Ultimately, this episode is about science and scholarship. As Sean says,  “understanding something as well as you can in science means that you need to confront the data and be pushed out of your comfort zone.” I find it counterintuitive but true: this episode shows us that theoretical physics and indeed science pushes us into the subjunctive. It’s our job as scholars to think beyond  what’s given, beyond what’s happening right now around us, and think about what could happen, perhaps what would happen if certain constraints were lifted. If we suffered a mass extinction, what would life look like? If the mouth were configured differently, how would phonetic change have been different from the beginning? What about the uniformitarian hypothesis? If a language dies out and a new hybrid language forms, what are the possibilities and impossibilities? And then what happens when we think about this space of possibilities combinatorially vs. probabilistically vs. normatively?Among other things, Sean and I discuss the romance of the university, the merits of interdisciplinarity, his blog posts from 20+ years ago on Zizek, language, and metaphor—we inevitably touch on AI and writing—and, of course, we discuss what it means to host podcasts and present public scholarship. Sean Carroll, the host of Sean Carroll's Mindscape, is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several books including The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion, and Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime.https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/ The universe is structured like a languageFrom experience to metaphor by way of imaginationHoliday message 2025The Universe as a Quantum ComputerThe Library of Babel David KrakauerMaine senate primaryMax Weber 

We've been told time and time again that we need to understand data in context: it's an ethical imperative. Not every language gets an LLM; not every population fully understands a technology that's deployed in their community with or without everyone's consent; and certainly we're told that we will make better, safer conclusions with our data if we understand the context. John DeNero looks at things differently: instead of an ethical imperative for understanding data in context, John talks about a structural one. For example, accurately translating language necessitates understanding the context. It's almost as if he read a bunch of French critical theory, thought about deconstruction, and realized that a structural imperative has an ethical valence as well—and vice versa. It's not a paradox, it's deconstruction. This interview covers John's work as a professor of data science and computer science, his experience as a senior research scientist at Google Translate, thoughts on AI and language, and keeping up with the slang of today's youth. John DeNero is the Faculty Director of Data Science Undergraduate Studies (DSUS) and Associate Teaching Professor in the UC Berkeley EECS department. He is the co-founder and Chief Scientist at lilt. John's website Google ScholarA Class-Based Agreement Model for Generating Accurately Inflected TranslationsThis episode is dedicated to MukhammadAziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook, the two Brown University students who passed away on December 13th, 2025.

In language-centric fields we privilege the speaker. Linguistics looks at spoken or signed utterances; linguistic anthropology does as well. But Michael Berman looks at listening, which for him is a process wherein you limit or shift your language practices so as to avoid being generated as a certain type of person (often within a hierarchical relationship). That’s listening. It's about avoiding (or not) taxonomy, stereotypes, perception, and it necessitates an understanding of the power that our ears have. This episode cannot be reduced to a few thematic elements: Michael and I discuss listening, semiotics, C.S. Peirce, suffering and compassion, critiques of linguistics and other sciences, the implicit economic models undergirding scholarship, and his fieldwork in Japan—among other things. I’m struck by how much ground we cover, and yet we make a limited number of rhetorical and analytic moves. Whether we’re talking about what constitutes listening, language ideology, religion, etc.—we’re always taking the minuscule and making it representative (or symptomatic) of something bigger. Maybe that’s a paranoid reading, but I think it’s useful in the context of our conversation. What appears as an individual assessment of language is in fact a societally-engineered and collectively-upheld assessment. What appears as a certain niche orientation to data turns out to be symptomatic of widespread abuses of scientific frameworks. And, as Michael will remind us, the creation of categories and production of knowledge has effects. So let’s pay attention. This episode took inspiration from the questions that Jonathan Rosa asked in his episode on Tomayto Tomahto a year ago. Before listening to Michael, I encourage listening to Jonathan’s episode if you haven’t already. Michael BermanC.S. PeirceJonathan Rosa’s episode Toward a linguistic anthropological approach to listening: An ear with power and the policing of “active listening” volunteers in JapanReligion overcoming religions: Suffering, secularism, and the training of interfaith chaplains in JapanForms of the Affects “Why The Problem Isn’t Single-Parent Families” Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?This episode was written, edited, and produced by Talia Sherman. All artwork by Maja Mishevska.

