I spend three months living in Paris. My family is only a husband and wife. Their son has joined the French military and is now training to fly helicopters to Afghanistan. My host father, Laurent, is sixty-five but quite vigorous and robustly French in all its stereotypes—he speaks not a word of English. His wife Philippa is a naturalized Norwegian whose fluent French, like her broken English, is overwhelmed by the rhythms and intonations of her native tongue. Since my arrival I am worrying about communication, reminded of what I have read in the translator’s note of a great novel: foreign languages are so difficult to translate not because of the differences between the words, but due to the incompatibility of their sequences. I tend to speak in basic sentences, noun-verb-noun, noun-verb-adjective, noun-verb-adverb, the simplest paradigms shared by French and English. Reduced to these three act tragedies, my first two months show me that my words no longer carry the texture of my thoughts.

This summer I spend three weeks doing political science research in Dakar, where I don’t know a soul and not a soul knows me. When someone asks, I confess, Yes, this is my first time in Senegal. (I visited Mexico, once, when I was eleven years old.)

I pass hours in the courtyard of my hotel, which has everything I need and could be possibly entertained by in Africa. A wireless internet connection, which they call wi-fi in French, so that it rhymes with leafy or beefy. A bar and a barman, who meets me with a beer at my preferred beer-drinking and wi-fi surfing table, near the hanging vines but not so near that a mosquito could lurk in the greenery and launch a surprise attack on my upper neck. I am terrified of contracting dengue fever, yellow fever, or malaria.

The barman is convinced I neither speak nor understand a word of French, no matter how many times I talk in French to him. [...]

Exciting news here at Leland! Our second issue of Volume II is now printed and circulating campus. The issue will be launched online by the end of the week (April 26 or so). If you’re on campus and want to know how you can get your hands on a copy of the current issue, you [...]

We’re not wearing ties. We carry neither briefcases nor resumes. We wear t-shirts, plaid shirts, sweaters. We sidle up to cute recruiters and begin our job pitch, ‘Sup?’ We smile and we laugh more than anyone else at the career fair, and we like to think it’s genuine (i.e. we’re not selling out), but [...]