James Geary, an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, is author of the New York Times bestseller The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It, and I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World, among other books. He is the former deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, where he edited Nieman Reports, and the former editor of the European edition of Time magazine.