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Shakespeare has not lost his place in this new world, just as, despite the grim jeremiads of the cultural pessimists, he has not lost his place in colleges and universities. On the contrary, his works (and even his image) turn up everywhere, and students continue to flock to courses that teach him, even when those courses are not required. But as I have discovered in my teaching, it is a different Shakespeare from the one with whom I first fell in love. Many of my students may have less verbal acuity than in years past, but they often possess highly developed visual, musical and performative skills. They intuitively grasp, in a way I came to understand only slowly, the pervasiveness of songs in Shakespeare’s plays, the strange ways that his scenes flow one into another or the cunning alternation of close-ups and long views. When I ask them to write a 10-page paper analyzing a particular web of metaphors, exploring a complex theme or amassing evidence to support an argument, the results are often wooden; when I ask them to analyze a film clip, perform a scene or make a video, I stand a better chance of receiving something extraordinary. A student with a beautiful voice performed Brahms’s Ophelia songs, with a piano accompaniment by another gifted musician. Students with a knack for creative writing have composed monologues in the voice of the villainous Iago, short stories depicting an awkward reunion of Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, or even additional scenes in Shakespearean verse.

There is one clear difference, though: Iyer has not invented them. The definitions she illustrates – 60 so far, from 30 different languages – match The Meaning of Liff for absurdity, but all of them are real. There is komorebi, Japanese for ‘the sort of scattered dappled light effect that happens when sunlight shines in through trees’; or rire dans sa barbe, a French expression meaning ‘to laugh in your beard quietly while thinking about something that happened in the past’.

was in my late forties when I finally admitted to myself that I would never love wine. As other women fake orgasms, I have faked hundreds of satisfied responses to hundreds of glasses—not a difficult feat, since my father schooled my brother and me in the vocabulary of wine from an early age. Confronted with another Bordeaux or Burgundy, I could toss around the terms I had learned at the dinner table (Pétillant! Phylloxera! Jeroboam!), then painstakingly direct the wine straight down the center of my tongue, a route that limited my palate’s exposure to what it perceived as discomfiting intensity.

But now experts say a reliance on sat-navs and smartphone map apps is undermining map-reading skills. So here are five reasons why you should love maps and resist the easy attraction of the sat-nav.

Digital note-taking apps also leave their users only a finger-swipe away from e-mail or Candy Crush. An article on digital distraction in the June issue of The Harvard Business Review cites an estimate, by the Information Overload Research Group, that the problem is costing the U.S. economy nine hundred and ninety-seven billion dollars a year. “The digital world provides a lot of opportunity to waste a lot of time,” Allen said. A paper notebook, by contrast, is a walled garden, free from detours (except doodling), and requiring no learning curve. A growing body of research supports the idea that taking notes works better on paper than on laptops, in terms of comprehension, memorization, and other cognitive benefits.