Culture

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…

Pundit is the only spelling in the dictionary. Where pundint comes from, why the extra n feels right in the mouth, and how the word reached English in the first place.

By Anna Zhila There is a long-standing parlour game we play with the past, filtering old films to see how they imagined our present. Blade Runner promised us flying cars and replicants by 2019. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men gave us a fertility crisis by 2027. But perhaps the most chillingly accurate prophecy came from…

By Yulia Tulegenova Why a Single Letter in "Cancellable" Tells a Story There is a quiet and revealing battle being waged across the Atlantic Ocean. It is a battle fought not with armies, but with a single, humble consonant. The battle is over the correct spelling of a single word: "cancellable." Or is it "cancelable"?…

By Yulia Tulegnova This year, the highest-grossing film in the world will likely not come from Hollywood. It will not star Tom Cruise, nor will it emerge from the sprawling universes of Marvel or DC. The title that has quietly conquered the global box office is Nezha Conquers the Dragon King, a Chinese animated blockbuster that…

Retube or retubed depends on the tense, and both are real words. When each one is used, and where the term turns up outside engineering.

By Yulia Tulegenova, Artist and Film Critic Hollywood loves a wunderkind, and after the sleeper success of 2022’s Barbarian, Zach Cregger was anointed. That film, a masterclass in narrative misdirection that turned an Airbnb rental into a subterranean nightmare, was a commercial juggernaut, earning ten times its modest budget. But more than that, it was a…

By Yulia Tulegenova, artist and film critic There are some stories that refuse to end. They do not fade into history; they curdle into mythology, their facts hardening into fixed narrative points, their human figures becoming characters trapped in a forever-loop of public performance. The murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia in 2007, and the…

Helpful is the correct spelling. The useful part is why so many people write helpfull, which words really do double the l, and where the rule stops working.

Babysat is the correct past tense. Which verbs behave like sit, why the regular -ed ending fails here, and the related forms that trip people up.

By Yulia Tulegenova Why We Invent Words Like "Worldwidely" There is a strange and beautiful ghost that haunts the English language. It is the ghost of a word that does not exist, but perhaps should. The word is “worldwidely.” It is a word you will not find in any dictionary. It is a word that…