We’re in a paradoxical time for dictionaries, claims Stefan Fatsis. On the one hand, we’re bombarded by words and ways to understand them in this lexically intense, linguistically charged political and cultural moment. On the other hand, the dictionary is struggling. Merriam-Webster—fighting to keep up with AI, machine learning software, and the explosion of voices vying for authority over what words mean—must evolve or compromise on the care put into defining words. But Merriam-Webster isn’t unique, and neither is language, for that matter, in its position within a (political) economy. Competition is healthy. Throughout NYT-bestselling author Stefan Fatsis’ book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, readers learn about lexical histories, Merriam-Webster’s backstory, word-enthusiast subcultures, and the importance of a dictionary's measured, apolitical approach to language. As Stefan says, “the demand for life or death information—objective, solid, reality based information that a dictionary like Merriam Webster provides—is critical to the functioning of democracy in a civil society.” So there you have it: the thrill and threat to the modern dictionary. It’s a paradox, hopefully an escapable one.Stefan Fatsis Website (https://www.bystefanfatsis.com/)Unabridged - Grove Atlantic Site (https://groveatlantic.com/book/unabridged/) Is This the End of the Dictionary? - Atlantic OpEd (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/10/dictionary-survival-language-evolution/683976/) American Dialect Society Selects rawdog as 2024 Word of the Year (https://americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2024-Word-of-the-Year-PRESS-RELEASE.pdf) Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue Perplexity AI for copyright and trademark infringement (https://www.theverge.com/news/777344/perplexity-lawsuit-encyclopedia-britannica-merriam-webster) True Color by Kory Stamper (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/555914/true-color-by-kory-stamper/) Here’s why “fuck” is in the dictionary (https://qz.com/973992/a-lexicographer-explains-why-dictionaries-contain-words-like-fuck)Lindsay Rose Russell  (https://english.illinois.edu/directory/profile/russellr)  Peter Sokolowski (https://aceseditors.org/peter-sokolowski)Ben Zimmer’s episode on Tomayto Tomahto  (https://open.spotify.com/episode/1VlBEyUPyhfzRmAoZe5lV2?si=3639e28fc3564c22) Nicole Holliday’s episode on Tomayto Tomahto 

“And that’s what ideologies are: the air that you’re breathing, something that feels like it’s common sense.” From start to finish, this episode is about ideologies: their consequences, their makeup, and the struggle to shake their influence. Savithry Namboodiripad, an associate professor of Linguistics at UMichigan leverages her linguistics background to critique ideologies of the native speaker, monolingualism, multilingualism, and more. Her research often proceeds on two separate tracks: studying language (usually syntax or language contact), and studying the field of linguistics: where our received theoretical framings come from, and how to reach stronger conclusions based on multi-disciplinary evidence. In this episode, we discuss how to dismantle pernicious ideologies through better experimental design and theoretical framing, and then we get to questions that are far greater than just the field of linguistics. For instance, why must we always get to the “pure” natural object? How have ideas about language always transcended academic discourse? Throughout, we express a lot of frustration at the academic frameworks that neglect to unsettle eugenicist, misogynistic, or racist ideologies. But it’s important to remember that linguistics is not alone in its failure. Science needs variables, and society provides them. Frameworks make things make sense, so they stay. Linguistics is caught in limbo between formal failures and the impositions of our content: language. Savithry Namboodiripad The ROLE Collective Contact, Cognition, & Change Lab Rejecting nativeness to produce a more accurate and just Linguistics Towards a Decolonial Syntax: Research, Teaching, Publishing | Decolonizing Linguistics Why we need a gradient approach to word order Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker The Emergence of the English Native Speaker: A Chapter in Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought

The AI Con may as well be the answer to the question: what happens when a linguist and a sociologist come together to write a book? Co-written by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, The AI Con isn’t just a book, it’s an instruction manual to guide readers through this era of AI hype. In short, this book does what academic scholarship does best: close read texts, historical patterns, marketing schemes, statistics, politics, and more—and find a way to connect these granular details and examples to broader trends in our society. The AI Con sits along this continuum between close reading and abstraction. It’s a book about “AI” technology, yes, but it’s also about the demands of an economy that values human labor and intelligence less and less. It’s a book about the ideals of democracy conflicting with economic pressures; the mutually determining relationship between worldviews and technology, or technology and institutional priorities; the power of technology if people have autonomy over it; and the problems with western epistemological orientations when they are imposed via technology onto populations and individuals who never consented for this technology to be imposed on them. This book is about a lot. But it’s also funny, and witty, and accessible, and written with the best intentions. Throughout this episode, Emily and Alex discuss their writing process, the pernicious economic undercurrents that paved the way for this AI hype era, contrasting epistemological orientations, how technology perpetuates societal biases, and much more. The AI ConAlex HannaEmily M. Bender Sébastien Bubeck, et al, Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality The Less People Know About AI, the More They Like ItArs technica: “Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says”Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass Tomayto Tomahto is produced, written, and edited by Talia Sherman. Artwork by Maja Mishevska. 

