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"Latin is a language as dead as dead can be; It killed the ancient Romans, and now it's killing me!" In the past, Latin teaching has emphasized grammar and translation. Yet, to paraphrase Monty Python, Latin might now well say, "But I'm not dead yet!" Read about this movement to revive spoken Latin, in order to make it a "living language" more relevant and engaging to a new generation of learners.

Three University of Southern California professors offer their thoughts on whether print media and traditional books will survive this digital age, or whether they will become obsolete. "Today, practically anyone with online access can blog or tweet to a worldwide audience. This has both democratized writing and, in some ways, devalued it. At the same time, the rise of digital books and online mega-sellers like Amazon means more writers can self-publish their books, and readers can order books instantly with the push of a button. But authors are getting a smaller piece of the economic pie. Then there's the halo effect of social media. Some authors build strong followings on Twitter and Facebook, which bring writers closer to their readers-turned-fans. In this swirling media landscape, what will happen to the book as we know it?"

Kaitlyn Tiffany, the writer of this article from the Atlantic, examines the social media commentary surrounding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Milling," a sociological term, refers to the "agitated, aimless buzzing of the type of crowd that gathers in the aftermath of some bewildering catastrophe...We are all just chattering away in restless and confused excitement as we try to figure out how to think about what's happening. We want to understand which outcomes are most likely, and whether we might be obligated to help-by giving money or vowing not to share misinformation or learning the entire history of global conflict so as to avoid saying the wrong thing. We are milling." The word comes from the mid-20th-century American sociologist Herbert Blumer, who was interested in the process by which crowds converge, during moments of uncertainty and restlessness, on common attitudes and actions. As people mill about the public square, those nearby will be drawn into their behavior, Blumer wrote in 1939. "The primary effect of milling is to make the individuals more sensitive and responsive to one another, so that they become increasingly preoccupied with one another and decreasingly responsive to ordinary objects of stimulation." These days, we mill online. For a paper published in 2016, a team of researchers from the University of Washington looked at the spread of rumors and erratic chatter on Twitter about the Boston Marathon bombings in the hours after that event. They described this "milling" as "collective work to make sense of an uncertain space" by interpreting, speculating, theorizing, debating, or challenging presented information.

Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own. Edward Tian, a 22-year-old senior at Princeton University, has built an app to detect whether text is written by ChatGPT, the viral chatbot that's sparked fears over its potential for unethical uses in academia. Tian, a computer science major who is minoring in journalism, spent part of his winter break creating GPTZero, which he said can "quickly and efficiently" decipher whether a human or ChatGPT authored an essay.

How many times have your teachers or editors told you that every word counts? Now, it turns out that every character you send counts, too. In fact, it turns out that the best way to punctuate a text message may be by not punctuating it at all: Researchers at Binghampton University have found that ending your text with a period - full stop - may make you seem more insincere.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, wants to break language barriers across the globe using artificial intelligence (AI). Meta announced an ambitious AI driven project, which will be key to building its Metaverse. The company said that it is building a universal speech translator, along with an AI powered virtual assistant. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in an online presentation, stated, "The ability to communicate with anyone in any language - that's a superpower people have dreamed of forever, and AI is going to deliver that within our lifetime.For people who understand languages like English, Mandarin, or Spanish, it may seem like today's apps and web tools already provide the translation technology we need. Nearly half the world's population can't access online content in their preferred language today. No Language Left Behind is a single system capable of translating between all written languages. "We're also working on Universal Speech Translator, an AI system that provides instantaneous speech-to-speech translation across all languages, even those that are mostly spoken," said the company in a blog.

The takeaway: one K is bad, two Ks are good and above all else, never, ever use three Ks. 1. "Okay" is obviously the most professional way to type the word, and I will vouch that it is also safe to casually use in text messages. Some disagree that "okay" can sound sarcastic or stern, especially when paired with a period. Which isn't wrong - sentences do invoke a more serious tone when there are periods involved. But the reason why okay is, well, okay, is because it's the longest form of the word. You took the time to type out those additional two letters, and that counts for something. 2. "Kk" is the closest to gotcha. It means message received, roger that. 3. The origins of the dreadful "k" can't exactly be pinpointed, though it's been a thing since iMessage looked like this, so basically the Stone Age. People voiced their disdain for short responses - "k, ok, lol" - on Facebook pages and through memes years ago. And everyone pretty much agreed that yeah, when you type out an extremely long, emotionally charged paragraph to someone and they respond with one letter, it's pretty infuriating. From then on we've been conditioned (or traumatized) to react in a similar manner to the single k. Even when it's just in response to a simple, harmless sentence, it can still feel like a dig.