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Israel now has the world's third-largest Russian-speaking community (outside the former Soviet Union), after the United States and Germany.

Galili says that this flood of new immigrants was enthusiastically welcomed by what she calls Israel's "elite" for many reasons, including the impact they made on the demographic equation between Arabs and Jews.

But she says there was opposition in Israel, from a variety of fronts. This included the minority Israeli Arab population who feared becoming more marginalized. Questions were also raised over whether many of these former Soviet residents were actually Jewish.

Israel's Law of Return allowed the new arrivals to qualify for citizenship if they had one Jewish grandparent. Under rabbinical religious law, Jewishness passes through the maternal line. This defines more than 300,000 of Israel's Russian-speaking immigrants as non-Jews.

Galili says immigrants from the Soviet Union struggled with this: "They come here, and they have a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father — and suddenly this motherland, who's expecting them to come, says, 'Oh ! I forgot to tell you — you are not Jewish here.' "

There are no civil marriages in Israel. Russian-speaking Israelis defined as non-Jews who wish to marry must go abroad, or convert. Galili says conversion is not a popular option.

"They find it offensive. They feel Jewish. They were raised Jewish. They have Jewish names. They once suffered for being Jewish in the Soviet Union. Now they suffer for being Russians in Israel," she says.

To get a sense of what it was like to transition from the Soviet Union to Israel, you only have to wander through Ashdod — with its beach cafes, boulevards and apricot-colored apartment blocks — and chat with some of the many thousands of Russian-speaking residents.

A Major Transition

"In the beginning, of course, the language was a serious problem," says Stanislav Fishbein, a Ukrainian who migrated to Israel 18 years ago, speaking in Hebrew. "In addition to that, we didn't know about the tradition. I didn't know about Judaism and about Hanukkah, for example. But now I do — and I like it."

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Gangsters have been part of life in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, for decades. And nowhere is their rule more notorious than in the slums of Lyari, a dusty warren of low-slung tenement houses in the south central part of Karachi.

And in Pakistan, they are a little different from the American variety. They are part Tony Soprano — with the attendant extortion schemes and kickbacks and armed enforcers — but they are also, in a sense, politicians closely aligned to the various political parties. So when the leading such figure in Lyari speaks, it is with both the vocabulary and the sensibility of a politician.

"The people here in Lyari support us," says Uzair Baloch, 32. "It is the people outside who are trying to give me a bad reputation. They call me a gangster, but they have this wrong. I'm a politician. I'm a social worker."

He says all this with a smile, but he's only being slightly ironic. Every party in Pakistan has an armed wing, and gangster-politicians run them.

"When he says he's a social worker, to an extent he's right," says Zohra Yusuf, the head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. "These groups do provide for the community. If the electric supply is bothering them, or residents need help, they go to Uzair Baloch rather than anyone else. The government hasn't provided services for people in Lyari for years."

A Well-Guarded Home

Baloch is charismatic and quick to laugh. He lives off one of the dusty main drags in Lyari, and it is easy to know when one has arrived there: There are literally two-dozen guards with AK-47s outside his house. Some of them are so young they don't look like they have learned to shave yet. Others are 30-somethings who sit on couches in the front hall, armed to the teeth.

Once inside the house, the mood changes from noisy slum to moneyed tranquility. The doors open into an enormous game room with an indoor lap pool, and a six-foot flat-screen television and hand-painted murals of beach scenes on the walls. A fish tank is embedded in a step leading out to the garden. It is filled with Japanese koi.

There is a major decision coming up that will truly define the year 2012. Yes, it's almost time for the American Dialect Society to once again vote on the Word of the Year. Will it be selfie? Hate-watching? Superstorm? Double down? Fiscal cliff? Or (shudder) YOLO?

Ben Zimmer is a language columnist for the Boston Globe, and the chair of the ADS's New Words Committee. He tells NPR's Renee Montagne that the Word of the Year can be either a word or a phrase, as long as it's achieved new prominence in 2012. "You might have heard about YOLO, the acronym for 'you only live once.' YOLO caught on this year as a bit of youth slang that young people are already a little sick of."

A selfie is a self-portrait photograph, usually posted to a social networking site — and used most memorably by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (or, let's be honest, one of her aides) in a humorous message to the Texts from Hillary Tumblr account. "Another word that I was introduced to this year which I quite like, hate-watching, which describes the masochistic act of continuing to watch a TV show even if you hate it."

And of course there were the old-fashioned words that resurfaced this year, like malarkey, popularized by Vice President Joe Biden in a debate with Paul Ryan. "That's a great Irish-American word that's been around for about a century ... it's such a great evocative word and it grabbed people's interest," Zimmer says. "It turns out it was Irish-American newspaper writers who popularized it in the early 20th century."

Some words captured public attention for sadder reasons, like superstorm, coined to describe Hurricane Sandy. "Someone from the National Weather Service actually suggested Frankenstorm, because it was a hybrid of different weather systems, like Frankenstein's monster, and it was also going to hit around Halloween," Zimmer says. But many news organizations considered Frankenstorm too light-hearted in the wake of the disaster, so the consensus settled on superstorm.

Commentary

Forget YOLO: Why 'Big Data' Should Be The Word Of The Year

This is the movie's most problematic aspect. The cinematic brief filed by Berg, who previously investigated a sexually abusive priest in the powerful Deliver Us from Evil, seems strong. But Paradise Lost 2: Revelations also compellingly singled out a possible perpetrator of the murders. That person is no longer considered a likely suspect.

The three's high-profile defenders have long been part of the story. The members of Metallica gave their aid (and music) to the Paradise Lost movies. Subsequently, Johnny Depp, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins and others have added their voices. Australian rockers Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (of Dirty Three) joined the movement by composing the West of Memphis score.

There's another significant Down Under connection: This documentary was co-produced by Lord of the Rings maestro Peter Jackson and his wife and collaborator, Fran Walsh. (Echols and Lorri Davis, the woman who married him behind bars in 1999, are also co-producers.)

If West of Memphis spends a great deal of time with the trio's advocates, that seems warranted. Without outside pressure, Baldwin and Misskelly would still be in prison, and Echols might well have been executed. Mara Leveritt, who wrote a book on the three, notes that they benefited from a "crowd-sourced investigation." It took way too long, but the crowd finally bested the mob. (Recommended)