“Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to.”

In the New York Times, Guy Deutscher explores the ways in which the language we grew up speaking alters our way of thinking about the world.

“”Beach reading” only bugs me because it makes reading in general sound like a chore, and because it drapes a fake aura of naughtiness over mass market books, which sell millions of copies anyway and don’t need the bad publicity. It’s like calling a hot fudge sundae “decadent.”

It’s not decadent: it’s a sundae.”

From Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic, here is a column that argues against the concept of “beach reading.”