VISIONS OF GRANDEURI’m walking through a sheet of glass instead of the door,Flying over a giant candlestick lighting up Central Park,Repeating two courses at Hard Knock’s College,And swimming through the Red Sea with silky jelly...

Learning, learned people knew, was a multilingual enterprise [“Absolute English,” Aeon, February 4, 2015].

Africa is a huge continent; it would take several lifetimes of thousands of researchers testing in hundreds of languages to collect a valid sample of anything, especially IQ. Most Africans do their schooling in a...