John McWhorter

Associate Professor of English & Comparative Literature , Columbia University

About This Expert

John McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, teaching linguistics, Western civilization, and music history. He is a regular columnist on language matters and race issues for TIME and CNN, writes on language for The Atlantic, and hosts the “Lexicon Valley” podcast at Slate. McWhorter was a contributing editor at The New Republic from 2001 until 2014. A contributor to several outlets, he is the author of The Power of Babel, Doing Our Own Thing, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, and several other books, including Losing the Race. He appears regularly on Bloggingheads.TV, and the Teaching Company has released four of his audiovisual lecture linguistics courses.