Matt Thompson

As The Conversation About Serial reaches a fever pitch in certain circles, those of us behind Code Switch and Monkey See have been talking quite a bit about the show. Here's the first part of our exchange, from Code Switch editor Matt Thompson:

Hi Linda, Kat and Gene,

I ...

Last week, residents of Scotland voted not to break away from the U.K. in a much-anticipated referendum on Scottish independence. For those of us with a special fascination with culture and language, the vote called to mind another much-less-heralded referendum on Scottish independence that happened three short years ago. ...

In March, Rina Palta reported for Code Switch on a study that found private prisons were disproportionately filled with inmates of color. A broader recent study of federal data from 2005 has revealed something similar: The proportion of white inmates was significantly smaller in private prisons than in public ...

Back in May, I posted a reflection on what we've learned from a year of discussing race, ethnicity and culture on Code Switch. I mentioned we'd hold a live chat on June 3 to talk about The Conversation On Race — or at least our version of it ...

Alexander Shulgin, the researcher who transformed MDMA from an obscure chemical to a party drug known as Ecstasy, has died at his home in Northern California. He was 88, and the cause was liver cancer, the BBC reported.

In a statement on Facebook, Shulgin's wife and collaborator, Ann ...

The experience of talking about race, ethnicity and culture on the Internet is nearly always deeply disenchanting. People don't even talk past each other; they talk right through each other. Prejudices harden. We find ourselves confirming our worst stereotypes of one another. And that's before the slurs fly.

I've found ...

One year ago today, Code Switch launched with the post "How Code-Switching Explains The World." Last June, we released our first Code Switch visitors survey to query our users about what they were seeing, what they liked, and what they liked less. We're long overdue for a follow-up. ...

Someone in Southern California seems to have a real issue with Asian-American women. Their main sticking point? Relationships between Asian-American women and white men.

Last week, Asian American student groups at the University of California — Los Angeles and the University of Southern California were mailed fliers blasting Asian ...

A few years ago, a woman named Elaine Dove tried an experiment on Craigslist. She created three ads, each with a different treatment of her racial and cultural background:

"The first described me accurately: gothic, Asian-American, alternative, artistic, inquisitive, intelligent, adventurous. The second made no mention of my ...

Consider this your invitation to join us for a month of exploring interracial and cross-cultural romance. This Wednesday through Feb. 13, the Code Switch team will be holding Twitter chats, conducting Q&As and writing posts about many different ways love and attraction intersect with race, ethnicity and culture.

On Jan. ...

I prepared my breakfast of hard-boiled eggs a bit differently this morning. I added a teaspoon of baking soda to the boiling water. When the eggs were done, I cooled each one in ice water, then cracked both ends of the shell, held it in my fist and blew. Each ...

Like every team of reporters and editors at a major news outlet, Code Switch gets a lot of pitches for stories, and we can only greenlight a small percentage of them. The majority are from publicists interested in having us cover one of their clients. But we also get a ...

We've decided to take a weekly look at a word or phrase that's caught our attention, whether for its history, usage, etymology, or just because it has an interesting story. This week, we look into how we came to call cannabis "marijuana," and the role Mexico played in that shift.

Code Switch has been up and running for almost three months. We launched on April 8, with a series of stories about code-switching itself. Since then, we've covered evolving generational attitudes about race, cities undergoing significant racial and ethnic shifts, wealth disparities, racial fetishes,

The Internet is abuzz with the news of a scathing employee performance review given to an associate of al-Qaida's North African branch. The employee in question, a man by the name of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, is criticized for neglecting his expense reports, blowing off meetings and wasting his employer's money, ...

The spate of headlines that drew them to our attention has died down. Yet I still find myself thinking about the faces of a certain 19-year-old man and his elder brother, accused by police of bringing about a tragic end to what should have been a day of joy and ...

Monday, April 8, marked the launch of Code Switch, our new blog covering race, ethnicity and culture. To commemorate the blog's launch, all week we solicited stories about code-switching — the practice of shifting the languages you use or the way you express yourself in your conversations.

People sent ...

The song was an instant hit all over the Internet, though not (perhaps) the way its creators intended.

Exactly who is Santa Claus? It depends on where you are in the world. The BBC's Matt Thompson looks at "Too Many Santas." "The thing about The Christmas Lads is they're actua...