By RACHEL S. HUNT

How much has social media changed the way we talk and behave?

That’s the question linguist and content creator Adam Aleksic sets out to answer in his debut book “Algospeak.”

If you already know what words like “yeet,” “rizz,” “brainrot” or “blackpilled” mean, some of this information might not come as a surprise to you. Still, Aleksic’s analysis reaffirms how this language came about and why it continues to proliferate. For those unfamiliar, it acts as an accessible entry point into social media slang and its evolution.

“Algospeak” touches on a wide array of topics, including in-groups and out-groups, censorship, language appropriation, extremism online, microtrends, clickbait and generational divides. The chapters build on each other with a textbook-level attention to vocabulary.

This book serves as a sobering reality check on how social media is affecting not just our speech, but our entire identities.

This book cover image released by Knopf shows “Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language” by Adam Aleksic. (Knopf via AP)

“Social media creates new identities in order to commodify them,” Aleksic writes in a chapter about microtrends and micro-labels. “Your decisions are now curated for you under the guise of personalization, while in reality they’re engineered to make platforms as much money as possible.”

As a self-proclaimed “etymology nerd,” Aleksic leans heavily into his experience as a content creator, providing a crash course into social media history and how to game the ever-changing and opaque “algorithm.” His tone is academic, yet approachable, and he’s bold but pragmatic in his assertions, exploring counterarguments sufficiently.

He identifies the transient nature of language and the algorithm immediately, since the cultural references in “Algospeak” risk expiring quickly as trends change and social media platforms shift — but that’s the point.

“‘The algorithm’ is here to stay. This is why I think it’s absolutely worth talking about even the most fleeting words,” Aleksic writes.

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Aleksic’s writing feels personable and knowledgeable as he translates his online presence offline, and in doing so, demonstrates his own claims about parasocial relationships and owning one’s audience. Keeping up with the algorithmic cycle is portrayed as exhausting, but as a necessary evil for influencers supporting their livelihoods through social media.

“Algospeak” is a fascinating blend of etymology, psychology, cultural analysis and first-person perspective. The book acts as both a snapshot of our current, social media-imbued society and as an intellectual foundation for language developments to come.

Aleksic leaves his reader with questions about the threats and opportunities that stem from social media developments, but undeniably one principle is true: social media has breached containment and is influencing not only the way we talk, but the way we live.

“Algorithms are the culprits, influencers are the accomplices, language is the weapon, and you, dear reader, are the victim,” he writes.

By TRACEE M. HERBAUGH

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Romance novels have always spiced up quiet nights. Now, a genre that has sometimes been dismissed as a guilty pleasure is bringing readers and writers together through social media, book clubs and a growing number of romance-specific bookstores.

At a recent launch party for Nora Dahlia’s enemies-to-friends romance “Pick-Up” at Lovestruck Books, a romance-dedicated store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a crowd of women sipped cocktails from the bar-café as they browsed the shelves.

After Dahlia’s reading, patrons stuck around to mingle, swap contact info and trade author recommendations.

It was a particularly social event for a book talk. But the communal atmosphere is typical of events for romance fans.

Dahlia likened romance readers to “Comic-Con folks,” referring to the deep-rooted passion that defines comic-book fandom.

“They’re educated on the genre in a real way,” Dahlia said. “Many of them started reading romance — Danielle Steel, V.C. Andrews, Jude Deveraux — as teenagers.”

At The Ripped Bodice bookstore in Brooklyn, New York, manager Katherine Zofrea said romance fans who have connected online frequently come into the store to meet in person. Along with author events, the store hosts three different book clubs and a romance comedy night.

“We’ve had a couple proposals here, we’ve had a wedding here which was really fun,” Zofrea said.

She said customers range “from teenagers who are starting to really get into the romance genres to older folks who have been romance readers for their entire lives and remember way back when they were reading the Harlequins and romance wasn’t as widely accepted.

“Now they’re loving seeing how widely accepted romance has become.”

A boom in romance bookstores

Bookstores like Lovestruck and The Ripped Bodice (which has a flagship store in Los Angeles) have begun popping up all over the U.S., from Wichita, Kansas, to Wilmington, North Carolina, to Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

Of the 157 romance-dedicated bookstores in the American Booksellers Association, more than half opened within the last two years, said Allison Hill, CEO of the trade group for independent sellers.

“Romance books have been one of the fastest growing book sales categories in recent years, driven by a number of factors including the need for escape reading and BookTok,” Hill said.

And the genre has evolved. “The romance genre is more diverse in every way including character identity and plot,” she said.

Lovestruck Books owner Rachel Kanter poses in her bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Dec. 15, 2024. (Reagan Byrne/Lovestruck Books via AP)

Lovestruck’s owner, Rachel Kanter, called the boom “incredible — and honestly, overdue. Romance has always been one of the most commercially successful genres, but for a long time it didn’t get the respect or space it deserved in the literary world.”

