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half-way down the page there is a list of posts by linguists about sarcasm

So...I'm off on a tangent here--not really linguistics. But something I think you all would be interested in reading about. And David Brooks is a skillful writer.

"Psychologists had already suspected that language was important for understanding numbers. Earlier studies of two tribes in the Amazon - one that had no words for numbers greater than five and another whose counting system seemed to go "one, two, many" - showed that people in those tribes had trouble reporting exactly how many objects were placed in front of them. But in those cultures, which don't have monetary systems, there might be no need to represent large numbers exactly. The question posed was whether language kept those Amazonian people from counting, or a lack of cultural pressure. To address that question, Spaepen and colleagues turned to Nicaraguan homesigners, deaf people who communicate with their hearing friends and relatives entirely through made-up hand gestures."

"As the world's leading linguist, what are your thoughts on Watson, the robot that will be appearing on "Jeopardy"?"

"Neural processing that goes into deciphering simple two-word phrases is different from what happens when decoding complete sentences and other more complex linguistic expressions."

"Longer words tend to carry more information, according to research by a team of cognitive scientists.... Piantadosi and colleagues suggest that the relationship of word length to information content might not only make it more efficient to convey information linguistically but also make language cognition a smoother ride for the reader or listener."

more uses for computational linguistics

"The current, long-standing theory suggests that children learn their first words through a series of associations; they associate words they hear with multiple possible referents in their immediate environment....A small set of psychologists and linguists, including members of the Penn team, have long argued that the sheer number of statistical comparisons necessary to learn words this way is simply beyond the capabilities of human memory.... rich interactions with children-and patience-are more important than abstract picture books and drilling."

Interesting blog: Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK

"When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers. But how reliably can linguistic experts establish that Person A wrote Document X when Document X is an e-mail - or worse, a terse note sent by instant message or Twitter? After all, e-mails and their ilk give us a much more limited purchase on an author's idiosyncrasies than an extended work of literature. Does digital writing leave fingerprints?"

shows how human migration patterns established by dna tests mirror the language-reconstruction efforts of linguists

Linguistics Research Center

Lots of interesting questions that people ask that are answered by linguists on this site.

interesting overview of what's out there

Lakoff cognitive linguistics