This is what the Defector staff listened to and enjoyed this year. From the Pyre, by The Last Dinner Party In a year where the pop star praised most for being a songwriter put out a lyrically narrow ...

Chinese pronouns are largely split between female and male – prompting LGBTQ activists to invent their own gender-neutral pronoun. That movement just took a big step forward.

Here are correct pronunciations of Oregon, Willamette, Champoeg, Chemeketa, Deschutes, Grand Ronde, Idanha, Lebanon, Malheur, ...

When you add an image to a Word or PowerPoint document, the Copilot Plus computer should automatically generate a caption for ...

It's not often that "thinking inside the box," is lauded as a winning strategy. But for spoken word poet Henry Morray, it won Slamovision's 2025 international slam poetry competition.

If an AI gadget falls in the forest and there’s no one there to misguidedly buy it, does it really kill the smartphone? The answer? Unequivocally no. And yes, Sam Altman and Jony Ive are readying ...

There are a growing number of scholars today who can be considered anti-feminists. These men and women are starting to look ...

NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Shane O'Neill of The Washington Post about the word "aesthetic" and its evolution from art criticism and design theory to online speak and the White House.

The instructor, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, gave a zero to a student who wrote an essay arguing in ...

As we careen toward 2026, we took one last look back at the year that was. Specifically, we asked our columnists what they ...

Knowing how to harness the right AI tools for your particular role can be a big professional boon, but only if you do so carefully.

The print edition of Merriam-Webster was once a touchstone of authority and stability. Then the internet brought about a ...