The Language of Freedom
English doesn’t need saving. Thousands of other languages do.
Standing before Mount Rushmore on July 3, President Trump said, “In America, we speak English because that is the language of our founding and for a thousand years that has been the language of freedom.”
As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1056, “He biþ swā dysig and swā ungewiss.”
Trump’s campaign to promote English is, unfortunately, just one of many fantasies rattling around the rusty roulette wheel of his mind. In early 2025, during a blitz of performative rage, he signed an executive order purporting to make English the official language of the United States.
A more effective way to honor English might be to stop using it to lie, insult, and confuse, but nobody invited Orwell to this rally.
In her new book How to Kill a Language, Sophia Smith Galer neatly dismisses the suggestion that we’re all better off speaking English: “In our insistence that a common language can unite us, we forget that multilingualism is — like all biodiversity — a connective tissue in the grand scheme of our existence.”
Besides, English hardly needs more official defense from the federal government. English already exerts an implacable force: “Bloated and greedy, our language siphons off the words of many of our speakers, benefiting from what multilingual immigrants contribute to our countries but stripping them of their own language within two generations.”
That linguistic crisis, she explains, is far more dire than most people realize.
“This is the century that will make or break the future of languages around the world,” she writes. Thousands of local tongues are already as endangered as pandas. “In the next one hundred years, up to half of the world’s languages will die.”
“No funerals will be held; no cemeteries will fill. Some languages will leave behind dictionaries, novels, hours of radio; others will leave nothing save for a relative’s turn of phrase someone still remembers with affection.”
In fact, it’s Smith Galer’s affection for her Nonna that serves as the spine of this engaging work of memoir, reporting, and cultural analysis. Determined to track down the language that her grandmother brought from Italy, Smith Galer begins investigating the state of imperiled languages the world over.
Alas, it’s carnage everywhere: dozens, sometimes hundreds of languages slipping into eternal silence. And there’s nothing normal about this spate of linguicide, no natural reason we should be losing “one indigenous language every two weeks.”
War, commercial hegemony, and the lingering effects of colonialism are snuffing them out like an infernal red pen scratching across the planet’s manuscripts.
And what’s lost is not merely another name for love. Every time a language dies, it takes with it a unique way of understanding life, a whole universe of insights, distinctions, desires, and memories. “In short,” Smith Galer writes, “language diversity is one of our most potent weapons against the diminishment of deep knowledge, the homogenization of culture, the erasure of history.”
She considers a fascinating range of examples — from the Kremlin’s war on Ukrainian to the plight of a remarkably compact language called Śḥerɛ̄t spoken in the mountains of southern Oman.
Her chapters are arranged around the various threats languages face — from occupation to expulsion to criminalization.
A complicated essay on the remarkable revival of Hebrew considers the countervailing risks of sanctification and the tragic loss of linguistic diversity in Israel.
But despite its often elegiac tone, How to Kill a Language is not a work of resignation. As Smith Galer notes near the end, “We have also witnessed astonishing, fate-reversing language revivals.” Just consider Welsh, Hawaiian, and Basque.
This can seem like one of those colossal challenges that defies any personal solution — What can I do to preserve Arctic ice? — but Smith Galer has a concrete suggestion: “There is one small action that anyone can take to resist glottophobia, or the discrimination against other people’s languages or accents: learning a second language yourself.”
As the Dagomba people of northern Ghana say, “Suɣulo yi beni chinchini ni kpe gaɣili ni.”
Where there is patience, you can put a cloth into a narrow-neck gourd.◆
The rest of the newsletter follows below.
Books Go to the Movies
The first time I read The Odyssey was late — not just 2,800 years after it was composed but a week before the freshmen I was teaching it to. And honestly, I didn’t take to it easily. But the story and the students’ questions eventually won me over. How great a hero can Odysseus be, they wondered, if he loses 100 percent of the men under his command? And why must Penelope put off the suitors for years while her husband frolics with every nymph and goddess who falls in his way? What could I say? He was between Scylla and Charybdis. We used Robert Fagles’s edition — which was relatively new at the time — but now I’d want them to read Emily Wilson’s thrilling translation, which reportedly inspired Christopher Nolan’s new film version of The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway.
More than two decades ago, Azar Nafisi published a memoir about her years as a professor in post-revolutionary Iran, where she and a handful of female students risked gathering to read Western classics by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and Austen. Now, as the U.S. bombs Iran, bans thousands of books in schools and libraries, and lurches toward theocracy, a film adaptation of Reading Lolita in Tehran, starring Golshifteh Farahani, is playing in select theaters (trailer).
Lucky, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Annette Bening, and Timothy Olyphant, is streaming on Apple TV (trailer). The seven-episode series is based on Marissa Stapley’s 2021 thriller about a young con artist who’s been trying to put her criminal family behind her, but one last heist could be her undoing.◆
The Most Beautiful Bookstore in the World
Last month, Dua Lipa’s banned-books library in the basement of Livraria Lello sparked headlines around the world (story). But I also want to tell you about the magnificent old bookstore above it.
