Books

The description given for Pinker's The Blank Slate made me sceptical at best, so I went hunting for critiques and found this https://www.jstor.org/stable/27759451

Sadly it's pay-walled beyond a preview of the first page.

For a suggestion of my own, The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. It's a fun romp through the history of the English language with numerous tangents focusing on this or that quirk, written for those who have never formally studied English or linguistics.

As someone who was always more of a "STEM" person, this book completely upended my relationship to language. I used to think there was "one way" of expressing any given idea, and our job as humans, as it were, is to simply learn all the words and their meanings so as to be as precise as possible when expressing ideas. Nowadays I very much trend to see it the other way around: our use of language shapes the language itself, and our changing needs in terms of which ideas we want to express is what makes language evolve over time.

To put it succinctly, this book helped me view language as a tool that we should alter to suit our needs, not some pre-ordained scripture that we need to memorize and adjust ourselves to.