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John McWhorter, a contributing editor at The Atlantic who also teaches linguistics at Columbia, earned his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and became Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, after teaching at Cornell. His academic specialty is language change and language contact. He is the author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English (2008); The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (2003); Words on the Move (2016); The Language Hoax (2015); and Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music in America and Why We Should, Like, Care (2003). He has written books on Black English such as Talking Back, Talking Black (2016) and on creoles such as The Creole Debate (2018). Dr. McWhorter has appeared on radio and television programs such as The Colbert Report, Late Night with Don Lemon, AM Joy with Joy Reid, The Jim Lehrer NewsHour, and All Things Considered, and he hosts Slate’s linguistics podcast, Lexicon Valley.