Founded in 1906, Livraria Lello has become a mobbed tourist attraction in Porto, Portugal. So far as I know, it’s the only bookstore that charges every visitor just to enter.
Tickets — good for credit against any book that Lello publishes — start at about $18 and go up to more than $110 for various extra benefits. That admission policy might sound absurd, if not a little offensive, but it’s allowed the store to monetize its popularity and flourish.
The day we went, lines snaked down the street for various entrance times — 11, 11:30, 12 — like the gate for a packed flight to Paris, and just like those passengers, the bookstore’s customers are sternly managed by a cohort of agents wearing earpieces. (Your ticket will be checked and checked again.)
The moment you step inside, all the fuss makes sense. The store, beautifully refurbished in 2018, is a portal into the elegance of the Belle Époque. Gorgeous bookcases, filled with titles in six languages, soar to the ceiling. Above it all stretches a stained-glass skylight, its floral Art Nouveau border framing the store’s motto, Decus in Labore — “Honor in Work” — with the figure of a blacksmith presumably hammering out some great work of literature.
And dead center, inspiring gasps from all who enter, a bifurcated spiral staircase spills down from the second story. It’s a masterpiece of Old World craftsmanship perfect for the Instagram Age. Camera-wielding visitors — which is to say all of us — patiently wait their turn for a selfie on the stairs.
My ticket — about $57 — included a private tour with a Lello bookseller named Virginia. Among her first revelations: All the intricate woodwork I’m seeing on the walls and ceiling is not wood; it’s faux bois — painted plaster.
And the iconic red staircase was a mistake.
Virginia tells me, “In 1995, they made the first renovations, some maintainments in the staircase, and they bought the wrong color. They made the work at night, and in the morning, they look at the staircase and they say, ‘Well, that is perfect.’ And they keep it. It was the most beautiful mistake in the most beautiful bookshop in the world.”
One quickly succumbs to the extravagance of Lello rhetoric.
In Livraria Lello: The Book, an enormous and unintentionally hilarious tribute published in 2023, CEO Aurora Pedro Pinto writes, “From the humidity of the walls, we created humanity on the shelves.”
Brand Specialist Carlos Coelho adds, “Livraria Lello is a top model in an eternal pose, a timeless orgasm, a churn in the sacred milk ocean of knowledge.”
The book costs $80 and took up half my luggage space, but how could I leave Porto without “a timeless orgasm”?◆
Picture This
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
— Elon Musk
Picture books about kindness and inclusivity can taste as sweet as a strawberry cupcake. But given the poison trickling down from America’s ruling class, some kids may need a sharper interrogation of bigotry.
That sounds like a terminal load of moral freight for any children’s book to carry, and I’ve complained before about the sludge of didactic titles clogging up the shelves.
But Others, by Kobi Yamada, embraces its didacticism in a way that makes it more effective.
The story unfolds as a conversation between two boys standing in front of a large hedge. One boy is thoughtful and inquisitive; the other one sounds ready for a play date with Stephen Miller.
“You really have to wonder what they are thinking.”
“What do you mean?” his friend asks. “Who are you talking about?”
“Them. The other people,” the boy says. “They look different. They talk different. Everything about them is different.”
And then they’re off, back and forth, testing this concept of otherness against their teeth like a fake coin.
Again and again, the thoughtful boy considers what “different” could mean. “Do they have scales and feathers?” he asks. “Do they have sticky tentacles?”
Again and again, his friend is forced to admit, “No, don’t be silly. They don’t have those things.”
As their exchange grows incrementally more sophisticated, the fearful boy concedes that these mysterious Others probably feel lonely sometimes, that they celebrate birthdays, that they love their families.
And then, illuminated by Charles Santoso’s clever illustrations, the story starts rubbing “here” against “there” and “us” against “them” until there’s no way to avoid seeing that we’re all here, and we’re all us.◆
This Week’s Poem
Chera Hammons’s new collection, Birds of America, takes its title from John James Audubon’s study of North American birds published almost 200 years ago. But there’s nothing retrospective about these vibrant poems, which swoop and soar through trauma and healing.
In a bracing introduction, Hammons reveals that she was once in an abusive marriage and later found herself abandoned and penniless. “As I rebuilt my life,” she writes, “the natural world was my solace.”
But she doesn’t posit the woods, fields, and streams as a pure alternative realm to human strife. No, she understands that the natural world is a fellow victim of humanity’s cruelty and carelessness. “The earth wants to heal,” she writes, “but it needs the same things we do: care, effort, and time.”
It’s a terrific collection — witty, moving, and ultimately hopeful.
The Wedding Poem
How dangerous this ritual looks even to us,
though we are in the habit of taking risks:
Two bald eagles, talons locked,
spiral as they plummet from the sky
in freefall. This dive is their courtship,
the quickest way to approximate
the whirlwind of a life together.
