Soreness isn’t the signal. Lactic acid isn’t the culprit. What actually builds muscle is stranger and slower than you were told, and the English for it is worth having.
The Story That Needs You: Video Games as Modern Literature
Novels were once considered dangerous. Cinema was a fairground trick. Now it’s games. What happens to a story when you can move inside it, and how to argue about it in precise English.
The Floor Decides the Ceiling: The Psychology of Foundational Learning
Why chess masters forget random boards, why rereading lies to you, and how the first things you learn quietly set the limit on everything after. Advanced English, built together.
Recent Posts
A Hard Pill to Swallow | The Cure You Have to Get Past Your Throat
A poetic exploration of “a hard pill to swallow” — a phrase where the difficult thing is also the medicine, and everything depends on a few inches of throat.
You Don’t Find Your Voice. You Build It.
Everyone tells you to find your authentic voice, as if it were buried somewhere waiting. It isn’t. Voice is assembled from imitation, refusal, and repetition, and the people who have the strongest ones are usually the people who copied the most. Here’s how it actually works.
Опустить руки (Opustit’ ruki): The Arms Give Up First
A poetic dive into the Russian expression опустить руки, to lower the arms, and what neuroscience discovered when it went back and checked its most famous experiment.
The Polymath Advantage: Why Raising a Specialist Might Be the Riskiest Bet You Can Make
Our schools reward narrow expertise and treat broad curiosity as a lack of focus. But the evidence suggests the opposite: children who sample widely, connect ideas across fields, and resist premature specialization are the ones best equipped for a world that keeps rewriting the job description. Here is the case for range, the honest counterargument, and what to actually do about it.
Explaining Rules in English: How to Teach a Board Game Without Losing the Room
Learn the English of instructions — imperatives, must vs mustn’t vs don’t have to, the zero conditional for rules, and the precise language of rulebooks. Plus the teaching technique that fixes most bad explanations.
Sacrilegious: The Thief in the Temple
A poetic dive into “sacrilegious”; a word that literally means stealing sacred things, and what it tells us about how we still designate the untouchable.