Language

By Arika Okrent

When we form our thoughts into speech, some of it leaks through our gestures, revealing intricacies of language, ethnicity and assimilation.

More

Map

Living Languages

Facts and figures on the languages of the world.

View

Miscellany

There are sixty-eight indigenous languages in Mexico, one of which, Ayapaneco, as of 2011, had only two known speakers—and they prefer not to speak with one another.

1992 | Washington, DC

Media Saturation

The making of a pop culture president.More

1871 | Oxford

Close Reading

Through the looking-glass with Lewis Carroll.More

c. 365 BC | Athens

Tone of Voice

Demosthenes’ road to oratorical greatness.More

Charts & Graphs

Dispatches from the Front Lines

Communication in the field of battle.

View

Painting of François Rabelais.

Photograph of Joan Didion

Black and white photograph of E. B. White sitting at his typewriter with his dachshund.

Ambrose Bierce

Black and white photograph of German-language writer Franz Kafka.

American feminist, activist, and editor Gloria Steinem.

Exiled South African writer Breyten Breytenbach.

Henry David Thoreau

It is a luxury to be understood.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1831

Horace & Petrarch

Purchase