Imagine how that round sun spins,
how the toes tighten their grip,
how large and sharp the rushing stones become,
how fast and blurred the familiar stands of timber.
Let’s pretend that we are the first people to see this.
Let’s pretend we have discovered
an uninhabited wilderness.
Look, we are walking away from the cities
into a dappled wood, and anything can happen.
Our home will be a tree. We will sleep on a bed of leaves.
Forget for a moment that,
when we open our eyes,
we will still be damaged people waiting
where the world ends.
Instead, remember that there are eagles
whirling in breathtaking ceremony
even when — especially when — no one is there to see it.
There are spiders spinning histories in corners,
and galaxies that spiral into wheels of stars.
Water bears go about their invisible business
without interruption, having survived every extinction,
proof that there is something that can’t be reached
by our kind of hurt. Something that has never asked
for us. Something that hopes there is no ending.
See how the eagles lift now, bound by surviving together.
We only get one shot at this. Save
what you can. Love even what you can’t save.
Believe me when I tell you
gratitude is almost never wrong.
Excerpted from “Birds of America,” by Chera Hammons. Copyright © 2026 by Chera Hammons. Published by Dial. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.◆
The Writing Life
Don’t bother Jonathan Franzen this fall. Despite the recent appearance of an excerpt in The New Yorker, the novelist must set aside work on his sequel to Crossroads to finish an adaptation of The Corrections for Netflix. Filming is scheduled to begin in January, with Meryl Streep playing Enid, the unforgettable matriarch inspired by Franzen’s mother.
Last Friday night, I interviewed Franzen at the Book Ball, a fundraiser for Aspen Words, which supports writing workshops, school programs, and author events.
The upstart crow who once famously dissed Oprah, disparaged Michiko Kakutani, and declared television the enemy of serious fiction has mellowed into a gentler, more reflective literary statesman.
“I was extremely opinionated and extremely righteous as a kid in his 20s,” Franzen told the crowd enjoying their lemon tarts. “I thought I knew what was wrong with the world, and I thought I knew whose fault it was, and I made searing moral judgments. It was only when I entered my mid-30s that I realized, ‘You know what? You shouldn’t be so sure you’re right.’”
Despite the attention generated at the time by his debut novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, Franzen said, “I look back at that novel, and I see a very brainy kid who hadn’t figured out how to really write a novel.”
The fundamental shift that eventually produced The Corrections came when he dropped the old models and found new ones.
“I’d stopped reading the people I was supposed to be reading as an ambitious young, male, white, straight writer in America, and started reading fiction by women,” including Paula Fox, Jane Smiley, and Alice Munro.
“Those books were incredibly personal,” he said. “They were getting at what was going on in the larger society — not by trying to go out and gather in all of this information,” but by following “very carefully what was happening with someone who was anxious, who wanted something, who was failing.”
In other words, his mother. “She’s actually the model for all of my characters,” he said. “She so wanted things, and she mostly couldn’t have them. Wanting something and not being able to have it, that’s kind of the master key to story.”
Now, nearly three decades after reinventing himself with The Corrections, Franzen has come to see television differently, too.
Back in the mid-90s, he tried to make a living in Hollywood but recoiled from the collaborative writing process, and his agent dropped him “like medical waste.”
Since then, he said, two things have changed: He gained total artistic control over his material, and The Wire ushered in an era of socially engaged, long-form television in the tradition of great 19th-century novels.
“I realized at a certain point that TV like that is not a threat,” he said. “TV like that is another form of the novel. And I should just let go of my hostility to it, especially since I really like watching it.”
Franzen wrote the screen adaptation of The Corrections with Meryl Streep in mind as Enid. “She is a good comic actress,” he said, “and we are intending to make a comic show of it.”
P.S. Early Friday morning, Franzen led a small group of Aspen Words donors on a private bird tour. The highlight, I’m told, was spotting a Lewis’s Woodpecker with its distinctive pink belly. My own private tribute to birds took me to Poppycock’s for the legendary oatmeal pancakes, which were indeed very good, though the fake syrup is an abomination.◆
Clippings
This week’s review is Cloudthief, Nathaniel Rich’s unsettling thriller in which the most valuable loot is us (review).
Newsletter reader Kristy, in Bozeman, Mont., is the winner of Power Lines, by Peter Keating (see my giveaway on June 26). She tells me she’s loved maps since childhood, when her family’s long road trips fueled her curiosity about the world. Thanks to everyone who entered.
My friends and former Washington Post colleagues Becky Meloan and Olga Massov have started an occasional feature called “Feed & Read” that pairs a book worth discussing with a recipe inspired by its pages. You can sample their first offering here.◆
Growing up in a Norwegian/English-speaking household there may have been Norwegian words I couldn't translate into English, but I certainly understood what they meant. It led to a love of language, words, and the sounds various letters and letter combinations make in different languages. I think it also made it easier for me to learn French and Italian because I was open to different pronunciations and letter combinations. The richness and beauty of a world of multiple languages needs to be nurtured, not sanitized.
another Friday balm...which I needed