Decades ago, the book review section of the NY Times used to be one of my favorite portions of the paper to read of a Sunday, back when I read it in the paper version. Implicit in my mind—without my … Continue reading →
Famous author Joyce Carol Oates is known for the number and length of her fiction output. But she’s also a Twitter-user, and yesterday she retweeted this pithy thought: “I could shoot 24 million people on Fifth Avenue & I would’t … Continue reading →
The other day I was reminded by commenter “AesopFan” of this article from last spring: “[Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor Ben] Rhodes, 38, said in the article that it was easy to shape a favorable impression of the proposed (Iran) … Continue reading →
Wordsworth wrote: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…” Now researchers indicate that sleep itself is a forgetting: In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during … Continue reading →
It seems that Monica Crowley may have plagiarized a substantial portion—amounting to “thousands of words”—of her doctoral dissertation. According to Politico: An examination of the dissertation and the sources it cites identified more than a dozen sections of text that … Continue reading →
I’ve been reading this collection of essays about the poet Robert Frost. It’s an older book that I took out of the library, and although it was edited in 1962 the essays in it are mainly from the 1930s, 1940s, … Continue reading →
There’s a big mystery under the Antarctic ice: Scientists believe a massive object that could change our understanding of history is hidden beneath the Antarctic ice. The huge and mysterious “anomaly” is thought to be lurking beneath the frozen wastes … Continue reading →
After giving us the gift of his music for nearly fifty years, Leonard Cohen has finally gone home: His son issued this statement on his father’s death: “My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the … Continue reading →
The leaves aren’t quite what they were just a week ago. But although there are fewer of them, some very beautiful ones still remain. It’s windy, and you can feel a nip in the air. Here are some photos I … Continue reading →
Some people are wondering why on earth I seem so taken with makeovers. What’s the big deal? Besides the obvious desire to get away from the gloom of the election and escape into something seemingly frivolous and entertaining, that is. … Continue reading →
[NOTE: I wrote this post quite a while ago and never published it until now, so it’s not as timely as it once was. In fact, it’s not timely at all. But I think we continue to need the relief … Continue reading →
Well, it may not really be poetry—even though it’s a poem by a master of poetry: Robert Frost. It’s more in the vein of light verse, which Frost sometimes also wrote. The treatment is light, that is. Not the subject … Continue reading →