The Vocal Fries

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Carrie and Megan talk with Tim Brookes about his newest book, By Hand, about the importance of handwriting.

NBER report

Current Affairs

WOTY: 

• 6-7
• rage bait
• parasocial
• vibe coding
• AI slop
• maple washing

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Carrie and Megan talk about Makaton, an artificial sign-based system, particularly Sara Novič's article about it.

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Carrie and Megan talk about random words that are scary or scary-adjacent.

• facsism
• eldritch
• ghost
• vampire

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We have a few things to say about Pinker.

• Part of the War on Science
• The Language Instinct
• Pinker on Race Realism
• Co-authored paper on overregularization
• The Open Letter to the LSA
• The article that Carrie was interviewed for, but not named, about the Open Letter
• Our episode on dogwhistling
• The Harper's Letter
• Guardian on his appearance on Aporia

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Carrie and Megan talk with Adam Aleksic about his new book, Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language.

• Bromism and ChatGPT

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Carrie and Megan talk with Megan C. Reynolds, Dwell magazine editor, about her  book, Like: A History of the World's Most Hated (and Misunderstood) Word.

• Putin and Russian

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Carrie and Megan talk with Paulette van der Voet and Martina Terrazzano, PhD students at the University of Umea, about their class called “Linguistics and the Eurovision Song Contest”.

• Top 20 Eurovision songs
• Malta and Estonia

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We talk with Dr Lorna Gibb about her newest book, Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages.

Steven Pinker:

• Harvard Derangement Syndrome
• vs. LSA
• Jews and IQ

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Carrie and Megan talk with Drs Emily M. Bender, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, and Alex Hanna, Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), about their new book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, out May 13, 2025.

• Virtual Book Launch May 8, 2025, 2-4 PDT
• Bender v. Bubeck
• Inventing Intelligence: On the History of Complex Information Processing and Artificial Intelligence in the United States in the Mid-Twentieth Century
• Roxane Gay's anti-AI stance
• The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence 
• The Conduit Metaphor
• Kevin Roose's Conversation with Bing
• Mystery AI Hype Theatre 3000 

Intro:

• UK ruling on the legal definition of "woman"
• JK Rowling looking smug

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Carrie and Megan talk with Gabe Henry about his new book, Enough is enuf: Our failed attempts to make English eezier to spell.

• Puerto Rico and English as an Official Language

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Contact us:

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Thanks for listening and keep calm and fry on