John McWhorter

Linguist, professor, writer

Why you should listen

Columbia University professor and New York Times Opinion writer John McWhorter specializes in how language evolves. He teaches linguistics at Columbia (as well as Western Civilization and music history), and also writes about issues relating to race and cultural trends; his bestselling books include The Power of Babel, Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism. He hosts the popular language podcast Lexicon Valley.

John McWhorter’s TED talks

More news and ideas from John McWhorter

Live from TED2025

What we learned at day 2 of TED2025

April 9, 2025

Celebrating the joy of learning unexpected things, day 2 of TED2025 kicks off with a bang — or, more specifically, a howl, as we learn about the communication of wolves. From there, speakers explore a wide range of ideas, from the surprising parallels between evolution and language to jaw-dropping live demos of humanoid robots, AI-powered […]

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