Justin Khoo, an associate professor of Philosophy at MIT, begins this episode with the assertion that philosophy asks the most fundamental questions we can possibly articulate—but this assertion is not innocent. Asking the most fundamental questions we can possibly articulate may come at the cost of undermining conceptual, schematic, ideological, and often disciplinary frameworks upon which scientific findings are predicated. Through discussion of code speech, political speech, philosophy of language, aesthetic objects, hypothetical epistemic advantages, and the foundations of our current political (dis)order, this episode draws attention to stubborn frameworks and axioms, not necessarily undermining them, but questioning their validity and utility. This episode at times historicizes, allegorizes, analytically analyzes, narrativizes, and outright complains about the objects we're discussing—be it the referents of language or a film or a quote by Trump or the blind-spots of a discipline. The very fact of our discussion of the so-upheld "distinctions" between various methodologies and ideological orientations demonstrates the apparent need for a division among academic disciplines—but why? If there's a degree of meta-discourse throughout this episode, it's in reference to our frightening political climate. Parts of the world are literally on fire and yet we pontificate about Trump's contradictions and the subversive strategy of code speech. I want to acknowledge this tension, and optimistically suggest that perhaps exposing contradictions or calling out hypocrisy is a small act of resistance, even if it does project the frame of rationality on completely irrational actions. Justin's Website 3am interview Judging for OurselvesPolitical and Coded Speech Willard Van Orman Quine ; Two Dogmas of EmpiricismPeter Van InwagenMichael Lynch: Trump, Truth, and the Power of ContradictionJason Stanley: Democracy and the Demagogue‘You Can’t Pin Him Down’: Trump’s Contradictions Are His Ultimate Cover Jennifer Lackey: Acting on KnowledgeJustin's podcast: Cows in the Field Minority Report The Shining Artwork: Maja Mishevska, Brown '27

Throughout this episode, Chiara Repetti-Ludlow, a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Mellon's Neuroscience Institute, asks us to consider the essentials of speech processing and its constraints. We hear phonetics, but we understand phonology. How and why? To answer those questions, Chiara takes a highly interdisciplinary approach. We know that linguistics is an interdisciplinary field—it has to be. We can't divorce language from its cognitive, physical, and social apparatuses, nor can language be extricated from human interaction. But academic inquiry has a way of siloing different subfields. And, frankly, it's easier to stick to a rigid set of questions and methodologies. Chiara Repetti-Ludlow's research is exactly what we often hope for in linguistics: interdisciplinary, multi-textured, and conscious of the strengths of different subfields. By bringing together methods and insights from neurolinguistics, phonetics-phonology, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics, Chiara's research attempts to answer granular questions about speech processing. Chiara is a current postdoctoral research fellow in the Carnegie Mellon University Neuroscience Institute. She earned her PhD in Linguistics at NYU. Chiara’s Website Continuous Perception and Graded Categorization: Electrophysiological Evidence for a Linear Relationship Between the Acoustic Signal and Perceptual Encoding of SpeechRegularization in the face of variable input: Children's acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American EnglishVariable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð ~ θ]s of changeSahil Lutha

In early 2023, Susan Blum came on Tomayto Tomahto to discuss linguistic anthropology. 2 years later, she's back to discuss her work on schoolishness, ungrading, and linguistic ideology. From plagiarism to authentic learning, imperialist language ideologies to biased methods and metrics of Western science, this episode looks critically at what we "know," how we know it, and where the perpetuation of knowledge might hinder new discoveries. Science promises objectivity, but does it deliver? How might anthropology promise subjectivity, deliver complexity, but ultimately nudge our cultural, psychology, and linguistic understandings toward objectivity?  We can be angry with students for cheating and we can lament the existence of AI for aiding and abetting—or we can ask: why are students cheating in the first place? Surely there’s something amiss with our education system that a substantial portion of students feel no intrinsic motivation to learn and therefore happily outsource their essays and projects, right? Combining questions of methods, results, epistemological orientations, and the political ramifications of research, this episode highlights the merits of an anthropological approach to learning, language, and inquiry.  Susan Blum's personal website; Notre Dame profile Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Unseen WEIRD Assumptions: The So-Called Language Gap Discourse and Ideologies of Language, Childhood, and Learning John Warner: More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI Asao Inoue: Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, 2nd Edition Contract Cheating Émile Durkheim: Collective Effervescence ⁠Charles Briggs⁠ ⁠William Labov ⁠

A defining quirk of fields like English, Linguistics, Comparative Literature, etc is that the the objects of study mirror the medium through which the objects of study are explicated. Literary scholars produce literature to explain literature. We explain language through language, not always the same language,  but a linguistic medium matches a linguistic medium nonetheless. Climate change is not the same as language, not at all. So why is it that we make sense of our climate through language? Josh Willis, a Principle Research Scientist at NASA joins Tomayto Tomahto to discuss the communications war of global warming (or is it climate change?). We discuss why the explanatory language of global warming can be exclusionary or inaccessible and weigh the benefits of using plain-er language. Ultimately, it’s on hegemonic systems and power structures, not individuals, to reduce our global emissions, so why is it that individuals feel such pressure to  make consequentially sustainable consumer choices?  Josh Willis studies ocean warming and rising sea levels at NASA. He also teaches improv. His research profile can be found here Frank Luntz Jihad vs. McWorld