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 I know exactly why leftists aren’t celebrating this ceasefire
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Special Report This school is fighting antisemitism all wrong. Why is it working?
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Culture Why Diane Keaton still matters
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Books A bespectacled, Jewish hypochondriac with literary pretensions and a creepy fascination with his stepson’s girlfriend — Guess who?
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Film & TV How a complete unknown created one of the most iconic music events of the 1970’s
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Fast Forward 3 more hostages’ remains returned as Hamas reasserts control in Gaza, potentially threatening truce
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Fast Forward How phase one of the Gaza peace plan is beginning to fray
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Opinion Trump drew Arab leaders into a historic peace agreement. Too bad about the one glaring caveat
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