James Geary is the former deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, former editor of Nieman Reports, and former editor of the European edition of Time magazine. He is the author of “Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It,” “I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World,” “Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists,” the New York Times bestseller “The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism,” and “The Body Electric: An Anatomy of The New Bionic Senses.”