Romance-specific bookstores, she says, “are places where readers can feel joy, comfort, and connection — and where love is taken seriously as a literary theme.”

A lifeline during COVID

As with many hobbies, romance fandom solidified and expanded after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The pandemic had pushed so many people toward reading for escape and comfort, and romance became a lifeline for a lot of folks,” said Kanter.

“At the same time, there was a wider cultural shift happening — people were rethinking what mattered, craving joy and softness, and looking to support indie businesses that reflected their values. Romance, with all its hope and heart, met that moment beautifully,” she said.

Reimagining the romantic bond

Romance has countless subgenres — hockey romance, Western romance, LGBTQ romance, even romance set on prison planets. But a common theme is their “inherently hopeful storylines,” says Elizabeth Michaelson Monaghan, a 52-year-old freelance writer and editor in New York who said she’s read “hundreds” of romance novels.

“Romance must have a happily-ever-after — or at least a happily-for-now. Romance writers and readers are very clear on this,” she said.

Romantic fiction that doesn’t end that way? That’s just a love story.

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Traits of the romance genre also include strong character descriptions, attraction, conflict, and a satisfying resolution and emotional growth. Expect plenty of steam — some authors deploy it explicitly, others are more tame.

There’s a long-standing culture of (mostly) women reading and sharing these books across generations.

“It is pleasurable to reimagine courtship or the romantic bond,” said Jayashree Kamble, professor of English at LaGuardia Community College and president of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. “There is limited risk involved.”

Kamble has been a voracious romance reader since her teenage years in India, where she devoured Harlequin romances.

Romance novels, she said, are “a lovely reminder that individualism and companionship can go together. These are basic bonds.”

Community: online and in real life

Podcasts, too, have become a source for discovering what’s trending. Andrea Martucci, creator and host of the romance-focused “Shelf Love” podcast, said romance bookstores have become places of connection akin, in some ways, to churches — for the romantically devoted.

“I can go to a bookstore and not just find people who love books,” she said, “but find people who love the very same books I love.”

As Annabel Monaghan, author of several love stories including “Nora Goes Off Script,” puts it, “People who read romance want to feel good. And when you gather a bunch of people who want to feel good, it’s magic.”

Confidence. Some people have more of it and some people have less. Confident people have what psychologists call a strong internal locus of control. They believe they have the resources to control their own destiny. They have a bias toward action. They venture into the future.

When it comes to confidence, some nations have it and some don’t. Some nations once had it but then lost it. Earlier this month on his blog, “Marginal Revolution,” Alex Tabarrok, a George Mason University economist, asked us to compare America’s behavior during Cold War I (against the Soviet Union) with America’s behavior during Cold War II (against China). I look at that difference and I see a stark contrast — between a nation back in the 1950s that possessed an assumed self-confidence versus a nation today that is even more powerful but has had its easy self-confidence stripped away.

In the 1950s, American intelligence suggested that the Soviet Union was leapfrogging U.S. capabilities across a range of military technologies. Then on Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space.

Americans were shocked but responded with confidence. Within a year the United States had created NASA and ARPA (later DARPA), the research agency that among other things helped create the internet. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, one of the most important education reforms of the 20th century, which improved training, especially in math, science and foreign languages. The National Science Foundation budget tripled. The Department of Defense vastly increased spending on research and development. Within a few years total research and development spending across many agencies zoomed up to nearly 12% of the entire federal budget. (It’s about 3% today.)

America’s leaders understood that a superpower rivalry is as much an intellectual contest as a military and economic one. It’s who can out-innovate whom. So they fought the Soviet threat with education, with the goal of maximizing talent on our side.

“One reason the U.S. economy had such a good Cold War was that the American university had an ever better one,” historian Hal Brands writes in his book “The Twilight Struggle.” Federal support for academic research rose to $1.45 billion in 1970 from $254 million in 1958. Earlier in that century, American universities lagged behind their “best” European peers, Brands observes; by the end of the Cold War, they dominated the globe.

Today we are in a second Cold War. For the first couple of decades it wasn’t clear whether China was a rival or a friend, but now it’s pretty clear that China is more a rival than a friend. As scholar Robert D. Atkinson argued in The New York Times this year, for the Chinese regime, the desire to make money is secondary. “Its primary goal is to damage America’s economy and pave the way for China to become the world’s pre-eminent power,” he wrote.

