Ben Yagoda
By Ben Yagoda
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Culture What Bob Dylan Owes to Frank Sinatra — and Vice-Versa
In the summer of 1966, Frank Sinatra passed a baton to Bob Dylan. Not literally, of course: it’s hard to imagine, at that point in their lives, the two men being in the same physical space. Sinatra had been the most important figure in American popular music for twenty-five years: from his bobbysoxer days with…
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Culture How Steven Pinker Became the Anti-Maven of Language
Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard, didn’t coin “language maven” (William Safire did, back in the ’70s, to describe himself), but he did more than anyone else to popularize the term. In a 1994 article in The New Republic called “Grammar Puss,” included in his subsequent book “The Language Instinct,” Pinker…
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Opinion It’s time for the pro-Palestinian movement to make a radical change
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News Should synagogues remove the Israeli flag from bimahs now? How a New York shul made the decision
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Opinion JD Vance just made a critical error in Israel — and time to curb Hamas is running short
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Film & TV What the new season of ‘Nobody Wants This’ gets right — and very wrong — about Judaism
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Fast Forward The World War II origins of the White House East Wing, now demolished
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Opinion Can an idyllic dream of Israel ever be reality? She says: ‘Coexistence, My Ass’
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