...I'm going to write about this:

The Fort Griffin Fandangle is a historical pageant written, directed, costumed, sung and danced by Albany citizens. Robert E. Nail, Jr. wrote the Fandangle in 1938 while teaching at Albany High School. The historical play was conceived as an outdoor alternative to the traditional senior play. It was originally titled "Dr. Shackelford's Paradise." As the play grew in size, the name was changed as the undertaking incorporated more history than that of the settling of Shackelford County. The Fandangle has been performed fairly consistently for the past 68 years. The Fandangle was retired during World War II because writer-director Robert Nail was serving his country in the armed services, as were many of the other Fandangle personnel. The Fandangle was revived in 1947 and ran through 1957. For a number of reasons, the Fandangle was not performed again until 1964 when the West Texas Panhandle Heritage Foundation contracted with Robert Nail to bring the Fandangle to Canyon, Texas, to open the new outdoor amphitheatre in Palo Duro Canyon. The people of Albany who saw and were in the show came home determined to reinstate the Fandangle in Albany. Each year the Fandangle tells a difference story, attempting to portray with each show various phases of pioneer life. Stories in the past have been about Prairie Land, about a pioneer couple, about Fort Griffin, about ranching, the cowboy, early journalists, and the pioneer woman. For more information visit the Fort Griffin Fandangle Web Site.

Homeshoring.

Every year, late in November, I'm surprised that I didn't remember to celebrate the day on which I defended my dissertation and so entered the next stage of my life. What day was it? I think it was the 17th. I woke up, early and anxious, and before I knew it, I was wearing a suit and tie and standing in the Frank Dobie room of the Flawn Academic Center. I had wanted to hold the defense in the lounge, a smaller room to the side which features a fireplace, a cowhide rug, and a stool made out of longhorn horns, but one of my supervisors balked and moved the proceedings to the adjoining room's long, forbidding conference room tables. I let her have it. It wasn't the right time to stick up for the longhorn stool and the cowhide rug. A couple of friends attended: my friend Christian came in from Houston, my most recent ex-girlfriend was there, my former roommate Kevin showed up; I was especially surprised to see Buddy Burniske show up. At the time, he was more of an acquaintance from grad school and would become a good friend later on. I had a set introduction, talked for a bit, and then endured some grilling -- nothing that left scars, just enough to make me feel worked over. Honestly, at the end of it I wanted more of a workout. I've broken more sweat doing yoga. People talk about their defense as a trial that produces intense intellectual endorphins, but no skies parted for me. It all kind of plopped and skidded, then ground to a halt. I may have taken notes, I don't remember. Afterwards, a couple of us went to Chango's for lunch, and that night to Deep Eddy Cabaret with a bunch of folks who were happy I wouldn't be a graduate any longer. I got good and appropriately drunk, woke up in an inappropriate bed, and got on a plane later headed to Detroit for my uncle's wedding.

Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi on the herd mentality of the campaign press:

For these people, with the proximity to power, being able to sit in an airplane with Hillary Clinton or with John Kerry or John Edwards or Barack Obama—that’s like the sexiest thing they’re ever going to be involved with. And it’s a lot of fun for these people. It’s intoxicating. You can’t take some 25- or 26-year-old kid who is just out of college, put him in that environment, and expect him to be totally objective about it. If you break with the pack on the campaign trail and you’re shunned, it’s a very powerful thing. Nobody wants to do it, because to be friendless in that environment is very, very hard. There’s no way out, they’re the only people you ever see—you’re literally roped off from the rest of the world. There’s a real Stockholm syndrome that goes on. As a result of that, you get this collective worldview that develops where the campaign makes sense and everything that the candidates do is taken at face value. And they judge the candidates according to the internal logic of the campaign process, which, to an outsider or to someone looking at it objectively, is completely perverse and fucked up and wrong. But to them, it all makes perfect sense because you never ever are exposed to anything that shines a negative light on it. They never see any other thing.

A raucous interview.

I call myself a language journalist. What does that mean? Just check out some of the feature articles I've written for newspapers and magazines since 2000:

How the Chinese government is promoting Mandarin Chinese in dozens of countries around the world (including the US), as a soft projection of China's growing power. (Wired, Foreign Policy, 2006)

How the latest research in slips of the tongue and hand continues to teach us about language and the brain. (Science, 2007)

How an online community, Librivox, became the largest audiobook publisher in the world by getting volunteers to record books they love. (Reason, 2007)

The emergence of a new form of discrimination, labeled "linguistic profiling," or discriminating against someone because his or her voice "sounds" Black, Hispanic, Asian, gay, or some other protected class. (Legal Affairs, 2002)

How governments in Europe and Australia are using a controversial technique of language analysis to verify the origins of people who are claiming political asylum, many of whom lack documents. (Legal Affairs, 2002)

A hush-hush FBI-CIA project called the National Virtual Translation Center, which uses technology to enhance the abilities of foreign language experts in the federal government. (Technology Review, 2004)

About Unicode, an ambitious international project to allow every alphabet and writing system on the planet, from Chinese characters to mathematical symbols, to be universally displayed, stored, searched on the world's computers. (The New York Times, Technology Review, 2003)

How voice technology in the virtual world, Second Life, is enabling foreign language education. (Technology Review, 2007)

About "hyperpolyglots," people who can speak more than 6 languages, and what linguists have to say about them (and the possibility that language talent may be an inherited trait). (New Scientist, 2005)

The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language in the Negev Desert in Israel, one of those rare instances where scientists are getting to witness a language being born. (New Scientist, 2006)

How arguments about whether or not speaking in tongues is Biblical is creating political turmoil within the Southern Baptist Convention. (Texas Observer, 2007)

Why the US needs a language czar, someone at the federal level powerful enough to unite and drive language policy in the US -- and how proposed legislation to create such a position didn't go far enough. (The New Republic, 2005)

How the survey of the world's languages, Ethnologue, produced by missionaries, is now the secular world's standard guide to the 6,912 languages on the planet. (New York Times, 2005)

How a new symbol was accepted into the International Phonetic Alphabet. (New York Times, 2005)

How the "king of closed captions" got his crown. (The Atlantic, 2001)

How Google can protect its brand (and why it shouldn't restrict the use of "google" as a verb. (Design Observer, 2006)

The joys of sentence diagramming and Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog (Design Observer, 2006)

A new argument for why endangered languages are worth saving -- because they do things with information that other languages don't do. (Design Observer, 2007.)

On a controversial experiment with stutterers in the 1930s, the Monster Study, which came to light in an ugly way. (Lingua Franca, 2001)

Do languages make up a word for "butterfly" that mimics the butterfly? (Lingua Franca, 2000)

Is y'all moving northward? (Lingua Franca, 2001)

Language at the intersection of religion, policy, technology, law, and science is rich with stories. Each of these pieces depended on original reporting that I did, and in each one I set out to advance the story: to tell it in a way that went beyond the usual cliches that journalists use to tell these stories. (The headlines of these stories weren't always uncliched, but they would have been had I written them!) Doing more stories about language and doing them better is my goal. It's the only way to give people the tools to talk about language in their everyday lives which they'll need to meet the challenges of a diverse country and a globalized economy.