Blossom is correct and blosom is a typo, but it is one of the most common in English. Why the second s disappears when we type quickly, and how to stop dropping it.

By Yulia Tulegenova The films, of course, are the official reason. We are here, ostensibly, for the latest offerings from Guillermo Del Toro, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Noah Baumbach. But stand for a few minutes by the edge of the Grand Canal and you will witness a different kind of premiere. As the sleek Riva boats…

By Yulia Tulegenova There was a moment, on the first evening of Moscow Fashion Week, that crystallized the entire event. As the sun set behind the Kremlin’s blood-red walls, casting long shadows across the Floating Bridge in Zaryadye Park, a model walked out in a coat of impossibly vibrant, emerald-green fur. The air was cool,…

By Yulia Tulegenova Why We're Afraid of "Whomever" There is a small, and seemingly insignificant, battle being waged in the quiet corners of the English language. It is a battle over two, almost identical, pronouns: "whoever" and "whomever." On the surface, this is a trivial matter of grammar, a minor and forgivable point of confusion.…

By Yulia Tulegenova Look closely at the films arriving this September. It is not a random assortment of stories. It is an argument. It is a cinematic landscape haunted by its own past, a month-long séance where the ghosts of former glories are summoned for one last performance. We are being offered resurrections of undisputed…

Different is the only spelling in the dictionary. Where differant comes from, why it looks plausible, and the words that genuinely take the -ant ending.

Meant is the past tense of mean. Where ment does belong, why the two get mixed up, and the sentences in which even native speakers hesitate.

By Maria Bregman, writer, art and literary critic There is a certain kind of national literature that functions not just as a collection of stories, but as a living, breathing, and often fiercely argued, conversation. Modern Israeli literature is such a conversation. Born from the crucible of a young nation, it is a literature that…

By Anna Zhila There are certain actors who are more than just performers. They are cultural barometers, artists whose careers seem to trace the fault lines of their time, who are unafraid to venture into the darkest and most difficult corners of the human experience. As she turns fifty, it is clear that Charlize Theron…

One belongs to the body, the other to laughter. Why two words that sound almost identical describe opposite experiences, and which one you probably mean.

By Maria Bregman, writer and literary critic There are writers who chronicle their times, and then there are those who build entire worlds to make sense of them. Arkady Strugatsky, born one hundred years ago this August, and his brother Boris were not writers of science fiction. They were moral cartographers. They took the brutal,…

By Yulia Tulegenova There is a ghost in the pocket of British history. It is the ghost of a jumble of coins that made perfect, intuitive sense for a thousand years and now seems like a form of deliberate, almost beautiful, madness. For anyone born after 1971, the old monetary system of pounds, shillings, and…

Both spellings turn up in print, and neither is a typo. Which one belongs to the plural, where zeroes still earns its extra letter, and why the argument keeps going.

Soldering is the spelling you will find in a dictionary. Where sautering comes from, why workshops keep saying it, and what the survival of a wrong word tells us.

By Maria Bregman, Writer and Literary Critic For years, the high-fashion world has maintained a passionate and very public love affair with the art world. Collaborations with painters, sculptors, and filmmakers have become a standard part of the luxury brand playbook, a reliable way to signal cultural literacy and borrow a certain intellectual cachet. But…