A book that attempts to tell the story of one of the world’s largest and most complex islands across vast spans of time—from deep geological history to the urgent pressures of the present—Olivier Hein’s Borneo: The History of an Enigma announces its ambition from the first pages. Such scale is risky: many books with grand reach end up flattened by their own seriousness. Hein avoids that fate. What emerges instead is a work of remarkable clarity and narrative energy, one that wears its scholarship lightly and reads with the confidence of a storyteller who knows exactly where he is taking you.
Artificial Intelligence in Our Language Learning Classrooms brings together leading researchers and practitioners exploring the pedagogical, ethical, and emotional dimensions of generative AI (GenAI) in second language (L2) education. Across two major sections (L2 skill development and broader educational perspectives), contributors offer theory-informed and practice-oriented insights into how GenAI can transform language teaching and learning. Topics include conversational AI and chatbots, writing development, extensive reading, pragmatics instruction, ethics, emotions, and teacher-led inquiry. Through a balance of optimism and critical reflection, this volume situates AI integration within established educational frameworks, supporting teachers as they navigate the rapidly evolving technological landscape.
The name Jodhpur itself conjures for many the full colour of the Raj at its height: polo grounds and palaces, and impeccably-tailored riding trousers—jodhpurs—a word exported into the English language. In Peter Vacher’s richly-illustrated and deeply-researched book, that familiar imagery is joined by something less-widely appreciated but no less consequential: aviation. The result is a book that reveals how a princely desert state became one of the most important air hubs in Asia between the World Wars, and later a critical node in the Allied war effort in South-East Asia.
Today, much of the Middle East is “Arab”—an identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the Near East to Syria. Yet how did this region become Arab? How did this identity spread? Was it due to migration, or conquest?
A child was abandoned on the train tracks of Cheongnyangni Station, Seoul. Nothing was known of her before that moment—no certificates, no paperwork. She would grow up to be called Munju by her foster father, then Esther by the nuns at the orphanages, and finally given the name Nana by her French adoptive parents. Those same train tracks are Nana’s first childhood memory, a memory that forms how she views her birth mother, her foster father, and her own sense of self. Now an award-winning playwright in Paris, Nana receives an invitation to Seoul from an amateur filmmaker, who proposes a documentary on her adoption, a film that will revisit the fragmented scenes of her past.
Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850 is the accompanying volume to an eponymous exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art which places painters, local and foreign, working in India and China in the context of the commercial and colonial operations of the East India Company.
Author and journalist Fatima Bhutto reflects on how caring for her pet dog shed light on her own relationships in this tender and insightful memoir of a doomed love affair.
Intrinsic (Book 1 of The Intrinsic Trilogy) is a provocative (young adult) coming-of-age political saga that explores the fine line between dynasty and destiny.
The Myanmar-China border stretches for over 2,000 kilometres between China’s Yunnan Province and Myanmar’s Kachin and Shan States. The border has long been a site of migration, trade and cultural exchange, and became a particularly significant area of escape during periods of political and economic hardship. The impact of this border on individual lives is the focus of Wen-Chin Chang’s new book, Echoes from the Sino-Burmese Borderlands: Untold Stories of Overland Chinese Migrants during the Cold War.
Can grammar function like a machine? Can a set of mechanical procedures, or rules, generate perfectly correct sentences in a given language? This is a question that preoccupies linguists, but not language users. It is natural to assume that language is too sloppy, too idiosyncratic, too human, in the end, to be generated by a machine. When we studied English grammar, we learned there was an exception to every rule. But in India, scholars uphold one monumental grammar as a model of perfect, generative power: that of Panini, who lived in the 4th century BCE. His 4,000 rules in verse are supposed to generate all the required forms of Sanskrit, the classical language of Indian civilization.
You must be logged in to post a comment.