China is a country that, according to a 2024 House committee inquiry, was directly subsidizing the manufacture and export of fentanyl materials, even though drug overdose is the leading cause of death among Americans 18 to 44.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, China has moved — confidently — to seize the future, especially in the realm of innovation and ideas. China’s total research and development funding has grown 16-fold since 2000. Now China is surging ahead of the United States in a range of academic spheres. In 2003, Chinese scholars produced very few broadly cited research papers. Now they produce more “high impact” research papers than Americans do, and according to The Economist, they absolutely dominate research in the following fields: materials science, chemistry, engineering, computer science, the environment and ecology, agricultural science, physics and math.

These achievements of course lead directly to China’s advantages across a range of high-tech industries. It’s not just high-tech manufacturing of things like electric vehicles, drones and solar panels. It’s high-tech everything. In the years between 2003 and 2007, according to a study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the United States led the way in 60 of 64 frontier technologies — stretching across sectors such as defense, space, energy, the environment, computing and biotech. By the period between 2019 and 2023, the Chinese led among 57 of those 64 key technologies, while the United States led in only seven.

Then along came AI. Americans overall are fearful about it. Last year, the polling organization Ipsos asked people from 32 countries if they were excited for the AI future or nervous about it. Americans are among the most nervous people in the world. The countries most excited by the prospect of that future? China, South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand. The fact is that nobody knows what the AI future holds; people’s projections about it mostly reflect their emotional states. Americans used to be the youthful optimists of the globe. Not right now.

So how is America responding to the greatest challenge of Cold War II? With huge increases in research? By infusing money into schools and universities that train young minds and produce new ideas? We’re doing the exact opposite. Today’s leaders don’t seem to understand what the Chinese clearly understand — that the future will be dominated by the country that makes the most of its talent. On his blog, Tabarrok gets it about right: “The DeepSeek Moment has been met not with resolve and competition but with anxiety and retreat.”

Populists are anti-intellectual. President Donald Trump isn’t pumping research money into the universities; he’s draining it out. The administration is not tripling the National Science Foundation’s budget; it’s trying to gut it. The administration is trying to cut all federal basic research funding by a third, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A survey by the journal Nature of 1,600 scientists in the United States found that three-quarters of them have considered leaving the country.

The response to the Sputnik threat was to go outward and compete. Trump’s response to the Chinese threat generally is to build walls, to erect trade barriers and to turn inward. A normal country would be strengthening friendships with all nations not named China, but the United States is burning bridges in all directions. A normal country would be trying to restore America’s shipbuilding industry by making it the best in the world. We’re trying to save it through protectionism. The thinking seems to be: We can protect our mediocre industries by walling ourselves off from the world. That’s a recipe for national decline.

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The problem is not just Trump. China has been displaying intellectual and innovative vitality for decades and the United States has scarcely mobilized. This country sometimes feels exhausted, gridlocked, as if it has lost its faith in itself and contact with its future.

In the progressive era, America built new institutions like the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Reserve. During the New Deal, Americans created an alphabet soup of new agencies. By 1949, Americans had created NATO and the precursor to the World Bank. Where are the new institutions fit for today? Government itself is not great at innovation, but for a century, public sector money has been necessary to fuel the fires of creativity — in the United States, in Israel and in China. On that front, America is in retreat.

Can confidence be restored? Of course. Franklin Roosevelt did it and Ronald Reagan did it. Is China’s dominance inevitable? Of course not. Centrally controlled economies are prone to monumental blunders.

But the primary contest is psychological — almost spiritual. Do Americans have faith in the power of the human mind? Are they willing to invest to enlarge the national talent pool? Right now, no. Americans, on the left and the right, have become highly attentive to threat, risk-averse and self-doubting about the national project. What do you do with a country with astounding advantages but that no longer believes in itself?

David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.

Wendi Ward was working as an attorney in St. Paul when the first Gulf War started in 1990.

Wendi Ward, of St. Paul, pictured here at a St. Paul restaurant on June 20, 2025, died of a pulmonary embolism on Monday, July 14, 2025, at United Hospital in St. Paul. She was 70. (Courtesy of Victoria Fetter)

Ward, the daughter of a Quaker, refused to pay federal taxes as a protest against the war. That act of civil disobedience led to her disbarment, said her brother, Steve Ward of St. Paul’s East Side.

“She still paid state and local taxes, but they disbarred her for not paying her federal taxes,” he said. Eventually, he said, “she looked at all the stuff that she had that was cool – glassware and wool and silk and wood and metal things – and said, ‘You know, I should open a shop.’”

Ward, of St. Paul, died Monday evening of a pulmonary embolism at United Hospital in St. Paul. She was 70.

Thrift store on Randolph Avenue

Ward opened the Practical Goods thrift store on Randolph Avenue in June 2002 “to recycle, build community and offer spiritual resistance in a dismal situation,” she wrote in a history of the store posted on the store’s website. The store, which later moved to the Jax Building in St. Paul’s Lowertown and then to Selby Avenue, offered an extensive selection of kitchen goods, sweaters, baby clothes, wood toys, shoes and blankets.

