Key journalism
- "Shoot me a text," ARC, July 1, 2026 -- essay about words on bullets, casings, and other projectiles
- "Come-gimme: Why Do We Shrug When Apes Cross the Language Barrier?" Undark, March 18, 2025.
- "Cannibalinguistics," European Review of Books, 9 April 2024 -- review of Ayesha Siddiqi's The Centre
- "David Foster Wallace’s Pen Pal," Paris Review Online, Aug. 9, 2019.
- "A Cultural History of First Words," The Paris Review Online, July 16, 2019.
- "The Mystery of Babies’ First Words," The Atlantic, April 30, 2019. Feature about babies’ vocabularies.
- "Pete Buttigieg’s Language Magic is Textbook Polyglot Mythmaking," The Atlantic, April 29, 2019.
- "What People Really Say Before They Die," The Atlantic, January 16, 2019.
- "Creating some slack," Aeon, Dec. 20, 2018.
- "Why You Can Understand a Language But Not Speak It," The Atlantic, Nov. 26, 2018.
- "What Adults Can Learn from Dutch Children’s Books," The New York Times, July 23, 2018.
- "The Deep Roots of Writing," Aeon, April 21, 2018.
- "Is this 100,000-year-old hashtag the first humanmade symbol—or just a pretty decoration?" Science, April 20, 2018.
- "How Your Online Style Gives You Away – And How to Hide it," New Scientist, Nov. 22, 2017.
- "Why Sign Language Gloves Don’t Help Deaf People," The Atlantic, Nov. 9, 2017.
- "How the Appetite for Emojis Complicates the Effort to Standardize the World’s Alphabets," The New York Times Magazine, October 18, 2017.
- "Why Australia has One of the Biggest Language Families in the World," Science, Sept. 21, 2016.
- "ISIL demands many things of its top commanders, but good Arabic isn’t always one of them," Quartz, August 5, 2016.
- "ISIL isn’t merely tolerant of people who speak languages besides Arabic; it needs them," Quartz, August 4, 2016.
- "ISIL is using the language barriers within its ranks to evolve jihad beyond Arabic," Quartz, August 3, 2016.
- "Street talk," Aeon, April, 2016. People who speak more than one dialect may have the same cognitive benefits as bilinguals.
- "The Reason You Discriminate Against Foreign Accents Starts with What They Do to Your Brain," Quartz, February 25, 2016.
- "How Societies Learn to Count to 10, " Science, Oct. 7, 2015. How small-number systems evolve in hunter-gatherer languages.
- "What it means to talk like a Mainer," Down East, August 2015.
- "See Through Words," Aeon, June 19, 2015. Essay on metaphor design work.