John McWhorter is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Power of Babel, Doing Our Own Thing, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Language Hoax, Words on the Move and, most recently, Talking Back, Talking Black. He is a regular columnist on language matters and race issues for Time and CNN, writes for the Wall Street Journal Taste page, writes a regular column on language for the Atlantic, and hosts the Lexicon Valley podcast at Slate.