February 2023

61. Where Children’s Books Become Bilingual

2023-02-15T07:21:36-05:00By |Episodes|

EPISODE 61. Where Children’s Books Become Bilingual Arthur Levine (L) and Antonio Gonzalez Cerna of Levine Querido Publishing recorded our conversation in Guadalajara, Mexico, when they were in town for the Guadalajara Book Fair. When Arthur Levine, a longtime American book publisher, bought the rights to publish, as he called it, a “very British” new children’s book on this side of the pond, it was not because he thought it would become as popular as, say, Harry Potter. It was because “if you limit yourself to writers from your own [...]

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60. Crossing the Borderlands

2023-02-01T14:04:08-05:00By |Episodes|

Episode 60. Crossing the Borderlands of America's Immigration Brenda Piñero “I do consider Puerto Rico a borderland of the United States,” says Brenda Piñero of her homeland. Brenda left the island—an American territory rather than a state—after getting her law degree at the University of Puerto Rico. But she could not stay away from borderlands. She’s now an attorney who is part of a pro bono asylum representation project based in Harlingen, Texas. The border with Mexico is a scant 28 miles away. Brenda works [...]

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March 2022

Six More Spanish Words English Should Adopt

2023-03-10T10:35:43-05:00By |Articles|

English is already well seasoned with Spanish. Not just place names like Colorado and Florida, and not just food words like tacos and enchiladas, but also nouns so firmly established in English that we need no synonyms—nouns like canyon, silo, plaza and rodeo. Yet we could use some more—specifically, six more Spanish words that may serve to strengthen family ties, and for which no English equivalents exist. There’s a name for us I encountered the first of these family-member words from author Joseph Keenan in his book, Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish, which I recently discovered. [...]

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November 2017

Steve Leveen’s Response in the WSJ

2024-05-01T17:23:46-04:00By |Articles|

  Ed. Note: A July 16, 2017 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal maintained that “fluency in coding is a more useful skill than French, Spanish or Russian.” Steve disagrees! Here is his letter to the editor that was published in the July 25th print edition of the Journal. The world is not headed toward one language. The fact that we see signs in English around the world doesn’t mean the Japanese or Chinese or Egyptians are abandoning their native languages. Rather, they are learning English and becoming bilingual. The U.S., on [...]

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October 2017

13. Hurricane Irma: a Dispatch from Delray Beach and an Invitation

2017-12-05T20:43:48-05:00By |Episodes|

Hurricane Irma: a Dispatch from Delray Beach and an Invitation We were halfway into the production of episode 13 but then Hurricane Irma happened. However, our host Steve Leveen still was able to call and give us an overview of the situation in Delray Beach, Florida. We’ll be back with a new episode in two weeks, but in the meantime, we are re-broadcasting “Little Ketchup Girl”. Here’s the description for said episode: How hard can it be to go up to the counter at McDonald’s and ask for ketchup? The answer might depend on how confident [...]

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