“She could go through a thrift store and fill a cart with epic stuff for nothing,” Steve Ward said. “She was doing repurpose, reuse, recycle long before anyone else. She saw that a lot of plastic crap didn’t last long, so her store was all practical and durable and well-made.”

Practical Goods sold only goods that were secondhand and made from natural, high-quality fibers.

“We’re determined to stamp out polyester, acrylic, rayon and other materials that do not bio-degrade and therefore harm the environment,” Ward wrote in a post shared on the store’s Facebook page. “We support our local tax base and don’t feed big banks or mine your personal data.”

Ward didn’t own a TV and didn’t own a car for many years, said her niece, Eowyn Ward, of Minneapolis. The shop didn’t start taking credit-card payments until January 2023.

“She was very environmentally conscious,” Eowyn Ward said. “She was concerned about consumption and how if everything comes from a long way away, there are tons of transportation fees and additional costs and additional environmental impact. So she was very focused on small local businesses and natural goods.”

‘You vote with your dollar’

Ward was proud of running an independent business and keeping money in the local economy, Eowyn Ward said.

“She often said things like, ‘You vote with your dollar,’ and ‘Pay attention to where your money is going and what it’s contributing to,’” Eowyn Ward said.

Wendi Ward once wrote a long list of qualities she was looking for in potential customers. Among them: “People with more taste than money. People who like our planet and work to keep it nice. People with opposable thumbs (and an appreciation of the things hands make). People who wear clothes, use dishes, affirm the kinship of all human cultures. People who might dislike living in a world that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mc-Wal-Cola.”

In a list of “intangibles” explaining why supporting small businesses is good for neighborhoods, Ward included her thoughts on credit-card debt, overconsumption and overpackaging. She also wrote: “We have a potty, and you can use it.”

“She loved keeping humor into her dissent,” Eowyn Ward said. “She wasn’t the kind of person who was always furious and angry and just bitter about life. She was like, ‘Let’s not do that.’”

‘Moral obligation’

There were financial repercussions from her disbarment, and Ward often would say that she was “intentionally living in poverty because of the practices of our government,” Eowyn Ward said. “She believed that she was making that choice out of moral obligation. She intentionally wanted to do what was best rather than what was easy.”

Ward grew up in St. Peter, Moose Lake and Duluth. She graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter in 1976. In 1982, she graduated from William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul.

Ward loved playing Scrabble, writing in her journal, rescuing cats and singing soprano, family and friends said.

“She studied voice with a famous Scottish instructor, and was delighted when she was invited to go to Edinburgh just before Brexit,” said longtime friend Victoria Fetter of Milwaukee, Wis. “She had many musician friends. At her holiday parties, Wendi would come in bearing a boar’s head on a platter, and singing the ‘Boar’s Head Carol.’ Trifle and other traditional English desserts were served to the guests.”

For many years, Ward was a regular attendee of the Renaissance Festival, where she sold her handmade jewelry, which was made of bone, stone, glass, metal, natural gemstones and leather – “rather than plastics and other types of jewelry components,” Eowyn Ward said.

Transportation choices

Ward objected to having a car for many years, but later in life needed one due to her health, her niece said.

She often rode Metro Transit’s Route 74 and utilized HOURCARs located at 46th Street Station and nearby Macalester College, writer Bill Lindeke wrote in an article about Ward headlined “In Praise of Bricks and Mortar,” published in June 2012.

“I’ve saved a lot of money but there are lots of other benefits,” Ward told Lindeke as she traveled to a rummage sale. “I live along a snow-emergency route, and I’ve never once had to shovel my car out of the snow.”

Ward required that everything sold at Practical Goods be “actually useful in your everyday life,” according to Lindeke.

“She will happily explain to you, for example, the difference between a corn pot, a soup pot, and a stock pot, why rubber boots are great for puddles, or how to use a mill-style coffee grinder,” he wrote.

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‘No-haggling policy’

There was a strict “no-haggling” policy at the shop, Steve Ward said.

“Prices were fixed because she was an independent business person already taking a hit on everything,” he said. “She barely broke even for years. But she wanted things to go to a good home, to somebody who wanted or needed that thing, or would cherish it as a thing, rather than buy a cheap plastic crap from China, and throw it out a year later.

“There are plenty of people out there that have stuff that they bought at Wendi’s ten years ago that they’re still using,” he said.

A private family memorial is planned. A public celebration of Ward’s life will be held at a future date; anyone interested in attending should e-mail WendiWardS@gmail.com.

Crescent Tide Funeral & Cremation in St. Paul is handling arrangements.