Anecdotal Evidence

Dr. Johnson’s definition for pissabed is genteel and a little vague, though nicely trochaic: “a yellow flower growing in the grass.” At fi...

“The world is so various and rich that there are universes of knowledge that I will never touch (bird watching, mountain climbing, knitting ...

“There are persons in society with whom we put up and others for whom we pull up a chair by the fire; there are volumes of poetry that we po...

People used to get sick and die of exotically named diseases we have never heard of. We have cancer and congestive heart failure. They had q...

“Well, so that is that.”   W.H. Auden captures the hangover, alcoholic or otherwise, of the day after Christmas. As I’ve gotten older the ...

I’m not by nature a brooder. My brother died sixteen months ago yesterday, enough time for his death to have taken its place in the region o...

Brooke Allen’s preface to Good Bones: Glorious Relics from the Age of Reading (Tivoli Books, 2025) will read to some like a eulogy delivere...