In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Hah, clearly international cultural exchange is a good thing! At the same time, 국립국어원 regularly campaigns to use native Korean words and often discourages English loans. There was also a city of Suwon campaign launched recently to remove English in signage:

www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/g...

MwALT (Midwest Association of Language Testers) 2025 conference wrapped up today! Great sessions and great to catch up with colleagues in the Midwest (and quite nostalgic, as this was a conference I attended frequently in grad school).

We're hiring! UT Linguistics invites applications for a position in computational linguistics to begin next academic year 2026-27 (rank of tenure-track Assistant Professor or Associate Professor with tenure). apply.interfolio.com/175156

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Free access until September 9, 2026!

intelligibility is strongly associated with comprehensibility. We used archived test data representing a wide range of proficiency and diverse L1s (e.g., Spanish, Vietnamese) and large samples of listeners to obtain independent intelligibility measures (transcription) and comprehensibility ratings.

Very excited to have our new study examining the relationship between intelligibility and comprehensibility in L2 English speech published in BLC (@cambup-linguistics.cambridge.org). Our data suggest speech that is < 65% intelligible is largely incomprehensible and above that..

How it started // How it’s going

This is potentially quite disastrous for online panels. Chalking up one more in the column of "things that the availability of GenAI makes worse"

"Elite colleges have convinced us that scarcity equals quality, that a lower acceptance rate means a better education. But their own behavior shows that many of their decisions are more about manipulating the market than academic or any other kind of excellence." 🎁🔗
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/o...

Stefan Fatsis on the current state of American lexicography www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

People updating R and re-downloading all packages?

*please share widely*

My department (Second Language Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) is hiring a corpus linguist who conducts research on second languages. Great place to teach (2/2 load) and do research! See link for more details:

go.hawaii.edu/mGc

Just discovered that Susan Hunston's new book "Pattern, Construction, System: A Unified Approach to Grammar and Lexis" is out in OPEN ACCESS! 🤩
www.cambridge.org/core/books/p...

#corpuslinguistics #appliedlinguistics #linguistics #patterngrammar

My data privacy on Facebook is apparently worth $38.36.

Will donate 100% of this lavish settlement to my department's student association.

In Korea, it's not uncommon to see older folks protesting or otherwise engaging in public political speech. But that demographic skews conservative and they're often waving US flags. I wonder how the Georgia incident will impact Korean domestic politics.

wrote on charlie kirk for the newsletter this weekend

New article on changes to South Korea's National English Curriculum and the growing global influence of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR).

My co-author, Kitaek Kim (Seoul Nat'l), was directly involved in the revisions, and lead author (and SLS PhD student) Joonhee Kim assisted.

@langtestjournal.bsky.social has made our article "A survey of English language proficiency tests in international student admissions at US research-intensive universities" free to read/download for 1 year! Mahalo!

Expose on an alleged IELTS cheating scandal in Bangladesh. Two arrests related to selling exam content from the paper-based version of the test.

www.daily-sun.com/post/825063

We now get to commiserate with Bayesian statisticians and the use of "priors" among the pundit and tech bro classes.

Our study on academic outcomes for students admitted with different tests at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa:

www.altaanz.org/uploads/5/9/...