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When I was 14 years old, my father called the editor of the local newspaper. “My son writes all the time,” he said. “Could you give him a job?”

That summer I tagged along with the court and police reporter, down to the mayor’s office, the police station, the fire station. Then we went back to the newsroom, where I found an empty desk — it was an afternoon paper, so everyone cleared out after the deadline at 11 — and typed short essays for the Saturday supplement on an electric typewriter. It gave me a taste for smelling the ink, working with editors, talking to people about their lives, and seeing my name — and my words — in print.

Now I write mainly about language, languages, and the people who use and study them, but I also write about culture and technology. My essays, reviews, and reportage have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Science, Wired, Slate, The Atlantic, New Scientist, Reason, The Morning News, and many other magazines and newspapers.

I am a contributing writer at Design Observer and have a blog at Psychology Today. My first book, Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (Pantheon, 2007) was a natural history of things we wish we didn’t say (but do) as well as a cultural history of what happens after people blunder. My second, Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners (Free Press, 2012), is a search for the upper limits of the ability to learn, speak, and use languages.

After graduating from Williams College, I lived overseas, teaching English, then finished an MA in linguistics and PhD in English, with concentrations in rhetoric and linguistics, from the University of Texas at Austin. I am also a senior researcher and metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute, a research non-profit based in Washington, D.C.

Of course, telling my story on a website, I can make this path seem straight and uninterrupted, but it wasn’t. For some stories from along the way, see this one and this one and this one.